Some places closed the loophole after some guy successfully argued in court that installing a hidden camera, without audio, in the woman's bathroom in his business was legal. However, that only applies if you have an expectation of privacy, otherwise people could be charged for taking pictures almost anywhere that had another person show up in them.
Sadly, it appears, somehow, that cops have an 'expectation of privacy' while arresting people, despite this being flatly nonsensical.
Even if you ignore the fact that they're clearly in public and visible to at least one other person when they arrest people or even ticket them, they are doing something that they will be compelled to testify in court about as part of their job.
I'm sorry, police, if you're doing something, deliberately, as part of your job, that you know will end up in court and you will have to testify about, then you have no expectation of privacy doing it. And the fact you're even complaining that people are keeping a record of what you do has rather interesting implications about just how honest you are.
In fact, generally, government officials shouldn't have any expectation of privacy when interacting with the public in an official capacity at all, but it's even more absurd when it's part of someone's arrest, and the police officer is operating with the full knowledge their actions will be recounted under oath later.
So, we're going to save $15 a month and not subsidizing the high data users.
No shit. hey, look, a iPhone for people who a) have a wifi network or can set one up, and b) live in sucky coverage areas that they couldn't do streaming video over it anyway.
Hell, even if you do use a lot, it's pretty impressive to use 2GB a month. What are you people doing, torrenting from your phone?
I think a lot of people are getting mad before exploring this.
You realize it's people like you who have resulted in us all paying $60 a month, even if we don't use anywhere near that much data?
I have no idea what you're complaining about. It's the rest of us that were paying too much for an unlimited plan.
You want to use 4-5GB a month over the rather scarce resource of cell towers, you pay for it. Your plan isn't going anywhere.
You should probably be happy that they didn't pull a comcast and start disconnecting and dropping connections for unlimited users they felt were 'using too much'.
Incidentally, using 'quite a bit of mobile web' probably isn't pushing you even over the 200 MB a month. That would be pretty impressive web browsing to reach, 6.7 megs a day, or, assuming 16 hours awake, 410k every hour you're awake, which is at least five web pages, probably more like ten with browser caching and whatnot.
Streaming stuff, yes. YouTube, yes. Web browsing is just a blip.
I'm a pretty heavy surfer, but I'm considering switching to 200 a month. I'll need to get my wifi set back up, though, first. The coverage is so sucky here that streaming video doesn't work without well wifi anyway, I don't do streaming music (I put music on my phone, which seems a lot saner), and web browsing is well under that.
The only thing that would worry me is podcasts, which I download directly to my phone, but that's why I need to get my wifi set up. And then I should be well under 200 a month. (Or I could switch back to my computer downloading them.)
And, in fact, changes to the law have just specifically made that illegal. They can't (Or soon won't be able to) change the interest rate and terms of the loan from the previous billing period. All they'll be able to do is change the rate on new money they loan you, the old money has to stay at the same rate.
But, yeah, that's how they used to do it.
Of course, credit card companies are already figuring way around this. Chase, for example, is raising the minimum monthly payment if you have old, lower interest rates...but you can get that minimum lowered if you agree to change them.
What I'm concerned is, for more than two decades, as stocks trading has gotten faster and faster, companies have been operated for the shorter and shorter term stock prices.
Not even short profits, which would be bad enough. No, they're operated for short term 'random perception of value'.
I.e., this already happened, and it already fucked up the economy by causing stagnant wages for quite some time, as companies were not actually profitable in any sense. (I don't care what the 'earnings' say...companies are only profitable if they pay their owners, aka, stockholders, some profit, aka, dividends.)
This has resulted in the near total destruction of American manufacturing, for one. And quite a few large companies that have almost managed to kill themselves because manipulation of their stock price instead of, for example, actually making and selling stuff. (Chrysler comes to mind.)
And, of course, the wage stagnation along with normal inflation for everything has caused the stupid 'mortgage' crisis as people like to call it, but is actually the 'No one has as much money to live on as they used to, causing loans and eventually a painful correction' crisis.
So I want something, anything, a) to encourage people to actually hold on to stock long enough to actually care about how well the company will be doing next week, b) if at all possible, to encourage companies to reaim themselves as issuing dividends. They need to operate as companies should operate, not as a rollercoaster that people try to buy and sell spots on to make cash.
I have no problem with that existing, I have a problem when the American corporate world is hijacked for that purpose and corporate leaders are installed to make that happen BECAUSE WE ACTUALLY NEED THOSE CORPORATIONS, run in a sane profit making manner, to function as a society. They make the stuff we live on, and they pay us so we can buy it! We need them!
If people want to fuck around in a casino, well, there are plenty of actual casinos out there. We need to laws into places to discourage the use of corporate ownership as said casino.
In fact, this is often where the *real* salary of the execs comes from. I know of a company where the CEO sells somewhere between $3-$5 million worth of shares in his company per quarter, like clockwork. No triggers to tell anyone there's anything good/bad going on, and he's sucking $5 million in capital out of the company every time he does it. No one on the Board says "boo", because they gave it to him... of course.
Right. Instead of income, companies attempt to make 'stock price'. Why? Because it's much much easier to fool idiots into buying your stock.
Stock price is a zero sum game, and people just seem to forget that, and somehow think it's a good idea we operate out economy based on it.
With actual manufacturing, companies have to trade goods and services for money, and usually both parties come out better. (Or, duh, they wouldn't have made the trade.)
The company turns around and has to pay people (slightly less) money to actually produce the goods and services, again, with both sides coming out better. (Or, again, they would not have made the trade.) What is left over the owners get to keep.
There are a lot of problems with this system...for example, companies can do without a specific worker much easier than a worker can do without his job, so a company has more bargaining power. Which the invention of unions attempts to correct. Likewise, with the trade with customers, businesses often attempt to convince the customer to make the purchase even when it's not int he customer's best interest, through advertising and even outright fraud. Again, we've invented consumer protection laws to attempt to stop this.
But regardless of problems that creep in, it is entirely possible for the system to operate fairly. A consumer can walk in, and pay $10 for something he values at $12, and the company paid $8 to a worker for time that he values at $10. The company made $2, the worker made $2, and the consumer 'made' $2. Everyone considers themselves to have come out ahead.
I explain all that, and I suspect most people understand it if they think about it, to counter with the point that the stock market doesn't work that way at all.
Stock prices can, in theory, vary based on value of a company, but they almost never do. (The value of a company at best is recalculated once every quarter.) Likewise, people could invest in the stock market to collect dividends, aka, profits.
But neither of those has anything to do with the game as is currently played, where the market just goes up and down, sometimes in response to 'news', but never in relation to the value of the company, or even expected dividends. To do this, people have to purchase stock from other people.
Now, as I pointed out above, purchases, even stock purchases, can be a net gain for everyone, if people value the things differently. Which would be, for example, if people were trading 'current money' for 'future dividends'....but they aren't.
No, people are selling stock because they expect the immediately value to go down, and people are buying because they expect the immediate value to go up. One of them must be wrong. One of them is going to lose exactly as much money as the other made.
And we are hiring CEOs to operate where this is the goal, because, as I said, it's a lot easier, and faster, money, than the $2 profit I mentioned above, where people willing hand companies money for things they value more than money.
Of course, at some point, the people who bought the stock high, and it went back down, realize, um, this CEO let prices go down (Or, more technically, the magic he did to bump them up stopped working.), so they cut him loose, and get another one. Which is like renting a swing-set seat at the top of the swing, and then bitching when the operator lets it fall back down.
This is a goddamn absurd way to run an economy. The people operating businesses have no incentive to actually operate a busines
Oh, I'm with you entirely. Personal financing is something we need to immediately start teaching in school, it's amazing how many people can't get their life together.
I see people financing $400 TVs. Here's a hint: If you cannot collect $400 in cash, you do not need a $400 TV.
I see people who don't understand how interest works, that you pay down loans in the order they are costing you money, which is usually highest interest first. I see people who don't seem to grasp that a car is a mode of transportation, and if your car still functions, you don't really need a new one unless you have the ability to pay for it. (If it doesn't function, in most places, you sadly need another car even if you can't pay for it. But still not a 'new' one.)
This total irresponsibility actually works fine when the economy is doing good and you have a job, but well, um, it's not anymore, and many people don't.
In high school, I think we touched on some of this, for about week, how you 'make a budget', which frankly isn't people's problems...it's randomly spending too much money. I only budget fixed reoccurring expenses, mentally removing them from my paycheck and bank account, and I do fine.
But then again I don't go around buying things I can't afford, which has nothing to do with a 'budget'. Right now I'm 'saving up' to buy a new laptop, by which I mean I have more than enough money to actually buy it, but not enough that I'd be entirely comfortable afterward, and I'm waiting for my state's tax-free holiday when the school year starts.
That is what we're not teaching kids. We teach 'pretend you have this amount of money, find out how much food costs, and make a budget using meals you don't know how to cook(1)', which no one cares about, but need to teach a philosophical concept of trying not to spend money, and thinking for a moment before you do, and thinking even longer on big ticket things. (My personal rule is, if it's over $30, I'm not allowed to buy it the first day I know of it. I, at least, have to search for a cheaper deal online.)
But morons go out and buy houses without thinking it through. My personal favorite was a subdivision that backed up to a quarry. the fence at the back of some of the properties was about six inches in front of the 'Danger: Blasting' quarry fence. Who the hell was buying those houses? Idiots who didn't bother to do the slightest bit of work investigating their $350,000 purchase.
I've never bought a home, but, hell, I investigated the places I've rented for a week.
But, anyway, that's not what I was talking about with banks. I could care less about idiots who invest in the stock market and get wiped out. Frankly, that shows a level of deliberation I don't care to worry about...even stupid people know the stock market is risky. (I am of the opinion that 'retirement funds', which people are often 'forced' to buy in by their employer, or pay more taxes, should not include stocks, though.)
My suggestion was simply trying to make purchasing stock back 'investing in a company', where the owners of a company actually had a stake in at least the medium term growth.
Which, in turn, would result in them being operated with a tiny bit of intelligence and long-term planning, instead of the CEO closing down R&D because it will give him a tiny bump to stock prices for a month so he'll met his bonuses.
Likewise, the problem with what happened with the banks is that none of it was caused by normal people. Oh, sure, it was normal people who happened to the failing mortgages they traded this time, but next time it could be business loans or tulip bulbs they trade.
And you can say 'Just let them fail', which I'm all for, but the fact is the economy needs those companies, or at least needs some of what those companies do. Without business loans and (sane) financing, the country grinds to a halt.
Of course, the other option to my suggestion, one we probably should do
I'm fed up with this lame argument. Sure, you can't create a commercial quality game in a week, but you can write cooler, better, software than at any time in the past.
Hell, you probably could make a commercial quality game, for the first time in history, in less than a week of computer time.
If you've already designed it (Which you've already had to do anyway.), you probably could sit down for a week and build an Unreal or a TF2 or a NWN2 mod that's commercial quality and worth a few dollars. (By 'a week', I mean '40 hours of work'.)
Seriously, there are plenty of fully-functional engines out there and fully-functional tools to use them, along with very nicely done default behaviors and whatnot.
'Write a game' is only difficult if you insist on starting from scratch. And starting from scratch has always taken months of effort by teams of people, both now and two decades ago, to get to commercial quality.
It's just now that, tada, you can take the stuff they've written and build a different game inside it.
An entire story, from start to end, often with voice acting. (Although you need extra people for voices.)
Whether or not that's really 'making a game' or not is up to you. In my universe, if you conceptualize a story from start to end, design all areas, place the enemies and challenges, etc, you've made 'a game', even if it's in someone else's engine.
And there are engines for adventure games, and of course plenty of action engines like Unreal.
Creatively, you did all the work. It's like, when you write a book, you're not expected to operate the printing press.
Gaming mods can be a fun gateway to programming if you're the type of person who's willing to be a programmer.
Otherwise, it's just a gaming mod, and it's pointless to try to interest them in programming. Uses a computer all the time != destined to be a programmer(1)
What we really need is to know the sort of games this kid plays. You mentioned some action games, and I know of NWN and NWN2 as RPGs with very large modding communities and editors built in, Civ 4 has plenty of modding resources, etc.
Anyone else? Is there some sort of definitive list here? Fairly modern, but cheap, games with large mod communities?
Of course, the real joke might be that, for all we know, this kid is a major modder already, world famous in his community. He just doesn't bother to call it 'programming'.
Another gateway, of course, is web design. Get them a cheap PHP + mysql webhost, and see what they do. But if they're into games the modding gateway is probably easier.
1) That was true two decades ago, when I was a kid. But, honestly, half the population 'uses a computer all the time' nowadays.
How about picking up a few cheap copies of NWN? Start playing multiplayer, and then point out that, in fact, you can build your own levels?
But, anyway, I have to be against this.
See, it's my firm belief that skills have a hump you have to get over. There's some spot where, if you're not naturally skilled that much, you're never going to be good. Hump is probably the wrong word, but whatever.
Some skills have humps well below average, like riding a bicycle...almost anyone can learn to do that well. Almost everyone can learn to ride a bike and stay upright on it.
And some humps are close to average. Like singing. Maybe 50% of people could be trained to be fairly good singers. (I sometimes think I could be one of those, but I'm too lazy.)
And some humps are past average, where maybe 5% of the population can actually learn the skill in any useful manner. Acting, for example. Painting. Writing. Mathematics
And, of course, programming.
It's entirely a waste of time to try to get most of the population interested in programming. You can either code, or you can't.
This is not to pretend that all programmers are equal, just to say it's a specific skill that most people have no chance of doing well, that with training you could teach them to do it by rote, but not actually 'code' meaningfully. (And, of course, plenty of people like that actually work in the industry.)
And it's not to pretend this somehow makes programmers 'better'. I'm not trying to say this is some function of intelligence.
To put it another way, whether you can do something isn't 'innate skill + training > task'. It's more like '(innate skill - skill modifer) * training > task'. Some skills have a high modifer, some low...and for the high ones, many people have an innate skill below the skill modifer. (Okay, mathematically, that means they get worse with more training, but it's just an analogy.;)
Yes, anyone moderately intelligence and curious can write small scripts, or copy and modify a Excel macro, but that's the difference between a guy patching drywall and an architect.
And, again, nothing wrong with a kid patching drywall. Just don't try to push him into architecture because he's willing to do that.
You can say it's just 'sour grapes', if you want, but you're trying to solve an entirely different problem than me.
The American economy requires companies operated to make a profit. In fact, the entire premise of free enterprise is that.
However, many companies are currently operated to produce a temporary bump in some random market-set 'value' of a fraction of the company. That's it. That's the goal of the owners, it is the goal of the people they hire.
The stock market is not some natural phenomenon, it is not an automatic result of corporations, and neither is how it operates.
We can alter or remove the stock market, to make changes to remove 'milli-investors', people who purchase part of a company and expect that part to gain in value in the next five milliseconds.
If people who invest in a company start expecting even 'medium term' returns, a five-year investment, instead of millisecond returns, corporations will start being operated to make a profit, which requires them to actually employ people and make long term plans and goods and services people want, instead of laying off 10,000 people in a bad business decision simply because it will cause some momentary bump in the stock prices.
The issue you're talking about is another issue entirely, and you are mostly correct, although I feel I must point out that the reason that people are living on credit is that prices did go up and wages didn't. (Because of the aforementioned stupidity in operating corporations.)
In fact, I want people to stop living off credit not just because it's a bad idea, and more because it's hidden, for a decade, the fact that people were, on the whole, getting poorer.
It hide that along with the housing boom, which was more the same problem from the other direction...wages stayed the same, while one aspect of life got really expensive for no reason.
Saying 'Oh, everyone should just have lowered their standard of living' is a big of an absurd high-horse. People do not work like that. People calculate 'With this job, I can live at this level' when they start employment, and they fail to notice that their raises are at 1% and stuff costs 5% more, and then they somehow have shortfalls, but surely that was just bad luck, so they can borrow a bit, and surely they can afford that house on that salary.
It's the old expression about a frog being slowly boiled. Yes, some people caught on, in fact most did, but a good percentage did not. And even the people who did catch on couldn't stop themselves from being laid off or getting hit by rising health care costs or something.
Yes, that's exactly it. And even more. Additional charges should be added because they make the crime worse, even if only in some abstract sense.
I mean, if a guy burglarizes my house when I'm not there, whether or not he has a gun doesn't really matter in specifics...but it does matter, because he has just behaved in a more unsafe manner. I could have shown up, and one of us would have probably ended up dead. Guns, in general, make felonies less safe for everyone, so punishing people for having them during a felony is a good idea, even if they aren't used!
I mean, it sounds weird to say we'd rather have people murdered by poison than by gunshot, but, well, society is slightly safer if some guy isn't running around waving a gun.
But there's a lot of stuff that can't be justified at all. Like added lockpick charges, or this stupid map one. That's just burglary! It's not somehow worse for society how its committed.
"Premeditated" is an adjective only used when talking about murder,
Uh, no. It's an adjective that right now is used to distinguish two different crimes, but it's used all the time in the legal system when talking about other crimes.
A lot of time evidence of a crime is actually evidence of premeditation, and used as evidence that you were planning to commit the crime, and hence it is likely you did commit the crime. (As you planning a crime and someone else committing it is unlikely.)
If a bank was robbed, and you're arrested for it, and in your house is a plan of how to rob the bank, lawyers will, indeed, use the term 'premeditated' to refer to your actions. It is, indeed, a legal term, it just means 'planned in advance', and is defined by case law.
It's just planning in advance isn't a requirement of any crime except premeditated murder. (And sometimes 'aggravated assault', but there's a lot of other stuff that can do that, like age differences and attacking police officers, so naming that crime 'premeditated assault' would be odd.)
There's absolutely nothing under the law that wouldn't allow there to be premeditation in other crimes, or for it to be called that.
If they want to make premeditated burglary a crime with harsher penalties than opportunity burglary (Which, now that you mention it, I'm in favor of.), perhaps they should actually do that instead of fucking around with map possession.
If we want criminals to be sentenced longer, maybe we should actually raise the sentence for those crimes..
The only 'add ons' should be behavior we actually want to discourage independent of the crime...for example, add a penalty to committing a burglary with a weapon. Burglary, in theory, involves interacting with no other person (Or it's robbery), so the weapon doesn't technically matter, but we'd like burglars to not have weapons in case they run into people so it doesn't turn violent. So it might make sense to add a weapon charge to that. (In fact, additional possession charges for weapons makes sense for most crimes.)
What doesn't make sense is stuff like lock picking tools and whatnot, which actually discourage additional crimes. (Because with a lockpick, you don't have to vandalize a house or car to get in.) There is no universe where 'People breaking into things without tools' is better than 'People breaking into things with tools'. Or, in this case, maps.
So while the concept is sound for things we actually don't want people to do during crimes, you are correct in that all too often we go 'Hey, there's a bunch of crimes where people are doing X, and we should make X be an addition charge.'.
When in a sane world we might want to, you know, actually increase the penalty for the actual crime.
I didn't say anything about imaginary money. I have no problem with banks operating that way.
I said that there's a difference between allowing people to make bets, and operating a multi-trillion dollar market where people randomly trade those bets around.
The problem isn't bets, or stock ownership, or anything. It's that we created a 'market' to trade those things, as fast as possible, and at this point the supposed actual value of those things is meaningless, because computers are purchasing them for three-fourths of a second to resell them for.02% higher, and human are day trading, which is the same thing with both numbers times 5000. And no one cares about the actual supposed value of 'the bet'.
In the Crowning Moment of Failure, they did this with home loans and blew up the economy, but having it happen at all is stupid and serves no purpose whatsoever.
If people want to buy parts of companies, fine. And it's obviously good to have some sort of system where all sellers and all buyers can show up at a known place, aka, a market. That does not mean we should operate said market in such a manner where the same piece of a company can be sold a bajillion times a day, purchased and resold in milliseconds.
Is that how your local farmer's market operates, with people buying tomatoes based not on the need for tomatoes, but the expected value of tomatoes in ten minutes in the market? I hope not! (Someone's about to point out that the value of tomatoes doesn't normally change from minute to minute. Well, um, neither does the value of company, and thus neither should the value of stock. The fact it does is a symptom of the problem.)
Same with bets, aka, insurance. If I'm a farmer, and want to hedge my losses if the price of tomatoes drop past a certain point this harvest, sure, I should be able to do that...but there's no reason at all for me to actually sell that bet. If I don't want it anymore, I, duh, just buy the opposing bet also, and I'll take a tiny loss that's the house's cut. Well and good. (Yes, yes, I know futures don't actually work in that manner, but they can be mathematically reduced to that.)
The only reason I'd want to sell it is if I didn't actually want the bet in the first place, I was just trading it around to make money...and I fail to even slightly see how this helps the economy in any manner.
And with bets, of course, there are certain conflict of interest issues with betting that, indeed, have started showing up in the financial markets. It's like letting the jockeys bet on other jockeys in a horse race.
Your comment got cut off, but that's the other way of doing it...actually slowing the transaction.
The problem is, I don't think a day is long enough. I'd like to see it slowed to a week.
In fact, with a later post, I kinda had the same idea, a 'weekly reset'. Basically, each piece of stock can be transferred only once between resets.
I was imagining the market operating normally during that time, but instead it could be 'all buys and sells happen at this specific moment in time each week'. A week's worth of transactions are collected, trading is paused, then, bam, it happens all at once. (Obviously, everyone would put in their orders in the last thirty seconds, so probably best to try to stagger the schedule for different stocks.)
That way, you wouldn't even need to keep track of anything. (Presumably, no one would attempt to buy and sell the same stock in the same moment, and it's hard to see what that could possibly accomplish if they did.)
Either of those is probably better than trying to figure out a way to delay each individual transfer for a week from the moment it's made.
Of course, a much easier thing would be to tax people 0.5% of each purchase. The Dow Jones average dividend is 2.94%, so holding on to stock for two months would put you back in the black, assuming the value stayed perfectly level. (And, of course, somewhere around there we'd get CEOs who cared about share dividends instead of stock prices, so the dividends would probably rise.)
Are you asking rhetorically? I think it's a flaw for the same reason you do.
We used to have companies driven by profits. This resulted in some evil, but, in general, the actual fucking economy actually functioned.
Now we have companies driven by stock prices. CEOs get in, close a factory or two, lay off some people, bump the price up, and the shareholders are happy and he walks out the door with his bonus.
Everyone wins! At least for three months, but by then all the current shareholders have sold their stock to unsuspecting losers, so obviously those guys lose. And no one apparently has made anything and no one appears to be employed anymore, and, um, wait, what were we trying to do again? What is the purpose of a 'corporation' again? Cause I got confused somewhere in there.
Yes, the 'value' of the company is not important. What is important is the profit of the company. We used to have a system that, for better or worse, put profit ahead of everything, which was incredibly evil and people hated. Of course, it profited because it was able to product goods and/or services, and resell them for more than it cost them, so it was, in at least some manner, doing what people wanted.
Well, now we've got a system that puts random fluctuations in a random valuation of, well, nothing...ahead of everything else. So yeah.
Can we go back to the evil system, please? You know, the one that actually employed people to make stuff?
It is certainly not "entirely unconnected" - at some point, if the stock were to become cheap enough, somebody would purchase a controlling share to claim the company's products and income stream for themselves.
I said that the value of the stock is unconnected to the value of the company. Yes, if one gets a lot lower than the other, someone will do something, but that doesn't make them 'connected'.
Or perhaps you're taking issue with 'value'. By that, I mean 'price'...stock does have some intrinsically value that does vary in relation to the company value.
But value, ultimately, is what people think it's worth, what they are valuing it as, not what the 'actual' value is calculated by dividing the value of the company by the outstanding shares. Just because things have values written on them doesn't make that the actual value of the thing.
But if that's the issue, I will rephrase 'The price of stock is entirely unconnected to the value of the company'.
Incidentally, what you proposed is not a hypothetical. Ask Time Warner how the fuck AOL managed to buy them.
Also, under your hold for one month scheme, what happens to people who buy just before horrible news gets announced? They get screwed while people who bought one month + 1 day ago can sell?
People who own part of a company that something bad happens at might end up taking a loss? MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!
Seriously, um, right after bad news is a pretty stupid time to sell stock anyway.
More seriously, the entire point of this plan is that there won't be a lot of people who 'just bought stock' at any time. You buy stock because you want to invest in the company, period.
In a slow and sane market like the one I'm trying to figure out how to make, stock prices would actually reflect the value of the company/current issued stock. There is very little bad news that actually alters the value of a company in any major manner. Some sort of major new liability or a giant disaster, sure, but how often does that happen? (Everyone wave to BP.)
But all the 'major' news that the stock marker freaks over is stuff like 5% less earnings, which translates into maybe 2% less dividends, which, of course, translate into stock prices dropping by 40%, because the stock market is behaving like a coked-up ferret. Don't confuse that with how the stock market should work, which should reduce the stock price by maybe 0.5%.
It doesn't matter how you conceptualize it, the point is that, in the gold market accessible to the consumer, there is such a huge markup on purchased gold, and a huge discount on sold gold, that the idea of anyone making any money is absurd.
In developed nations we are reaching an inflection point (if we haven't passed it already) where the restrictions to cooperation and the spread of ideas from things like IP laws and the misallocation of economic resources from productive uses into piramid-like schemes (i.e. banking) is outweighting the good sides of those systems. At that point, productivity per worker will start to go down and with that so will average salaries.
I'm pretty sure we passed that when our damn economy collapsed.
But, yes, all the people talking about 'resources' like it has some bearing on this are full of shit. The problem with our economy is that instead of actually making things, the people at the top have decided to move the means of production to other countries that can do it cheaper. Thus resulting in no actual wages to the first world people who are supposed to buy all this shit that's being made.
Luckily, instead of running out of money, all those first world people could run over to the people at the top and get loans (that they can't possibly pay off) to continue to live on, usually backed by their house. Often repeatedly. <FUTURAMA>Thus solving the problem once and for all</FUTURAMA>.
Then, to top it all off, the people at the top invested the profits they made by only having to pay third-world wages not back into anything that was useful, but imaginary trading of imaginary contracts with imaginary value, backed by the loans they made to all those people who they've decided not to employ anymore.
It's like the most powerful people in the world are one of those inbred retarded cats or something, running in circles and crashing into a wall.
I don't like that plan because it still allows casino-like behavior, though, and it introduces even more randomness, of which there will invariably be complaints about.
I often say make people wait a month, although I've always conceived that as a delay from original purchase.
The GP's idea of on-the-minute trades, and your idea of delaying it longer, has merit though.
But I have a better idea. Let's leave things as they are, where people can buy and sell as fast as they want...but during each week, each piece of stock can only be transferred once. That's it.
Every company just gets a weekly or fortnight reset, on randomly assigned days, after the market closes. (And I'd make the reset have to happen right after the quarterly report. Any week where official company announcements happen, the reset should be scheduled that night, so people can get in or out the next day. Possibly even an extra reset.) Between resets, stock can only move once.
This would actually result in a bunch of trading early morning the next day, with 90% of the entire week's volume for the stock in about an hour, but the interesting thing that it would also allow 'real' stockholders, who had their stock since before the last reset, to sell their stock early if something happened during the week.
That is exactly the flaw in the current stock market. The value of stock is entirely unconnected to the value of a company.
I suggest requiring stock purchases be held on to for at least a month. I'd rather have a year.
Then we'd actually have people purchasing stock because they felt the company would do well, and companies would have to start actually paying dividends again to attract owners.
If it is not workable to outright ban resell before the time is up, I suggest a 10% tax.
Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
Even if you get rid of 'high frequency' trades, all you've done is slow the game back down. (And left a place for cheaters.)
If we want to facilitate investment, how about we just don't let people own stock for less than a month. You bought a goddamn company, not a fucking snowcone.
Slashdot Mirror
Some places closed the loophole after some guy successfully argued in court that installing a hidden camera, without audio, in the woman's bathroom in his business was legal. However, that only applies if you have an expectation of privacy, otherwise people could be charged for taking pictures almost anywhere that had another person show up in them.
Sadly, it appears, somehow, that cops have an 'expectation of privacy' while arresting people, despite this being flatly nonsensical.
Even if you ignore the fact that they're clearly in public and visible to at least one other person when they arrest people or even ticket them, they are doing something that they will be compelled to testify in court about as part of their job.
I'm sorry, police, if you're doing something, deliberately, as part of your job, that you know will end up in court and you will have to testify about, then you have no expectation of privacy doing it. And the fact you're even complaining that people are keeping a record of what you do has rather interesting implications about just how honest you are.
In fact, generally, government officials shouldn't have any expectation of privacy when interacting with the public in an official capacity at all, but it's even more absurd when it's part of someone's arrest, and the police officer is operating with the full knowledge their actions will be recounted under oath later.
So, we're going to save $15 a month and not subsidizing the high data users.
No shit. hey, look, a iPhone for people who a) have a wifi network or can set one up, and b) live in sucky coverage areas that they couldn't do streaming video over it anyway.
Hell, even if you do use a lot, it's pretty impressive to use 2GB a month. What are you people doing, torrenting from your phone?
I think a lot of people are getting mad before exploring this.
I believe that is the official motto of slashdot.
You realize it's people like you who have resulted in us all paying $60 a month, even if we don't use anywhere near that much data?
I have no idea what you're complaining about. It's the rest of us that were paying too much for an unlimited plan.
You want to use 4-5GB a month over the rather scarce resource of cell towers, you pay for it. Your plan isn't going anywhere.
You should probably be happy that they didn't pull a comcast and start disconnecting and dropping connections for unlimited users they felt were 'using too much'.
Incidentally, using 'quite a bit of mobile web' probably isn't pushing you even over the 200 MB a month. That would be pretty impressive web browsing to reach, 6.7 megs a day, or, assuming 16 hours awake, 410k every hour you're awake, which is at least five web pages, probably more like ten with browser caching and whatnot.
Streaming stuff, yes. YouTube, yes. Web browsing is just a blip.
I'm a pretty heavy surfer, but I'm considering switching to 200 a month. I'll need to get my wifi set back up, though, first. The coverage is so sucky here that streaming video doesn't work without well wifi anyway, I don't do streaming music (I put music on my phone, which seems a lot saner), and web browsing is well under that.
The only thing that would worry me is podcasts, which I download directly to my phone, but that's why I need to get my wifi set up. And then I should be well under 200 a month. (Or I could switch back to my computer downloading them.)
And, in fact, changes to the law have just specifically made that illegal. They can't (Or soon won't be able to) change the interest rate and terms of the loan from the previous billing period. All they'll be able to do is change the rate on new money they loan you, the old money has to stay at the same rate.
But, yeah, that's how they used to do it.
Of course, credit card companies are already figuring way around this. Chase, for example, is raising the minimum monthly payment if you have old, lower interest rates...but you can get that minimum lowered if you agree to change them.
Oh, I'm not concerned about a doomsday problem.
What I'm concerned is, for more than two decades, as stocks trading has gotten faster and faster, companies have been operated for the shorter and shorter term stock prices.
Not even short profits, which would be bad enough. No, they're operated for short term 'random perception of value'.
I.e., this already happened, and it already fucked up the economy by causing stagnant wages for quite some time, as companies were not actually profitable in any sense. (I don't care what the 'earnings' say...companies are only profitable if they pay their owners, aka, stockholders, some profit, aka, dividends.)
This has resulted in the near total destruction of American manufacturing, for one. And quite a few large companies that have almost managed to kill themselves because manipulation of their stock price instead of, for example, actually making and selling stuff. (Chrysler comes to mind.)
And, of course, the wage stagnation along with normal inflation for everything has caused the stupid 'mortgage' crisis as people like to call it, but is actually the 'No one has as much money to live on as they used to, causing loans and eventually a painful correction' crisis.
So I want something, anything, a) to encourage people to actually hold on to stock long enough to actually care about how well the company will be doing next week, b) if at all possible, to encourage companies to reaim themselves as issuing dividends. They need to operate as companies should operate, not as a rollercoaster that people try to buy and sell spots on to make cash.
I have no problem with that existing, I have a problem when the American corporate world is hijacked for that purpose and corporate leaders are installed to make that happen BECAUSE WE ACTUALLY NEED THOSE CORPORATIONS, run in a sane profit making manner, to function as a society. They make the stuff we live on, and they pay us so we can buy it! We need them!
If people want to fuck around in a casino, well, there are plenty of actual casinos out there. We need to laws into places to discourage the use of corporate ownership as said casino.
In fact, this is often where the *real* salary of the execs comes from. I know of a company where the CEO sells somewhere between $3-$5 million worth of shares in his company per quarter, like clockwork. No triggers to tell anyone there's anything good/bad going on, and he's sucking $5 million in capital out of the company every time he does it. No one on the Board says "boo", because they gave it to him... of course.
Right. Instead of income, companies attempt to make 'stock price'. Why? Because it's much much easier to fool idiots into buying your stock.
Stock price is a zero sum game, and people just seem to forget that, and somehow think it's a good idea we operate out economy based on it.
With actual manufacturing, companies have to trade goods and services for money, and usually both parties come out better. (Or, duh, they wouldn't have made the trade.)
The company turns around and has to pay people (slightly less) money to actually produce the goods and services, again, with both sides coming out better. (Or, again, they would not have made the trade.) What is left over the owners get to keep.
There are a lot of problems with this system...for example, companies can do without a specific worker much easier than a worker can do without his job, so a company has more bargaining power. Which the invention of unions attempts to correct. Likewise, with the trade with customers, businesses often attempt to convince the customer to make the purchase even when it's not int he customer's best interest, through advertising and even outright fraud. Again, we've invented consumer protection laws to attempt to stop this.
But regardless of problems that creep in, it is entirely possible for the system to operate fairly. A consumer can walk in, and pay $10 for something he values at $12, and the company paid $8 to a worker for time that he values at $10. The company made $2, the worker made $2, and the consumer 'made' $2. Everyone considers themselves to have come out ahead.
I explain all that, and I suspect most people understand it if they think about it, to counter with the point that the stock market doesn't work that way at all.
Stock prices can, in theory, vary based on value of a company, but they almost never do. (The value of a company at best is recalculated once every quarter.) Likewise, people could invest in the stock market to collect dividends, aka, profits.
But neither of those has anything to do with the game as is currently played, where the market just goes up and down, sometimes in response to 'news', but never in relation to the value of the company, or even expected dividends. To do this, people have to purchase stock from other people.
Now, as I pointed out above, purchases, even stock purchases, can be a net gain for everyone, if people value the things differently. Which would be, for example, if people were trading 'current money' for 'future dividends'....but they aren't.
No, people are selling stock because they expect the immediately value to go down, and people are buying because they expect the immediate value to go up. One of them must be wrong. One of them is going to lose exactly as much money as the other made.
And we are hiring CEOs to operate where this is the goal, because, as I said, it's a lot easier, and faster, money, than the $2 profit I mentioned above, where people willing hand companies money for things they value more than money.
Of course, at some point, the people who bought the stock high, and it went back down, realize, um, this CEO let prices go down (Or, more technically, the magic he did to bump them up stopped working.), so they cut him loose, and get another one. Which is like renting a swing-set seat at the top of the swing, and then bitching when the operator lets it fall back down.
This is a goddamn absurd way to run an economy. The people operating businesses have no incentive to actually operate a busines
Oh, I'm with you entirely. Personal financing is something we need to immediately start teaching in school, it's amazing how many people can't get their life together.
I see people financing $400 TVs. Here's a hint: If you cannot collect $400 in cash, you do not need a $400 TV.
I see people who don't understand how interest works, that you pay down loans in the order they are costing you money, which is usually highest interest first. I see people who don't seem to grasp that a car is a mode of transportation, and if your car still functions, you don't really need a new one unless you have the ability to pay for it. (If it doesn't function, in most places, you sadly need another car even if you can't pay for it. But still not a 'new' one.)
This total irresponsibility actually works fine when the economy is doing good and you have a job, but well, um, it's not anymore, and many people don't.
In high school, I think we touched on some of this, for about week, how you 'make a budget', which frankly isn't people's problems...it's randomly spending too much money. I only budget fixed reoccurring expenses, mentally removing them from my paycheck and bank account, and I do fine.
But then again I don't go around buying things I can't afford, which has nothing to do with a 'budget'. Right now I'm 'saving up' to buy a new laptop, by which I mean I have more than enough money to actually buy it, but not enough that I'd be entirely comfortable afterward, and I'm waiting for my state's tax-free holiday when the school year starts.
That is what we're not teaching kids. We teach 'pretend you have this amount of money, find out how much food costs, and make a budget using meals you don't know how to cook(1)', which no one cares about, but need to teach a philosophical concept of trying not to spend money, and thinking for a moment before you do, and thinking even longer on big ticket things. (My personal rule is, if it's over $30, I'm not allowed to buy it the first day I know of it. I, at least, have to search for a cheaper deal online.)
But morons go out and buy houses without thinking it through. My personal favorite was a subdivision that backed up to a quarry. the fence at the back of some of the properties was about six inches in front of the 'Danger: Blasting' quarry fence. Who the hell was buying those houses? Idiots who didn't bother to do the slightest bit of work investigating their $350,000 purchase.
I've never bought a home, but, hell, I investigated the places I've rented for a week.
But, anyway, that's not what I was talking about with banks. I could care less about idiots who invest in the stock market and get wiped out. Frankly, that shows a level of deliberation I don't care to worry about...even stupid people know the stock market is risky. (I am of the opinion that 'retirement funds', which people are often 'forced' to buy in by their employer, or pay more taxes, should not include stocks, though.)
My suggestion was simply trying to make purchasing stock back 'investing in a company', where the owners of a company actually had a stake in at least the medium term growth.
Which, in turn, would result in them being operated with a tiny bit of intelligence and long-term planning, instead of the CEO closing down R&D because it will give him a tiny bump to stock prices for a month so he'll met his bonuses.
Likewise, the problem with what happened with the banks is that none of it was caused by normal people. Oh, sure, it was normal people who happened to the failing mortgages they traded this time, but next time it could be business loans or tulip bulbs they trade.
And you can say 'Just let them fail', which I'm all for, but the fact is the economy needs those companies, or at least needs some of what those companies do. Without business loans and (sane) financing, the country grinds to a halt.
Of course, the other option to my suggestion, one we probably should do
I'm fed up with this lame argument. Sure, you can't create a commercial quality game in a week, but you can write cooler, better, software than at any time in the past.
Hell, you probably could make a commercial quality game, for the first time in history, in less than a week of computer time.
If you've already designed it (Which you've already had to do anyway.), you probably could sit down for a week and build an Unreal or a TF2 or a NWN2 mod that's commercial quality and worth a few dollars. (By 'a week', I mean '40 hours of work'.)
Seriously, there are plenty of fully-functional engines out there and fully-functional tools to use them, along with very nicely done default behaviors and whatnot.
'Write a game' is only difficult if you insist on starting from scratch. And starting from scratch has always taken months of effort by teams of people, both now and two decades ago, to get to commercial quality.
It's just now that, tada, you can take the stuff they've written and build a different game inside it.
Plenty of people have made entire games in NWN.
An entire story, from start to end, often with voice acting. (Although you need extra people for voices.)
Whether or not that's really 'making a game' or not is up to you. In my universe, if you conceptualize a story from start to end, design all areas, place the enemies and challenges, etc, you've made 'a game', even if it's in someone else's engine.
And there are engines for adventure games, and of course plenty of action engines like Unreal.
Creatively, you did all the work. It's like, when you write a book, you're not expected to operate the printing press.
Yes.
Gaming mods can be a fun gateway to programming if you're the type of person who's willing to be a programmer.
Otherwise, it's just a gaming mod, and it's pointless to try to interest them in programming. Uses a computer all the time != destined to be a programmer(1)
What we really need is to know the sort of games this kid plays. You mentioned some action games, and I know of NWN and NWN2 as RPGs with very large modding communities and editors built in, Civ 4 has plenty of modding resources, etc.
Anyone else? Is there some sort of definitive list here? Fairly modern, but cheap, games with large mod communities?
Of course, the real joke might be that, for all we know, this kid is a major modder already, world famous in his community. He just doesn't bother to call it 'programming'.
Another gateway, of course, is web design. Get them a cheap PHP + mysql webhost, and see what they do. But if they're into games the modding gateway is probably easier.
1) That was true two decades ago, when I was a kid. But, honestly, half the population 'uses a computer all the time' nowadays.
I was just thinking the same thing.
How about picking up a few cheap copies of NWN? Start playing multiplayer, and then point out that, in fact, you can build your own levels?
But, anyway, I have to be against this.
See, it's my firm belief that skills have a hump you have to get over. There's some spot where, if you're not naturally skilled that much, you're never going to be good. Hump is probably the wrong word, but whatever.
Some skills have humps well below average, like riding a bicycle...almost anyone can learn to do that well. Almost everyone can learn to ride a bike and stay upright on it.
And some humps are close to average. Like singing. Maybe 50% of people could be trained to be fairly good singers. (I sometimes think I could be one of those, but I'm too lazy.)
And some humps are past average, where maybe 5% of the population can actually learn the skill in any useful manner. Acting, for example. Painting. Writing. Mathematics
And, of course, programming.
It's entirely a waste of time to try to get most of the population interested in programming. You can either code, or you can't.
This is not to pretend that all programmers are equal, just to say it's a specific skill that most people have no chance of doing well, that with training you could teach them to do it by rote, but not actually 'code' meaningfully. (And, of course, plenty of people like that actually work in the industry.)
And it's not to pretend this somehow makes programmers 'better'. I'm not trying to say this is some function of intelligence.
To put it another way, whether you can do something isn't 'innate skill + training > task'. It's more like '(innate skill - skill modifer) * training > task'. Some skills have a high modifer, some low...and for the high ones, many people have an innate skill below the skill modifer. (Okay, mathematically, that means they get worse with more training, but it's just an analogy. ;)
Yes, anyone moderately intelligence and curious can write small scripts, or copy and modify a Excel macro, but that's the difference between a guy patching drywall and an architect.
And, again, nothing wrong with a kid patching drywall. Just don't try to push him into architecture because he's willing to do that.
You can say it's just 'sour grapes', if you want, but you're trying to solve an entirely different problem than me.
The American economy requires companies operated to make a profit. In fact, the entire premise of free enterprise is that.
However, many companies are currently operated to produce a temporary bump in some random market-set 'value' of a fraction of the company. That's it. That's the goal of the owners, it is the goal of the people they hire.
The stock market is not some natural phenomenon, it is not an automatic result of corporations, and neither is how it operates.
We can alter or remove the stock market, to make changes to remove 'milli-investors', people who purchase part of a company and expect that part to gain in value in the next five milliseconds.
If people who invest in a company start expecting even 'medium term' returns, a five-year investment, instead of millisecond returns, corporations will start being operated to make a profit, which requires them to actually employ people and make long term plans and goods and services people want, instead of laying off 10,000 people in a bad business decision simply because it will cause some momentary bump in the stock prices.
The issue you're talking about is another issue entirely, and you are mostly correct, although I feel I must point out that the reason that people are living on credit is that prices did go up and wages didn't. (Because of the aforementioned stupidity in operating corporations.)
In fact, I want people to stop living off credit not just because it's a bad idea, and more because it's hidden, for a decade, the fact that people were, on the whole, getting poorer.
It hide that along with the housing boom, which was more the same problem from the other direction...wages stayed the same, while one aspect of life got really expensive for no reason.
Saying 'Oh, everyone should just have lowered their standard of living' is a big of an absurd high-horse. People do not work like that. People calculate 'With this job, I can live at this level' when they start employment, and they fail to notice that their raises are at 1% and stuff costs 5% more, and then they somehow have shortfalls, but surely that was just bad luck, so they can borrow a bit, and surely they can afford that house on that salary.
It's the old expression about a frog being slowly boiled. Yes, some people caught on, in fact most did, but a good percentage did not. And even the people who did catch on couldn't stop themselves from being laid off or getting hit by rising health care costs or something.
Yes, that's exactly it. And even more. Additional charges should be added because they make the crime worse, even if only in some abstract sense.
I mean, if a guy burglarizes my house when I'm not there, whether or not he has a gun doesn't really matter in specifics...but it does matter, because he has just behaved in a more unsafe manner. I could have shown up, and one of us would have probably ended up dead. Guns, in general, make felonies less safe for everyone, so punishing people for having them during a felony is a good idea, even if they aren't used!
I mean, it sounds weird to say we'd rather have people murdered by poison than by gunshot, but, well, society is slightly safer if some guy isn't running around waving a gun.
But there's a lot of stuff that can't be justified at all. Like added lockpick charges, or this stupid map one. That's just burglary! It's not somehow worse for society how its committed.
"Premeditated" is an adjective only used when talking about murder,
Uh, no. It's an adjective that right now is used to distinguish two different crimes, but it's used all the time in the legal system when talking about other crimes.
A lot of time evidence of a crime is actually evidence of premeditation, and used as evidence that you were planning to commit the crime, and hence it is likely you did commit the crime. (As you planning a crime and someone else committing it is unlikely.)
If a bank was robbed, and you're arrested for it, and in your house is a plan of how to rob the bank, lawyers will, indeed, use the term 'premeditated' to refer to your actions. It is, indeed, a legal term, it just means 'planned in advance', and is defined by case law.
It's just planning in advance isn't a requirement of any crime except premeditated murder. (And sometimes 'aggravated assault', but there's a lot of other stuff that can do that, like age differences and attacking police officers, so naming that crime 'premeditated assault' would be odd.)
There's absolutely nothing under the law that wouldn't allow there to be premeditation in other crimes, or for it to be called that.
If they want to make premeditated burglary a crime with harsher penalties than opportunity burglary (Which, now that you mention it, I'm in favor of.), perhaps they should actually do that instead of fucking around with map possession.
If we want criminals to be sentenced longer, maybe we should actually raise the sentence for those crimes..
The only 'add ons' should be behavior we actually want to discourage independent of the crime...for example, add a penalty to committing a burglary with a weapon. Burglary, in theory, involves interacting with no other person (Or it's robbery), so the weapon doesn't technically matter, but we'd like burglars to not have weapons in case they run into people so it doesn't turn violent. So it might make sense to add a weapon charge to that. (In fact, additional possession charges for weapons makes sense for most crimes.)
What doesn't make sense is stuff like lock picking tools and whatnot, which actually discourage additional crimes. (Because with a lockpick, you don't have to vandalize a house or car to get in.) There is no universe where 'People breaking into things without tools' is better than 'People breaking into things with tools'. Or, in this case, maps.
So while the concept is sound for things we actually don't want people to do during crimes, you are correct in that all too often we go 'Hey, there's a bunch of crimes where people are doing X, and we should make X be an addition charge.'.
When in a sane world we might want to, you know, actually increase the penalty for the actual crime.
I didn't say anything about imaginary money. I have no problem with banks operating that way.
I said that there's a difference between allowing people to make bets, and operating a multi-trillion dollar market where people randomly trade those bets around.
The problem isn't bets, or stock ownership, or anything. It's that we created a 'market' to trade those things, as fast as possible, and at this point the supposed actual value of those things is meaningless, because computers are purchasing them for three-fourths of a second to resell them for .02% higher, and human are day trading, which is the same thing with both numbers times 5000. And no one cares about the actual supposed value of 'the bet'.
In the Crowning Moment of Failure, they did this with home loans and blew up the economy, but having it happen at all is stupid and serves no purpose whatsoever.
If people want to buy parts of companies, fine. And it's obviously good to have some sort of system where all sellers and all buyers can show up at a known place, aka, a market. That does not mean we should operate said market in such a manner where the same piece of a company can be sold a bajillion times a day, purchased and resold in milliseconds.
Is that how your local farmer's market operates, with people buying tomatoes based not on the need for tomatoes, but the expected value of tomatoes in ten minutes in the market? I hope not! (Someone's about to point out that the value of tomatoes doesn't normally change from minute to minute. Well, um, neither does the value of company, and thus neither should the value of stock. The fact it does is a symptom of the problem.)
Same with bets, aka, insurance. If I'm a farmer, and want to hedge my losses if the price of tomatoes drop past a certain point this harvest, sure, I should be able to do that...but there's no reason at all for me to actually sell that bet. If I don't want it anymore, I, duh, just buy the opposing bet also, and I'll take a tiny loss that's the house's cut. Well and good. (Yes, yes, I know futures don't actually work in that manner, but they can be mathematically reduced to that.)
The only reason I'd want to sell it is if I didn't actually want the bet in the first place, I was just trading it around to make money...and I fail to even slightly see how this helps the economy in any manner.
And with bets, of course, there are certain conflict of interest issues with betting that, indeed, have started showing up in the financial markets. It's like letting the jockeys bet on other jockeys in a horse race.
Your comment got cut off, but that's the other way of doing it...actually slowing the transaction.
The problem is, I don't think a day is long enough. I'd like to see it slowed to a week.
In fact, with a later post, I kinda had the same idea, a 'weekly reset'. Basically, each piece of stock can be transferred only once between resets.
I was imagining the market operating normally during that time, but instead it could be 'all buys and sells happen at this specific moment in time each week'. A week's worth of transactions are collected, trading is paused, then, bam, it happens all at once. (Obviously, everyone would put in their orders in the last thirty seconds, so probably best to try to stagger the schedule for different stocks.)
That way, you wouldn't even need to keep track of anything. (Presumably, no one would attempt to buy and sell the same stock in the same moment, and it's hard to see what that could possibly accomplish if they did.)
Either of those is probably better than trying to figure out a way to delay each individual transfer for a week from the moment it's made.
Of course, a much easier thing would be to tax people 0.5% of each purchase. The Dow Jones average dividend is 2.94%, so holding on to stock for two months would put you back in the black, assuming the value stayed perfectly level. (And, of course, somewhere around there we'd get CEOs who cared about share dividends instead of stock prices, so the dividends would probably rise.)
Are you asking rhetorically? I think it's a flaw for the same reason you do.
We used to have companies driven by profits. This resulted in some evil, but, in general, the actual fucking economy actually functioned.
Now we have companies driven by stock prices. CEOs get in, close a factory or two, lay off some people, bump the price up, and the shareholders are happy and he walks out the door with his bonus.
Everyone wins! At least for three months, but by then all the current shareholders have sold their stock to unsuspecting losers, so obviously those guys lose. And no one apparently has made anything and no one appears to be employed anymore, and, um, wait, what were we trying to do again? What is the purpose of a 'corporation' again? Cause I got confused somewhere in there.
Yes, the 'value' of the company is not important. What is important is the profit of the company. We used to have a system that, for better or worse, put profit ahead of everything, which was incredibly evil and people hated. Of course, it profited because it was able to product goods and/or services, and resell them for more than it cost them, so it was, in at least some manner, doing what people wanted.
Well, now we've got a system that puts random fluctuations in a random valuation of, well, nothing...ahead of everything else. So yeah.
Can we go back to the evil system, please? You know, the one that actually employed people to make stuff?
It is certainly not "entirely unconnected" - at some point, if the stock were to become cheap enough, somebody would purchase a controlling share to claim the company's products and income stream for themselves.
I said that the value of the stock is unconnected to the value of the company. Yes, if one gets a lot lower than the other, someone will do something, but that doesn't make them 'connected'.
Or perhaps you're taking issue with 'value'. By that, I mean 'price'...stock does have some intrinsically value that does vary in relation to the company value.
But value, ultimately, is what people think it's worth, what they are valuing it as, not what the 'actual' value is calculated by dividing the value of the company by the outstanding shares. Just because things have values written on them doesn't make that the actual value of the thing.
But if that's the issue, I will rephrase 'The price of stock is entirely unconnected to the value of the company'.
Incidentally, what you proposed is not a hypothetical. Ask Time Warner how the fuck AOL managed to buy them.
Also, under your hold for one month scheme, what happens to people who buy just before horrible news gets announced? They get screwed while people who bought one month + 1 day ago can sell?
People who own part of a company that something bad happens at might end up taking a loss? MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?!
Seriously, um, right after bad news is a pretty stupid time to sell stock anyway.
More seriously, the entire point of this plan is that there won't be a lot of people who 'just bought stock' at any time. You buy stock because you want to invest in the company, period.
In a slow and sane market like the one I'm trying to figure out how to make, stock prices would actually reflect the value of the company/current issued stock. There is very little bad news that actually alters the value of a company in any major manner. Some sort of major new liability or a giant disaster, sure, but how often does that happen? (Everyone wave to BP.)
But all the 'major' news that the stock marker freaks over is stuff like 5% less earnings, which translates into maybe 2% less dividends, which, of course, translate into stock prices dropping by 40%, because the stock market is behaving like a coked-up ferret. Don't confuse that with how the stock market should work, which should reduce the stock price by maybe 0.5%.
Hey, moron, did you not actually read the post?
It doesn't matter how you conceptualize it, the point is that, in the gold market accessible to the consumer, there is such a huge markup on purchased gold, and a huge discount on sold gold, that the idea of anyone making any money is absurd.
In developed nations we are reaching an inflection point (if we haven't passed it already) where the restrictions to cooperation and the spread of ideas from things like IP laws and the misallocation of economic resources from productive uses into piramid-like schemes (i.e. banking) is outweighting the good sides of those systems. At that point, productivity per worker will start to go down and with that so will average salaries.
I'm pretty sure we passed that when our damn economy collapsed.
But, yes, all the people talking about 'resources' like it has some bearing on this are full of shit. The problem with our economy is that instead of actually making things, the people at the top have decided to move the means of production to other countries that can do it cheaper. Thus resulting in no actual wages to the first world people who are supposed to buy all this shit that's being made.
Luckily, instead of running out of money, all those first world people could run over to the people at the top and get loans (that they can't possibly pay off) to continue to live on, usually backed by their house. Often repeatedly. <FUTURAMA>Thus solving the problem once and for all</FUTURAMA>.
Then, to top it all off, the people at the top invested the profits they made by only having to pay third-world wages not back into anything that was useful, but imaginary trading of imaginary contracts with imaginary value, backed by the loans they made to all those people who they've decided not to employ anymore.
It's like the most powerful people in the world are one of those inbred retarded cats or something, running in circles and crashing into a wall.
Indeed.
I don't like that plan because it still allows casino-like behavior, though, and it introduces even more randomness, of which there will invariably be complaints about.
I often say make people wait a month, although I've always conceived that as a delay from original purchase.
The GP's idea of on-the-minute trades, and your idea of delaying it longer, has merit though.
But I have a better idea. Let's leave things as they are, where people can buy and sell as fast as they want...but during each week, each piece of stock can only be transferred once. That's it.
Every company just gets a weekly or fortnight reset, on randomly assigned days, after the market closes. (And I'd make the reset have to happen right after the quarterly report. Any week where official company announcements happen, the reset should be scheduled that night, so people can get in or out the next day. Possibly even an extra reset.) Between resets, stock can only move once.
This would actually result in a bunch of trading early morning the next day, with 90% of the entire week's volume for the stock in about an hour, but the interesting thing that it would also allow 'real' stockholders, who had their stock since before the last reset, to sell their stock early if something happened during the week.
MOD PARENT UP
That is exactly the flaw in the current stock market. The value of stock is entirely unconnected to the value of a company.
I suggest requiring stock purchases be held on to for at least a month. I'd rather have a year.
Then we'd actually have people purchasing stock because they felt the company would do well, and companies would have to start actually paying dividends again to attract owners.
If it is not workable to outright ban resell before the time is up, I suggest a 10% tax.
Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
Even if you get rid of 'high frequency' trades, all you've done is slow the game back down. (And left a place for cheaters.)
If we want to facilitate investment, how about we just don't let people own stock for less than a month. You bought a goddamn company, not a fucking snowcone.