As somebody who is hunting for a job right now, I have one advice - Do not create a CV/resume in OO and email it to companies. It messes up formatting beyond belief. (I believe due to different margins/fonts)
I love Openoffice, and as I said in another post, dualboot both Windows/Ubuntu. I have filed bugs when I find them against OO.org, but I would not right now recommend using OO.org for business unless your counterparty is also using OO.org (ie use it for internal documents/spreadsheets, but don't mail it out to other companies).
If you want nitpicks -
1) OO spreadsheets do not run macros/vbscript - this means that tons of businesses could not use it. (you would'nt believe how many finance companies run entirely on excel)
2. It slightly and strangely messes up embedded images - I have a collegue who mails out screenshots embedded in word documents - And I can't read it in OO.org. I have to run word under wine
3. OO.org spreadsheet's goalseek is bad (wrong?) and its financial functions are extremely limited. I once completed an entire financial statement for a company in Calc, but the experience was extremely painful
4. The mail software (Evolution) crashes when there are large number of emails- and refuses to receive new emails on re-opening. The solution is to disconnect from exchange, close Evolution and to restart it again- but this is not easy to guess at for a new user.
I love Opensource as much as anyone on/. and have contributed what I can, but recommending Openoffice (unless you personally are going to support it) is a disservice to the community. I could survive with Openoffice, you could, but Joe the regularemployee would not be able to.
You can get all these applications to run under wine
I dual boot Ubuntu/Vista and end up booting to Ubuntu just because it boots faster. So I ended up installing wine and the full Microsoft suite in wine. It was not easy to set up Office under Ubuntu because the latest version of wine supported on Ubuntu breaks excel, but Google provides a nice script to fix the dependencies and libraries. Once I got it to run I never booted to Vista again (I don't play video games, I run tons of business apps).
IF IBM can get the set-up of wine right, I am fairly certain that as long as you don't need Internet explorer you can run Powerpoint, Excel, Visio and Other MS utilities. I have also been able to install tons of business applications under wine with no problems --but strangely MSFT applications run the best under wine.
They are selling them at $299 on their website
$399 with Camera and GPS . I hope the prices are in Australian dollars, that would make it a pretty good buy
And the website has this comment "PRE-ORDER NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT -
DEMAND WILL EXCEED SUPPLY!"
I wonder how they know for certain that demand WILL exceed supply ?
You must be joking or seriously mistaken.
US is on a cliffs edge and has been for a while - its currency is highly overvalued because of trust. If it ever becomes devalued suddenly, US wont be able to import many items including essentials like oil - Oil is used not just for transportation, but also for heating in many cold areas, you know. If that happens, the savers will see their savings worthless and the debtors will rejoice. A sign of weakness, in the form of recession is exactly the sort of trigger that causes all sort of bad things to happen.
South America knows this, so does Asia and Russia- and people are atleast semi-carefull. China and India are building forex reserves to avoid just such an eventuality(of their currency pegs breaking) . Europe is protected by a fortress of governmental intervention and can produce food and get oil from Russia. USA never has had such a revaluation happen (maybe in the early 80s), so are very underprepared.
Actually lots were lost.
The losses were from two areas -
1) Lots of investments were made, which should not have been. The houses in US are bigger and luxurious compared to the rest of the world, people invested in them assuming a later profit. Now all of these money should have been invested in assets that would have returned some value later on in the future (industries etc.) which was not done. We are just now begining accounting for them. This loss is real in the sense that this hampers the ability of Americans to buy stuff they really would have liked to buy (flying cars for example) when measured in happiness terms or hedonic prices. It can also be measured in real dollars by calculating future returns on other investments minus returns from housing markets.
2)Loss of trust - Trust reduces cost of financing and hence provides more opportunities for projects to get started. When Banks failed and bankers exposed, it eroded the trust. This in turn raised the cost of borrowings and hence lesser number of projects get funded. This affects the future, but its effect is felt today when bond prices go down (yield goes up).
Not if you assume that one of the chief exports of US is treasury bonds and you assume that it has some extra intrinsic value other than monetary. US bonds are valued because you are not only selling debt, but it is powdered with trust It is sorta like a swiss watch, just the same as the Japanese one, but made by Swiss- costs a lot more just because of the tiny difference.
Not that I am saying this is a good thing in anyway , but that Debt in the case of US, atleast in the short term, seems to cause no inflation. It also seems to work counterintuitively when seen in Macroeconomic terms. I dont believe it will hold in the long term, but measuring deflation adjusted for debt for the short term may not be as accurate as we want .
You know what, there is a bigger problem that I see.
The more I look at it, more the US seems to look like the drunkard at the bar who always is the nicest customer and gets free beer from the barman. China and the rest of the world here is the barman.This has gone on for a while and now the drunkard is really drunk and needs to take a break and go to the restroom, but he is afraid that if he gets up hell lose his favorite chair at the bar (which just happens to be right next to the beer tap- which in this analogy would be Saudi arabia) . The beer in this story is the free credit that China and others have been giving US. The drunkard starts feeling the pain and what does he do ? He goes and orders a whisky in the hopes that a stronger drink will cure him.
The barman complains a bit but pours him a strong one anyway. Now the drunkard does not want to go to the toilet, but becomes all drowsy and seeing all sort of strange this happening.
I would really say that the best way out of this mess is a quick undervaluation of the US dollar, causing real estate and all other commodities to quickly rise up in prices to where they should be - that would be the easiest way to put the money where people need it and the fastest. It certainly wont be painless, since the dollar may fall almost by 25 or 30 percent, causing Oil, guns and most importantly foreign labor to become more costly.But hey, nobody said sitting and drinking free beer all day long would be a good idea. US might also lose the seat right next to the barman, but as they say , "if you gotta go, you gotta go".
This will happen one way or the other, all the world can do is to postpone it. The worst part of all this is that the savers are going to suffer, while the debtors rescued.
Many Video/Audio applications run on UDP, so does SNMP (after all these years still used for monitoring network devices). If the router and network starts dropping UDP packets, the effect on non-P2P users is going to be worse than them throttling TCP packets.
For some reason, the author of the article seems to think (or imply) that Audio/Video runs on TCP - It mostly does not (or should not).
I think the solution would be for the ISP's to use "pay for data" schemes rather than "pay for TCP connections".
The worst amongst these cycles is Bamboo trees (plants ? Grass ?)
They flower every 12 (or 8 or even 20 ) years or so. And when they flower they produce grains. These grains are eaten by rats and mice and this causes mice to breed rapidly. Then these rats go and eat all the rice from the rice paddies and causes starvation in large areas. This causes humans to start eating Bamboo grains repeating the cycle till rats die out. 50 years ago or so it would lead to starvation and human beings dieing in large parts of Asia out but it has'nt happened in the recent past since people started using pesticides. Here is an article from National Geographic about that.
If the last time the windfall taxes were applied is a good example, Government may not get any money at all.
When Windfall taxes were applied in the 80's,companies took on large amounts of debts (debt repayments are not taxed) and use all of that Debt to go digging for Oil (Expenditures are not taxed or have depreciation cover). It is difficult to say if it was a good idea or bad, but all the effect that a tax has on Oil companies is to shift money from gas pumps/customers to prospecting.
If it is a good idea to look for Oil in places where it is profitable only at $70 a barrel, the best way to do that is to impose a windfall tax. Oh and the bankers and private equity groups will get some money in the buyouts and mergers that follow.
To play Devil's advocate (What you said is true, I'll nitpick the conclusion).
Elaborate burial need not imply a extremely high intelligence. Elephants seem to care about death of a group creature and tend to remember the place of burial (or death) and seem to understand that bones of animals in some way represent the dead elephant.
Now I agree that they are smart creatures, but they are not smarter than a chimpanzee.
Jewelery is not a great achievement either. Crows for example (atleast the asiatic crow) , will often decorate their nests with shiny items. I personally have seen a crow burn down its nest trying to "decorate" it with an ember - I noticed it because it set fire to a coconut tree in the process.
Significance of music is common to many birds and a lot of animals can tap or scratch musically to attract mates or convey information.
So, I don't think the above is evidence for being at Forrest Gump level. Maybe at a Chimpanzee + Elephant + Bird level.
There is a subtle difference there.
The report shows that from a population that has guns, you try and limit or remove guns crime goes up. What the other study (Canada vs US) says is that if you have two societies, one with guns and the other without, the one without guns is safer.
I could explain this by saying that when everyone has guns and you ban them, all the nicer people turn in their guns while the bad guys keep them. Hence crime increases.
So the above study does not back up your argument adequately. If a population has no guns, the thiefs have knives, so does the general population and both of them are loath to use it (messy, unreliable etc.) and hence the population is safer than one with guns (both the bad guys and the good guys use them).
The net-worth of the company is the sum of all future dividends
I would propose that the net worth of the company is the net earnings of the company
For example consider the Oil Shock of the 80s. Government imposed a 60+% tax on the companies as windfall taxes. This meant that for every dollar earnt, the company could give the investors only 40 cents. This meant that large capital expenditures were a good idea - which they did by investing in Oil exploration. So now instead of the investor owning a company, they also owned large amounts of Oil (which is almost as liquid as cash anyway). This Oil would not be taxed until it was dug out - and so they were not dug out till the taxes changed back.
So in the interim period while the company was investing in digging for oil (and apparently losing money, in accounting terms), the company really was growing. There WAS a reason to not pay dividents and the company valuation to go up. They did start paying dividents later though.
The other alternative was for the company to transform itself into a Oil trust. Essentially break the company apart, stop digging for Oil and give out all profits as dividents and pay no taxes. This is something Boone Pickens pioneered - And this lead in the longer term to the death of any company he touched since they were no longer looking for oil. The investors got their dividents in the meanwhile though!
That is a Ponzy scheme,
This is not true. Suppose you own 1% of shares of a company that is worth $100. Your shares are worth $10.
Now they make $10 profit. They could either give you $1 back or reinvest it back in the project to make the same return the next year. If it all works out as planned, the next year you are holding 1% of a company worth $110 and growth prospect of 10%.
You see how stocks inherently are worth more because the money got re-invested ? It is not a Ponzy scheme.
BTW, P/E ratio has nothing to do with dividents. P/E ratio is calculated on the basis of earnings which are internal to the company.
Dividends are a bad idea because they get taxed at the company level at 33% and then once again at the shareholder level as either income or capital gains. If you are going to give out money it is cheaper to issue dividents
But your other point is valid. Retail investors HATE selling stocks to make a profit - they prefer dividends much more. Which is why companies with large retail holdings issue dividents and the ones with large institutional holdings do share buybacks
Say that to Dell. Kevin Rollins kept buying back stocks (pay out dividents) and made Dell the most efficient at producing cheap computers.
The only problem was that when HP improved its game, Dell did'nt have any buffer cash to change their gameplan. They seemed to have fixed it recently, but from the stockprices I think they have'nt worked all that well.
Some amount of retained earnings are sometimes a good idea.
This graph explains it better than I can.
Assume that the earnings of a company is what remains to be distributed to shareholders. If divident is not paid, and the money gets re-invested, this is similar to a compund interest rate - You should be able to cash in the money at some point of time. Either the company finally pays dividents when it stops growing (MSFT) or the stock price rises since the company has a lot more of retained earnings which they reinvested.
If you take the above approach the Price to earnings ratio gives an indication of the inherent value of the company. A non growing company with a P/E ratio of 10 is the equivalent of a 10% interest rate and a P/E ratio of 30 implies a 3.3% interest rate.
Historically the returns from stock markets have been slightly higher than debts (bonds) - the stock markets are riskier and only the high return projects ever get funded. (If it was low return and high risk, no one would invest in the first place). Anyway, the average P/E ratio for the whole market should have been below 10, but in the recent past they were much higher. implying lower returns than bonds or astronomical growth rates.
After the market crash many are saying that the P/E ratios are about right on average, but then there is the risk that markets overcorrect and the markets could go down even further.
That is another idea. You could just pick up a book in Fluid Dynamics and Aeronautics if you want to learn up PDE's.
Many of the low speed flows can easily be modeled at home too , that should give a good feel of PDE's better than anything. The Navier Stokes equation for Newtonian fluids gives you a feel for what each of these terms mean more than anything else (Stresses, momentum, viscosity etc.)
Solving this in 1-D/2-D is easy and you can simulate a lot of these scenarios on the computer. (As a side benefit it will ensure that you understand the rules of rounding-off numbers very well. They are notoriously difficult to approximate).If you get really good at the math, you could even try your hand at solving the General case:-)
There are many ways of looking at this. The multiverse/string theory explanation of the world exists irrespective of whether life exists or not . These theories came out of attempts to explain various experiments and thought experiments. So there might really be multiple universes, whether the theory that explains it is simple or not.And illogicalness,if any, of Anthropic principle has nothing to do with string theory.
Here is how I think the Anthropic principle fits into the multiverse theory.
1) Odds of complex life are infinitely low . (Not saying they are, but assume this is the case)
2) World is not infinite. Atleast according to the big bang theory, there is a limit to the observable universe
3) Hence life cannot exist!! If the probabilities were as we saw earlier, if life in infinitely impossible and world is limited, life would not exist unless for something odd. Some blame it on God.
4) Now we have to break one of our assumptions -- I would think Step 1 would be the wrong one, but many still disagree and believe in a "Special case" explanation. But still you have not eliminated all the explanations - World is really infinite.
This again obviates the need for a "Special condition"
So really Occam's razor would have to be between "Special condition" (maybe god, maybe just luck) or the proposition given above that world is infinite.
Either his site has been hacked or he is apologizing . His webpage now has a single page message in german
Google translation says "No further legal steps against Wikipedia "
Zur Beendigung der juristischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Wikimedia eV erklärt Lutz Heilmann: To end the legal dispute with the Association Wikimedia Lutz Heilmann explains:
Nachdem die falschen, ehrabschneidenden und deshalb mein Persönlichkeitsrecht verletzenden Inhalte weitgehend aus dem entsprechenden Artikel entfernt wurden, habe ich gegenüber dem Wikimedia eV erklärt, dass ich keine weiteren juristischen Schritte unternehmen werde und die Weiterleitung auf die Wikipedia-Inhalte unter http://de.wikipedia.org/ wieder geschaltet werden kann. After the false ehrabschneidenden and therefore my personality right infringing content largely from the corresponding articles have been removed, I compared the Wikimedia eV explained that I no further legal steps will be and forwarding to the Wikipedia content http://de./ wikipedia.org again can be. Wikimedia eV kann also ab sofort die Inhalte der freien, nicht kommerziellen Internet-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia wieder über die URL www.wikipedia.de Wikimedia eV may ie immediately the contents of the free, non-commercial Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia again on the URL www.wikipedia.de zugänglich machen. access. Ich bedaure außerordentlich, dass durch die von mir beantragte Einstweilige Verfügung des Landgerichts Lübeck die deutschen Wikipedia-Userinnen und -User in den letzten 24 Stunden keinen direkten Zugriff mehr auf die Wikipedia-Inhalte hatten. I am extremely sorry that I have requested the Interim disposal of the District of Lübeck, the German Wikipedia users and users in the last 24 hours no longer have direct access to Wikipedia content had. Mir ging es dabei keineswegs um Zensur, sondern schlicht um eine wahre Tatsachen-Darstellung. I went there to be no censorship, but simply a true representation of facts. Der juristische Weg hat sich dafür insoweit als problematisch erwiesen, als durch die Struktur von Wikipedia die anderen Userinnen und User in Mitleidenschaft gezogen werden. The legal route has advocated so far proven to be problematic than the structure of the other Wikipedia users and users in affected are. Das war nicht meine Absicht. That was not my intention. Gemeinsam mit Wikimedia eV werde ich nach anderen Wegen suchen, um den offenen und freien Charakter von Wikipedia so weiter auszugestalten, dass Persönlichkeitsrechte gewahrt bleiben. Together with the Wikimedia eV I will be looking for other ways to open and free nature of Wikipedia develop so that privacy rights are safeguarded.
Look, she screwed up (and big time)
But she is old and probably grew old before internet and probably never traveled much (considering her background, seemly very likely -teacher and a priest of some sort -both very local professions). So there is some reason why she believed everything she was told. And she spent till she could spend no more.
She is gullible, but now she is taking a very, very brave decision, which is to admit her mistakes publicly.
The hope here is that there are two thresholds to spending - one one the amount of information and the other on the amount of money.When you get to either of them you stop sending money to Nigeria
She clearly did not get to her threshold of info before she got to the threshold of money. Hopefully by sharing her story, she is raising the awareness in other people who may be being scammed and they will back out of the stupidity before they hit the threshold of money themselves.
Another way of looking at it is that while the cost of going public is very very high and she alone bears the costs, she hopes that there is some (small, LordKronos says) limited benefit to doing this. Moreover she wont reap the benefits, the public will. So what she is doing is actually a good thing.
I'll ignore her stupidity considering it has limited impact on me, but will applaud the fact she went public with the info (since it provides some benefit to me -if nothing else, helps calculating the odds of being conned).
If nothing else, show some concern for old people and people who are not as smart as you are. Brain does'nt remain what it is in the youth and this is inevitable for you an me.Cut some slack now, so you won't be ridiculed later on.
Humans did survive when the seas were much higher. But 400 billion humans did'nt survive the high seas. And in a time when the average life expectancy was closer to 20, they really did'nt care if half the town was killed.
The idea being proposed is that (IF theories are correct) it is better for everyone to suffer a bit now than for a large percentage to get displaced later.
Carbon taxes are what economists call Externalities And most economists hate them because they don't involve market forces - Carbon trading was a way of making this more manageable.
What you said overall though is correct. With free trade, according to classical economics, nations with cheap capital will get even more cheaper capital while countries with cheap labor will see labor costs increase slowly.
My belief is that production will move East , green rules or not. Most energy intensive industries are also labor intensive (Steel, Aluminum pdn., any products made of plastics etc.)and the price advantage in terms of labor far outweighs any costs added by emissions trade.
Slashdot Mirror
As somebody who is hunting for a job right now, I have one advice - Do not create a CV/resume in OO and email it to companies. It messes up formatting beyond belief. (I believe due to different margins/fonts)
/. and have contributed what I can, but recommending Openoffice (unless you personally are going to support it) is a disservice to the community. I could survive with Openoffice, you could, but Joe the regularemployee would not be able to.
I love Openoffice, and as I said in another post, dualboot both Windows/Ubuntu. I have filed bugs when I find them against OO.org, but I would not right now recommend using OO.org for business unless your counterparty is also using OO.org (ie use it for internal documents/spreadsheets, but don't mail it out to other companies).
If you want nitpicks -
1) OO spreadsheets do not run macros/vbscript - this means that tons of businesses could not use it. (you would'nt believe how many finance companies run entirely on excel)
2. It slightly and strangely messes up embedded images - I have a collegue who mails out screenshots embedded in word documents - And I can't read it in OO.org. I have to run word under wine
3. OO.org spreadsheet's goalseek is bad (wrong?) and its financial functions are extremely limited. I once completed an entire financial statement for a company in Calc, but the experience was extremely painful
4. The mail software (Evolution) crashes when there are large number of emails- and refuses to receive new emails on re-opening. The solution is to disconnect from exchange, close Evolution and to restart it again- but this is not easy to guess at for a new user.
I love Opensource as much as anyone on
You can get all these applications to run under wine
I dual boot Ubuntu/Vista and end up booting to Ubuntu just because it boots faster. So I ended up installing wine and the full Microsoft suite in wine. It was not easy to set up Office under Ubuntu because the latest version of wine supported on Ubuntu breaks excel, but Google provides a nice script to fix the dependencies and libraries. Once I got it to run I never booted to Vista again (I don't play video games, I run tons of business apps).
IF IBM can get the set-up of wine right, I am fairly certain that as long as you don't need Internet explorer you can run Powerpoint, Excel, Visio and Other MS utilities. I have also been able to install tons of business applications under wine with no problems --but strangely MSFT applications run the best under wine.
They are selling them at $299 on their website
$399 with Camera and GPS .
I hope the prices are in Australian dollars, that would make it a pretty good buy
And the website has this comment "PRE-ORDER NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT - DEMAND WILL EXCEED SUPPLY!"
I wonder how they know for certain that demand WILL exceed supply ?
You must be joking or seriously mistaken.
US is on a cliffs edge and has been for a while - its currency is highly overvalued because of trust. If it ever becomes devalued suddenly, US wont be able to import many items including essentials like oil - Oil is used not just for transportation, but also for heating in many cold areas, you know. If that happens, the savers will see their savings worthless and the debtors will rejoice.
A sign of weakness, in the form of recession is exactly the sort of trigger that causes all sort of bad things to happen.
South America knows this, so does Asia and Russia- and people are atleast semi-carefull. China and India are building forex reserves to avoid just such an eventuality(of their currency pegs breaking) . Europe is protected by a fortress of governmental intervention and can produce food and get oil from Russia. USA never has had such a revaluation happen (maybe in the early 80s), so are very underprepared.
Actually lots were lost.
The losses were from two areas -
1) Lots of investments were made, which should not have been. The houses in US are bigger and luxurious compared to the rest of the world, people invested in them assuming a later profit. Now all of these money should have been invested in assets that would have returned some value later on in the future (industries etc.) which was not done. We are just now begining accounting for them. This loss is real in the sense that this hampers the ability of Americans to buy stuff they really would have liked to buy (flying cars for example) when measured in happiness terms or hedonic prices. It can also be measured in real dollars by calculating future returns on other investments minus returns from housing markets.
2)Loss of trust - Trust reduces cost of financing and hence provides more opportunities for projects to get started. When Banks failed and bankers exposed, it eroded the trust. This in turn raised the cost of borrowings and hence lesser number of projects get funded. This affects the future, but its effect is felt today when bond prices go down (yield goes up).
Not if you assume that one of the chief exports of US is treasury bonds and you assume that it has some extra intrinsic value other than monetary. US bonds are valued because you are not only selling debt, but it is powdered with trust
It is sorta like a swiss watch, just the same as the Japanese one, but made by Swiss- costs a lot more just because of the tiny difference.
Not that I am saying this is a good thing in anyway , but that Debt in the case of US, atleast in the short term, seems to cause no inflation. It also seems to work counterintuitively when seen in Macroeconomic terms. I dont believe it will hold in the long term, but measuring deflation adjusted for debt for the short term may not be as accurate as we want .
You know what, there is a bigger problem that I see.
The more I look at it, more the US seems to look like the drunkard at the bar who always is the nicest customer and gets free beer from the barman. China and the rest of the world here is the barman.This has gone on for a while and now the drunkard is really drunk and needs to take a break and go to the restroom, but he is afraid that if he gets up hell lose his favorite chair at the bar (which just happens to be right next to the beer tap- which in this analogy would be Saudi arabia) . The beer in this story is the free credit that China and others have been giving US. The drunkard starts feeling the pain and what does he do ? He goes and orders a whisky in the hopes that a stronger drink will cure him.
The barman complains a bit but pours him a strong one anyway. Now the drunkard does not want to go to the toilet, but becomes all drowsy and seeing all sort of strange this happening.
I would really say that the best way out of this mess is a quick undervaluation of the US dollar, causing real estate and all other commodities to quickly rise up in prices to where they should be - that would be the easiest way to put the money where people need it and the fastest. It certainly wont be painless, since the dollar may fall almost by 25 or 30 percent, causing Oil, guns and most importantly foreign labor to become more costly.But hey, nobody said sitting and drinking free beer all day long would be a good idea. US might also lose the seat right next to the barman, but as they say , "if you gotta go, you gotta go".
This will happen one way or the other, all the world can do is to postpone it. The worst part of all this is that the savers are going to suffer, while the debtors rescued.
No, that would be MIT.
Harvard would then be the local liberal arts & Business college which also happens to have a CS program.
Many Video/Audio applications run on UDP, so does SNMP (after all these years still used for monitoring network devices). If the router and network starts dropping UDP packets, the effect on non-P2P users is going to be worse than them throttling TCP packets.
For some reason, the author of the article seems to think (or imply) that Audio/Video runs on TCP - It mostly does not (or should not).
I think the solution would be for the ISP's to use "pay for data" schemes rather than "pay for TCP connections".
The worst amongst these cycles is Bamboo trees (plants ? Grass ?)
They flower every 12 (or 8 or even 20 ) years or so. And when they flower they produce grains. These grains are eaten by rats and mice and this causes mice to breed rapidly. Then these rats go and eat all the rice from the rice paddies and causes starvation in large areas. This causes humans to start eating Bamboo grains repeating the cycle till rats die out. 50 years ago or so it would lead to starvation and human beings dieing in large parts of Asia out but it has'nt happened in the recent past since people started using pesticides. Here is an article from National Geographic about that.
If the last time the windfall taxes were applied is a good example, Government may not get any money at all . ,companies took on large amounts of debts (debt repayments are not taxed) and use all of that Debt to go digging for Oil (Expenditures are not taxed or have depreciation cover). It is difficult to say if it was a good idea or bad, but all the effect that a tax has on Oil companies is to shift money from gas pumps/customers to prospecting .
When Windfall taxes were applied in the 80's
If it is a good idea to look for Oil in places where it is profitable only at $70 a barrel, the best way to do that is to impose a windfall tax. Oh and the bankers and private equity groups will get some money in the buyouts and mergers that follow.
To play Devil's advocate (What you said is true, I'll nitpick the conclusion).
Elaborate burial need not imply a extremely high intelligence. Elephants seem to care about death of a group creature and tend to remember the place of burial (or death) and seem to understand that bones of animals in some way represent the dead elephant.
Now I agree that they are smart creatures, but they are not smarter than a chimpanzee.
Jewelery is not a great achievement either. Crows for example (atleast the asiatic crow) , will often decorate their nests with shiny items. I personally have seen a crow burn down its nest trying to "decorate" it with an ember - I noticed it because it set fire to a coconut tree in the process.
Significance of music is common to many birds and a lot of animals can tap or scratch musically to attract mates or convey information.
So, I don't think the above is evidence for being at Forrest Gump level. Maybe at a Chimpanzee + Elephant + Bird level.
There is a subtle difference there.
The report shows that from a population that has guns, you try and limit or remove guns crime goes up. What the other study (Canada vs US) says is that if you have two societies, one with guns and the other without, the one without guns is safer.
I could explain this by saying that when everyone has guns and you ban them, all the nicer people turn in their guns while the bad guys keep them. Hence crime increases.
So the above study does not back up your argument adequately. If a population has no guns, the thiefs have knives, so does the general population and both of them are loath to use it (messy, unreliable etc.) and hence the population is safer than one with guns (both the bad guys and the good guys use them).
The net-worth of the company is the sum of all future dividends
I would propose that the net worth of the company is the net earnings of the company
For example consider the Oil Shock of the 80s. Government imposed a 60+% tax on the companies as windfall taxes. This meant that for every dollar earnt, the company could give the investors only 40 cents. This meant that large capital expenditures were a good idea - which they did by investing in Oil exploration. So now instead of the investor owning a company, they also owned large amounts of Oil (which is almost as liquid as cash anyway). This Oil would not be taxed until it was dug out - and so they were not dug out till the taxes changed back.
So in the interim period while the company was investing in digging for oil (and apparently losing money, in accounting terms), the company really was growing. There WAS a reason to not pay dividents and the company valuation to go up. They did start paying dividents later though.
The other alternative was for the company to transform itself into a Oil trust. Essentially break the company apart, stop digging for Oil and give out all profits as dividents and pay no taxes. This is something Boone Pickens pioneered - And this lead in the longer term to the death of any company he touched since they were no longer looking for oil. The investors got their dividents in the meanwhile though!
That is a Ponzy scheme,
This is not true. Suppose you own 1% of shares of a company that is worth $100. Your shares are worth $10.
Now they make $10 profit. They could either give you $1 back or reinvest it back in the project to make the same return the next year. If it all works out as planned, the next year you are holding 1% of a company worth $110 and growth prospect of 10%.
You see how stocks inherently are worth more because the money got re-invested ?
It is not a Ponzy scheme.
BTW, P/E ratio has nothing to do with dividents. P/E ratio is calculated on the basis of earnings which are internal to the company.
Dividends are a bad idea because they get taxed at the company level at 33% and then once again at the shareholder level as either income or capital gains. If you are going to give out money it is cheaper to issue dividents
But your other point is valid. Retail investors HATE selling stocks to make a profit - they prefer dividends much more. Which is why companies with large retail holdings issue dividents and the ones with large institutional holdings do share buybacks
Say that to Dell. Kevin Rollins kept buying back stocks (pay out dividents) and made Dell the most efficient at producing cheap computers.
The only problem was that when HP improved its game, Dell did'nt have any buffer cash to change their gameplan. They seemed to have fixed it recently, but from the stockprices I think they have'nt worked all that well.
Some amount of retained earnings are sometimes a good idea.
This graph explains it better than I can.
Assume that the earnings of a company is what remains to be distributed to shareholders. If divident is not paid, and the money gets re-invested, this is similar to a compund interest rate - You should be able to cash in the money at some point of time. Either the company finally pays dividents when it stops growing (MSFT) or the stock price rises since the company has a lot more of retained earnings which they reinvested.
If you take the above approach the Price to earnings ratio gives an indication of the inherent value of the company. A non growing company with a P/E ratio of 10 is the equivalent of a 10% interest rate and a P/E ratio of 30 implies a 3.3% interest rate.
Historically the returns from stock markets have been slightly higher than debts (bonds) - the stock markets are riskier and only the high return projects ever get funded. (If it was low return and high risk, no one would invest in the first place). Anyway, the average P/E ratio for the whole market should have been below 10, but in the recent past they were much higher. implying lower returns than bonds or astronomical growth rates.
After the market crash many are saying that the P/E ratios are about right on average, but then there is the risk that markets overcorrect and the markets could go down even further.
That is another idea. You could just pick up a book in Fluid Dynamics and Aeronautics if you want to learn up PDE's. :-)
Many of the low speed flows can easily be modeled at home too , that should give a good feel of PDE's better than anything. The Navier Stokes equation for Newtonian fluids gives you a feel for what each of these terms mean more than anything else (Stresses, momentum, viscosity etc.)
Solving this in 1-D/2-D is easy and you can simulate a lot of these scenarios on the computer. (As a side benefit it will ensure that you understand the rules of rounding-off numbers very well. They are notoriously difficult to approximate).If you get really good at the math, you could even try your hand at solving the General case
There are many ways of looking at this. The multiverse/string theory explanation of the world exists irrespective of whether life exists or not . These theories came out of attempts to explain various experiments and thought experiments. So there might really be multiple universes, whether the theory that explains it is simple or not.And illogicalness,if any, of Anthropic principle has nothing to do with string theory.
Here is how I think the Anthropic principle fits into the multiverse theory.
1) Odds of complex life are infinitely low . (Not saying they are, but assume this is the case)
2) World is not infinite. Atleast according to the big bang theory, there is a limit to the observable universe
3) Hence life cannot exist!! If the probabilities were as we saw earlier, if life in infinitely impossible and world is limited, life would not exist unless for something odd. Some blame it on God.
4) Now we have to break one of our assumptions -- I would think Step 1 would be the wrong one, but many still disagree and believe in a "Special case" explanation. But still you have not eliminated all the explanations - World is really infinite.
This again obviates the need for a "Special condition"
So really Occam's razor would have to be between "Special condition" (maybe god, maybe just luck) or the proposition given above that world is infinite.
Either his site has been hacked or he is apologizing . His webpage now has a single page message in german
Google translation says "No further legal steps against Wikipedia "
Zur Beendigung der juristischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Wikimedia eV erklärt Lutz Heilmann: To end the legal dispute with the Association Wikimedia Lutz Heilmann explains: Nachdem die falschen, ehrabschneidenden und deshalb mein Persönlichkeitsrecht verletzenden Inhalte weitgehend aus dem entsprechenden Artikel entfernt wurden, habe ich gegenüber dem Wikimedia eV erklärt, dass ich keine weiteren juristischen Schritte unternehmen werde und die Weiterleitung auf die Wikipedia-Inhalte unter http://de.wikipedia.org/ wieder geschaltet werden kann. After the false ehrabschneidenden and therefore my personality right infringing content largely from the corresponding articles have been removed, I compared the Wikimedia eV explained that I no further legal steps will be and forwarding to the Wikipedia content http://de./ wikipedia.org again can be. Wikimedia eV kann also ab sofort die Inhalte der freien, nicht kommerziellen Internet-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia wieder über die URL www.wikipedia.de Wikimedia eV may ie immediately the contents of the free, non-commercial Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia again on the URL www.wikipedia.de zugänglich machen. access. Ich bedaure außerordentlich, dass durch die von mir beantragte Einstweilige Verfügung des Landgerichts Lübeck die deutschen Wikipedia-Userinnen und -User in den letzten 24 Stunden keinen direkten Zugriff mehr auf die Wikipedia-Inhalte hatten. I am extremely sorry that I have requested the Interim disposal of the District of Lübeck, the German Wikipedia users and users in the last 24 hours no longer have direct access to Wikipedia content had. Mir ging es dabei keineswegs um Zensur, sondern schlicht um eine wahre Tatsachen-Darstellung. I went there to be no censorship, but simply a true representation of facts. Der juristische Weg hat sich dafür insoweit als problematisch erwiesen, als durch die Struktur von Wikipedia die anderen Userinnen und User in Mitleidenschaft gezogen werden. The legal route has advocated so far proven to be problematic than the structure of the other Wikipedia users and users in affected are. Das war nicht meine Absicht. That was not my intention. Gemeinsam mit Wikimedia eV werde ich nach anderen Wegen suchen, um den offenen und freien Charakter von Wikipedia so weiter auszugestalten, dass Persönlichkeitsrechte gewahrt bleiben. Together with the Wikimedia eV I will be looking for other ways to open and free nature of Wikipedia develop so that privacy rights are safeguarded.
Apparently even Jesus had a sense of humour. "Peter you are my rock" is probably the most famous pun in the world (Peter = rock).
Look, she screwed up (and big time) .Cut some slack now, so you won't be ridiculed later on.
But she is old and probably grew old before internet and probably never traveled much (considering her background, seemly very likely -teacher and a priest of some sort -both very local professions). So there is some reason why she believed everything she was told. And she spent till she could spend no more.
She is gullible, but now she is taking a very, very brave decision, which is to admit her mistakes publicly.
The hope here is that there are two thresholds to spending - one one the amount of information and the other on the amount of money.When you get to either of them you stop sending money to Nigeria
She clearly did not get to her threshold of info before she got to the threshold of money. Hopefully by sharing her story, she is raising the awareness in other people who may be being scammed and they will back out of the stupidity before they hit the threshold of money themselves.
Another way of looking at it is that while the cost of going public is very very high and she alone bears the costs, she hopes that there is some (small, LordKronos says) limited benefit to doing this. Moreover she wont reap the benefits, the public will. So what she is doing is actually a good thing.
I'll ignore her stupidity considering it has limited impact on me, but will applaud the fact she went public with the info (since it provides some benefit to me -if nothing else, helps calculating the odds of being conned).
If nothing else, show some concern for old people and people who are not as smart as you are. Brain does'nt remain what it is in the youth and this is inevitable for you an me
It did a lot of things to New York.
Last I knew , the Erie Canal was having traffic jams because it was cheaper to use the Canal rather than roads !!
Humans did survive when the seas were much higher. But 400 billion humans did'nt survive the high seas. And in a time when the average life expectancy was closer to 20, they really did'nt care if half the town was killed.
The idea being proposed is that (IF theories are correct) it is better for everyone to suffer a bit now than for a large percentage to get displaced later.
Carbon taxes are what economists call Externalities
And most economists hate them because they don't involve market forces - Carbon trading was a way of making this more manageable.
What you said overall though is correct. With free trade, according to classical economics, nations with cheap capital will get even more cheaper capital while countries with cheap labor will see labor costs increase slowly.
My belief is that production will move East , green rules or not. Most energy intensive industries are also labor intensive (Steel, Aluminum pdn., any products made of plastics etc.)and the price advantage in terms of labor far outweighs any costs added by emissions trade.