He spent the only money that mattered. Pickens funded the Swift Boating of Kerry and got a 4 more years of an oil-industry friendly administration. That's money well spent, from his perspective at least.
I don't care how many fucking windmills that cunt build or doesn't build. I, and many others, will never forgive or forget.
Or are they going to supply the kids with Kindles or something?
You really think there are no copyright issues with copying stuff back and forth like that?
In my utopian fantasy, Amazon offers every kid a Kindle at an huge discount (with the remainder covered by the state) and the founders of Wikipedia start their new effort wikitextbook.org to create open, peer-reviewed K-12 textbooks.
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but here's the final math:
For $78 in June 1999 you could get one share. As of today you would have two shares at $22 each. You would have also earned $5.17 in dividends on each of the shares (the dividends have only been paid since their last stock split).
$78 $22 x 2 + $5.17 x 2 = $44 + $10.34 = $54.34
Better than GM, yes, but far worse than the savings account at my credit union.
I think I'm accounting for splits. I was basing this on Google Finance which shows a smooth curve across splits which implies that Google is taking splits into account. The curve from 1999 is pretty consistantly down...
I could be wrong, but I think your math is incorrect since the price in June 1999 dollars wasn't $39 it was roughly $78.
I was basing my data on Google Finance with the chart set to 10 years ( http://www.google.com/finance?q=MSFT ). The chart shows a split on Feb 18, 2003 (the previous split was March 1999 which is outside my 10-year analysis) but does not show a discontinuity. In other words, the chart is displaying based on the stock's current sale price.
Or, in other words, the share price was about $46 before the split and about $23 after the split. From your example, it would have cost $78 to buy a share in June 1999. Today you would have 2 shares worth $22 each. I think I'll stick with the savings account.
If you have held MSFT over the last 10 years you would have been better off with your money in a savings account.
June 11, 1999 @ $39 to June 4, 2009 @ $22.14
Other than a little bump in early 2000 at the end of the tech bubble, there is not a year in the last 10 where you would have been better off holding your MSFT rather than selling.
Maybe they (and most corporations) should spend less time trying to game the tax system or the H1A system or screwing around with politics and spend a little more time trying to make a decent product. That is the ONLY thing that can increase shareholder value in the long term. And those greedy, greedy shareholders should demand it...
...these people are more like absentee landlords who purchase a building or land legitimately but leave it empty...
That's interesting. As a resident of Baltimore, I wanted to use that analogy in my original post, but I had trouble expressing the logic of the metaphor.
I think I have it now and it's not a argument that's going to convince a libertarian or capitalist. In essence it's like Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" or the idea of the Network Effect turned upside down where a valueless node (i.e. the squatted domain) has a negative effect by bringing down the average value of the network as a whole.
For the absentee landlord the logic is like this: I buy this boarded up rowhome for really cheap and someday -- after the urban pioneers, the gentrifiers, the artists, the rehabbers, and the neighbors fix up the rest of the neighborhood -- my boarded-up, rat-infested, shooting-gallery shithole will be worth a lot of money. The libertarian / pure capitalist says "no problem". No one said your neighbors had to fix up your neighborhood for you.
The problem is that the "investor" isn't just sitting on an abstract idea. He has purchased an entity who's very existence is a factor in the value of the commons; the neighborhood where real people live. By not maintaining his property he's actually imposing a cost on all of his neighbors by bringing down the value of their property, inviting rats and criminals into the neighborhood, and, in extreme cases, causing physical damage to the houses that abut his property.
If the internet is the neighborhood, then the squatter is imposing the same costs on his neighbors; increasing the noise, cruft, chaos and thereby decreasing the average value of all the citizens and entrepreneurs that are building the web.
Yes, of course people have the right to sell domain names they own. And, no, I don't believe Santa should be in the domain assignment business. Thank you for clarifying. I guess you won the argument.
But wait... it's possible that the arguments are slightly more subtle. What value does a domain squatter add? They add no value -- actually they destroy value since they are blocking useful entrepreneurship -- and take no risk. No wonder so many of us want to see the process banned or at least made much more expensive.
I think of domain squatters like ticket scalpers. Sure, in a pure capitalist society that scalper should be able to sell any ticket that they've bought. If you want to see a concert and it's all sold out, I guess you need to pay whatever markup that scalper wants to charge. Did the scalper add value? No, unless you consider being propositioned outside the concert hall as valuable. But, for a scalper at least, there is a risk since they must sell their ticket before the curtain opens or they're out the price of the ticket. A domain squatter has no such risk since that domain doesn't expire.
You bring up the point of asking what a domain is worth. So what is a domain worth? GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and the free market say that a.com domain name is worth between $9 to $30 a year. The squatter has added no value. So, personally, I'd like to see legislation that enforced some sort of simple calculation for squatted domains: $price = $30 x # of years the squatter has squatted on the domain. The squatter gets to make back their investment (which is a better deal than the ticket scalper is guaranteed to make) and an actual entrepreneur is able to use the domain to increase the value of the economy which benefits everyone. What do you think?
I'm sorry I got your panties in a twist and, for the record, I didn't suggest any of your distopian "solutions" to this problem. I am only pointing out the fundamental truth is that there is one source of blame for the quality of students; the parents. You can blame society. You can blame the teachers. You can blame the unions. You can blame the politicians. You can blame TV or the internet or D&D or video games. You can blame the NIMBY neighbors that don't want new schools or new property taxes. But, in the end, the blame falls on the people who have the biological maturity but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to be parents but decide to bring a new life into this world anyway.
Let's pay them the same as an entry level asshole at Goldman Sachs. We can give them the same bonus structure, too. We can see what quality teachers we get then.
This reminds me of a funny personal story. It's March of 2000 and I've finally got a decent job as a coder. I've missed the previous 10 years of skyrocketing tech stocks and I figure it's time to dive in. Around that time, Wired Magazine online does a profile of a company called Constellation 3D. This high-tech start-up had a new DVD technology that can store up to a Terabyte of data! Well, I dive right...
I keep the shares -- currently valued at $0.0001 each -- in my stock account to remind me that press releases are not the basis for sound investing.
This didn't deserve to be modded down. What is a sustainable human population? That needs to be brought into every conversation about the economy and the environment.
That's a very interesting post. Why submit anonymously?
I thought I had read the same thing; Antarctica is basically a desert because it's almost too cold for precipitation. The ice that is there has accumulated millimeters a year for tens of thousands of years. For the ice to be "thickening" could easily be a side effect of a warming planet.
...Holder felt it more important to punish the prosecution on this one than nail Senator Tubes.
I can't help but wonder if this is leading up to a purge of Monica Goodling's little religious wack-job cadre? Holder couldn't get away with out-and-out firing of career prosecutors, but if there's documentation that that the Liberty University and Jerry Farwell Law School graduates are incompetent then they can be sacked without too much political fallout.
To be fair, I don't have any evidence that the specific prosecutors involved in this are Goodling hires, but it seems to me that perception is 90% of politics. The DoJ prosecutors are still (perceived to be) heavily tainted by the last administration so the current administration may be looking for any excuse to bring in new, professional, and un-biased prosecutors.
Is this the same Nobel committee that gave the Peace Prize to Arafat for his heroic efforts in Jew-murdering? Politics couldn't possibly be at work with those guys.
Terribly off topic. You don't win any points with non-sequiturs... we were talking about healthcare innovation, right?
Anyway, you made the assertion that "almost all medical innovation" comes from countries without a government healthcare system (by which, I assume you mean the U.S. but ignoring Medicare, NIH, CDC, and the VA). I pointed out that the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine [which had nothing to do with "Jew killing" as you disturbingly put it] went to a German and 2 Frenchmen. Thereby, with a quick Google search I was able to prove that you were incorrect in your assertion.
So your point is that the New York Times is equal in respectability to Fox News since Jayson Blair (who was fired) made up stories and Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly (who are all active, highly paid stars at Fox News) also make up stories?
We know for sure that tax rates above a certain amount will actually produce less goverment revenue.
We also know for sure that tax rates below a certain amount will produce less government revenue.
We know for sure that almost all medical innovation in the 20th century came from a system with no government healthcare system, and that almost no innovation came from any country with a government healthcare system.
Actually, we don't know that for sure. For example the 2008 Nobel Prizes in Medicine went to a German, a Frenchman, and another Frenchman.
Before our current system many doctors would give patients reduced or free health care depending on their financial situation.
Are you seriously suggesting a healthcare system based on the individual charity of doctors? An open source healthcare system, perhaps, where you get your chemotherapy from a sourceforge? Don't get me wrong, many of them are wonderful people -- I'm married to one and she's a wonderful, charitable person -- but they also leave medical school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and even if they were willing to work for free, I doubt Pfizer is going to send you your free chemo drugs.
Also, GM and Chrysler would not be in the problem they are in if we had universal coverage. We've established a system where all companies -- car companies, computer companies, banks -- have to be in the healthcare industry. Let's get universal healthcare coverage and let GM, Ford, and Chrysler back into the business of building cars.
I think you are confusing individuals with news organizations. For example, if you were to say that Jayson Blair was no better than Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck, I would have to agree with you.
I'm not defending Blair or Duranty, it was a world-wide scandal at the NYT because we hold them to such a high standard. A top-flight reputation that they have earned, for the most part.
Nobody bothers to hold Fox, Drudge, and the DailyKos to the same standards...
Slashdot Mirror
He spent the only money that mattered. Pickens funded the Swift Boating of Kerry and got a 4 more years of an oil-industry friendly administration. That's money well spent, from his perspective at least.
I don't care how many fucking windmills that cunt build or doesn't build. I, and many others, will never forgive or forget.
Sorry to follow up to myself. A quick search for open source K-12 textbooks got me to here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Sounds like that might be a good starting point for the Governator.
In my utopian fantasy, Amazon offers every kid a Kindle at an huge discount (with the remainder covered by the state) and the founders of Wikipedia start their new effort wikitextbook.org to create open, peer-reviewed K-12 textbooks.
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but here's the final math:
For $78 in June 1999 you could get one share.
As of today you would have two shares at $22 each. You would have also earned $5.17 in dividends on each of the shares (the dividends have only been paid since their last stock split).
$78 $22 x 2 + $5.17 x 2 = $44 + $10.34 = $54.34
Better than GM, yes, but far worse than the savings account at my credit union.
I think I'm accounting for splits. I was basing this on Google Finance which shows a smooth curve across splits which implies that Google is taking splits into account. The curve from 1999 is pretty consistantly down...
Here's Yahoo's version:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my
I could be wrong, but I think your math is incorrect since the price in June 1999 dollars wasn't $39 it was roughly $78.
I was basing my data on Google Finance with the chart set to 10 years ( http://www.google.com/finance?q=MSFT ). The chart shows a split on Feb 18, 2003 (the previous split was March 1999 which is outside my 10-year analysis) but does not show a discontinuity. In other words, the chart is displaying based on the stock's current sale price.
Or, in other words, the share price was about $46 before the split and about $23 after the split. From your example, it would have cost $78 to buy a share in June 1999. Today you would have 2 shares worth $22 each. I think I'll stick with the savings account.
Judges, can I get a ruling?
If you have held MSFT over the last 10 years you would have been better off with your money in a savings account.
June 11, 1999 @ $39 to
June 4, 2009 @ $22.14
Other than a little bump in early 2000 at the end of the tech bubble, there is not a year in the last 10 where you would have been better off holding your MSFT rather than selling.
Maybe they (and most corporations) should spend less time trying to game the tax system or the H1A system or screwing around with politics and spend a little more time trying to make a decent product. That is the ONLY thing that can increase shareholder value in the long term. And those greedy, greedy shareholders should demand it...
That's interesting. As a resident of Baltimore, I wanted to use that analogy in my original post, but I had trouble expressing the logic of the metaphor.
I think I have it now and it's not a argument that's going to convince a libertarian or capitalist. In essence it's like Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" or the idea of the Network Effect turned upside down where a valueless node (i.e. the squatted domain) has a negative effect by bringing down the average value of the network as a whole.
For the absentee landlord the logic is like this: I buy this boarded up rowhome for really cheap and someday -- after the urban pioneers, the gentrifiers, the artists, the rehabbers, and the neighbors fix up the rest of the neighborhood -- my boarded-up, rat-infested, shooting-gallery shithole will be worth a lot of money. The libertarian / pure capitalist says "no problem". No one said your neighbors had to fix up your neighborhood for you.
The problem is that the "investor" isn't just sitting on an abstract idea. He has purchased an entity who's very existence is a factor in the value of the commons; the neighborhood where real people live. By not maintaining his property he's actually imposing a cost on all of his neighbors by bringing down the value of their property, inviting rats and criminals into the neighborhood, and, in extreme cases, causing physical damage to the houses that abut his property.
If the internet is the neighborhood, then the squatter is imposing the same costs on his neighbors; increasing the noise, cruft, chaos and thereby decreasing the average value of all the citizens and entrepreneurs that are building the web.
Yes, of course people have the right to sell domain names they own. And, no, I don't believe Santa should be in the domain assignment business. Thank you for clarifying. I guess you won the argument.
But wait... it's possible that the arguments are slightly more subtle. What value does a domain squatter add? They add no value -- actually they destroy value since they are blocking useful entrepreneurship -- and take no risk. No wonder so many of us want to see the process banned or at least made much more expensive.
I think of domain squatters like ticket scalpers. Sure, in a pure capitalist society that scalper should be able to sell any ticket that they've bought. If you want to see a concert and it's all sold out, I guess you need to pay whatever markup that scalper wants to charge. Did the scalper add value? No, unless you consider being propositioned outside the concert hall as valuable. But, for a scalper at least, there is a risk since they must sell their ticket before the curtain opens or they're out the price of the ticket. A domain squatter has no such risk since that domain doesn't expire.
You bring up the point of asking what a domain is worth. So what is a domain worth? GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and the free market say that a .com domain name is worth between $9 to $30 a year. The squatter has added no value. So, personally, I'd like to see legislation that enforced some sort of simple calculation for squatted domains: $price = $30 x # of years the squatter has squatted on the domain. The squatter gets to make back their investment (which is a better deal than the ticket scalper is guaranteed to make) and an actual entrepreneur is able to use the domain to increase the value of the economy which benefits everyone. What do you think?
At least you have some good submissions for The Daily WTF. :-)
I'm sorry I got your panties in a twist and, for the record, I didn't suggest any of your distopian "solutions" to this problem. I am only pointing out the fundamental truth is that there is one source of blame for the quality of students; the parents. You can blame society. You can blame the teachers. You can blame the unions. You can blame the politicians. You can blame TV or the internet or D&D or video games. You can blame the NIMBY neighbors that don't want new schools or new property taxes. But, in the end, the blame falls on the people who have the biological maturity but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to be parents but decide to bring a new life into this world anyway.
Let's pay them the same as an entry level asshole at Goldman Sachs. We can give them the same bonus structure, too. We can see what quality teachers we get then.
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents.
For all the back-and-forth that's going to take place in this article, the fundamental truth is that shitty parents generally lead to shitty students.
This reminds me of a funny personal story. It's March of 2000 and I've finally got a decent job as a coder. I've missed the previous 10 years of skyrocketing tech stocks and I figure it's time to dive in. Around that time, Wired Magazine online does a profile of a company called Constellation 3D. This high-tech start-up had a new DVD technology that can store up to a Terabyte of data! Well, I dive right...
I keep the shares -- currently valued at $0.0001 each -- in my stock account to remind me that press releases are not the basis for sound investing.
This didn't deserve to be modded down. What is a sustainable human population? That needs to be brought into every conversation about the economy and the environment.
That's a very interesting post. Why submit anonymously?
I thought I had read the same thing; Antarctica is basically a desert because it's almost too cold for precipitation. The ice that is there has accumulated millimeters a year for tens of thousands of years. For the ice to be "thickening" could easily be a side effect of a warming planet.
I can't help but wonder if this is leading up to a purge of Monica Goodling's little religious wack-job cadre? Holder couldn't get away with out-and-out firing of career prosecutors, but if there's documentation that that the Liberty University and Jerry Farwell Law School graduates are incompetent then they can be sacked without too much political fallout.
To be fair, I don't have any evidence that the specific prosecutors involved in this are Goodling hires, but it seems to me that perception is 90% of politics. The DoJ prosecutors are still (perceived to be) heavily tainted by the last administration so the current administration may be looking for any excuse to bring in new, professional, and un-biased prosecutors.
Depends on whether we can engineer ourselves to live 50 years in a tiny spacecraft with a bunch of strangers.
Terribly off topic. You don't win any points with non-sequiturs... we were talking about healthcare innovation, right?
Anyway, you made the assertion that "almost all medical innovation" comes from countries without a government healthcare system (by which, I assume you mean the U.S. but ignoring Medicare, NIH, CDC, and the VA). I pointed out that the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine [which had nothing to do with "Jew killing" as you disturbingly put it] went to a German and 2 Frenchmen. Thereby, with a quick Google search I was able to prove that you were incorrect in your assertion.
So your point is that the New York Times is equal in respectability to Fox News since Jayson Blair (who was fired) made up stories and Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly (who are all active, highly paid stars at Fox News) also make up stories?
We also know for sure that tax rates below a certain amount will produce less government revenue.
Actually, we don't know that for sure. For example the 2008 Nobel Prizes in Medicine went to a German, a Frenchman, and another Frenchman.
Are you seriously suggesting a healthcare system based on the individual charity of doctors? An open source healthcare system, perhaps, where you get your chemotherapy from a sourceforge? Don't get me wrong, many of them are wonderful people -- I'm married to one and she's a wonderful, charitable person -- but they also leave medical school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and even if they were willing to work for free, I doubt Pfizer is going to send you your free chemo drugs.
Also, GM and Chrysler would not be in the problem they are in if we had universal coverage. We've established a system where all companies -- car companies, computer companies, banks -- have to be in the healthcare industry. Let's get universal healthcare coverage and let GM, Ford, and Chrysler back into the business of building cars.
I think you are confusing individuals with news organizations. For example, if you were to say that Jayson Blair was no better than Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck, I would have to agree with you.
I'm not defending Blair or Duranty, it was a world-wide scandal at the NYT because we hold them to such a high standard. A top-flight reputation that they have earned, for the most part.
Nobody bothers to hold Fox, Drudge, and the DailyKos to the same standards...