I liked the part that said "College students represent the majority of copyright violators for a simple reason--they are in a learning environment, and they legitimately want to know about musical culture."
In other words, kids like to party and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.
Not that anyone who isn't actually buying or selling divisions of companies cares, but here are a couple of other things you might think about to make sure you're protected:
- make sure each legal entity is the licensor of its own licenses (ie. Bluelight should have been the licensor, not Kmart); then when the division is sold or divested, it is transparent to Microsoft (you may lose some volume discount here, of course); - if you haven't done the above or are selling assets instead of equity, set up a permanent lease of the computers to the buyer instead of transferring ownership; make sure payments are structured (probably through some sort of escrow account or trust) so the lease is a lease and not a sale; - in a bankruptcy, ask the judge to tell Microsoft to stuff it, which he may well have the power to do, and if he's a Windows user will certainly *want* to do.
Does it need to be said? IANAL.
On a related note, why doesn't some unemployed entrepreneur out there start a company that buys unused MS licenses (for Windows and Office, say) from companies that are downsizing or going out of business, then resell them to large companies that are being audited by MS? I know a few that would pay decent money just to not have to sort out the mess that is their file cabinet full of licenses, even if they do lose SA.
Ah, sorry. I disagree though. They are putting in place, effectively, a military governorship. Its mission will be to establish law and order and to reconstruct a viable system of government. Although local sensibilities need to be primary, history shows that there is no way you can put an American and a Frenchman in the same room and have them agree on anything. The same is probably true, to a lesser degree, with people of any two nations. I think the test of US intentions will be how quickly they relinquish local government to the Iraqis, not how multinational the transitional government is. Since keeping it short is the key, the best transitional government is one that has clear objectives. Personally, I would rather the US earns long-term plaudits for doing it well than short-term praise for doing it inoffensively (although I admit that either would be preferable to doing it badly, which is, given the inevitable difficulty of any reconstruction, most probable.)
but after hearing how the US has *already* formed a government
Geez, I sure hope you're not in charge of project management where you work: "after we finish the code we'll take six months to form a marketing team and plan..."
If they wait until after they need a government to form a government, they're a little bit late, don't you think? Whether or not you agree with the war, there's a good chance the US and UK will be the only ones around to prevent complete anarchy and warlordism when it's over. When it is over, there will be plenty of problems to deal with; having a plan to deal with them will minimize, to the extent possible, the impact on the citizens. I think leaving the entire country under direct rule by troops and in a political vacuum is a solution so bad that your perceived view of the US being arrogant by planning ahead for a likely scenario pales beside it.
VCs are usually smarter than that; they don't want to get stuck with an illiquid investment when the life of their fund ends. Most venture capital contracts are written with one of several possible liquidity-forcing clauses, like demand registration (forces company to register shares for an IPO) or redemption rights (forces company to buy back VCs' shares at purchase price, often plus an accumulated dividend). Not all shares are created equal.
A good reference and surprisingly representative of what was actually being used at the time (they are significantly more punitive, er... conservative, now) is this term sheet. Free registration required.
There is some truth in what you say, but keep in mind that the big shareholders in our economy in companies like TW and Disney are mutual funds. For Disney, there are no owners of more than 5% of the stock of the company so there is no public disclosure except as to officers and directors (who own about 2.6% of the company, as a group), but I would venture to guess that the largest holders of the stock are Fidelity and Vanguard through their various funds (mainly the index funds, again a guess.) For AOLTW, the management owns about 4.6% and the largest non-management holders are Capital Research (owns 7.1%) and FMR Corp. (owns 5%.) Capital Research is a mutual fund company. FMR is Fidelity.
Mutual funds do not want to get involved in the management of the company. Index funds even less (they are an index fund, after all, they hardly care what happens to the company and if they spend money trying to influence it, their expense ratio rises.) For instance, the heads of Fidelity and Vanguard wrote a letter to the WSJ saying that public disclosure of their votes on proxy statements would be bad because, essentially, they didn't want the responsibility of having to run the company well.
There are investors that buy large blocks and try to reform the company, with varying degrees of success--they are often derided as 'breakup artists' (ie. destroyers of value) or 'greenmailers.' But Deleware corporate law discourages these by allowing things like staggered boards and poison pills. The rush to entrench management through state law that happened in the '80s in response to the 'greed is good' perception of LBO shops is one of the causes of the current dismal state of corporate governance, the others being the unbridled use of stock options to avoid compensation expense and the use of fallacious measures of value by investors (ie. 'did the company make their whisper number?')
"Making the equity liquid" certainly has more than one form--an IPO, a sale, large dividend payments, etc.--but the VCs certainly need one or the other of these eventually. Your "don't be evil" comment implies that going public or making money on an investment is wrong, for some reason. I don't believe that: in a normal capitalist environment, a company should be run no differently when public than when private, just with more public disclosure. Although that environment almost disappeared in the boom years, I believe it is coming back. I don't think investors are as concerned with short-term profits right now as much as they are with long-term prospects. On the other hand, they need credible evidence that the company is, in fact, worth what they are paying for it. The burden of credible evidence versus the boom mentality of any evidence, credible or incredible, means valuations are lower, and will be until the next mania in twenty years or so.
VCs have a definite mission and a limited timeframe in which to accomplish it: they are playing with other peoples' money, and held accountable for it. Even if they decided they were a charity, they could not opt for a less than optimal return on investment and hope to have a career for more than a few more years.
Okay, this shouldn't be +5 informative. It should be -1 Wrong.
"Going Public" basically means that you, the owner, are offering a percentage ownership to the public in exchange for the public's money
Most IPOs are for "primary" shares: shares that are issued by the company for cash, not by management or the owners. If management or the owners are trying to sell their shares in an IPO, they better have a durn good reason or nobody else in the world is going to buy them.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules.
This is hialrious, see my previous post.
This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company
The president owning 51% is very unusual, and really unheard of in venture backed companies unless the president was already rich and famous when he started the company.
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back
As noted in a previous reply, this is just plain wrong. If people sell your stock, the stock price goes down, shareholders are angry and you have a hard time raising more money (because investors are leery of your stock going down again.) Companies never have to buy their stock back, except in certain Preferred issues.
Please don't get your financial education from/. (well, except from me, of course.)
I especially liked the part about being sacked at the annual general meeting! Like that has ever happened in the entire history of corporate America!
Seriously, the shareholders own the company and, classically, the company is supposed to do whatever is in their best interests. But there are numerous caveats, including but not limited to: - The "agency" problem: the people deciding what is best for the shareholders are not the shareholders and not chosen by the shareholders (voting yea or nay for a single candidate for a board of directors is as much a democracy as Stalinist Russia was); - The board of directors is protected by the "business judgement rule": any decision they make, however wrongheaded, can be justified by the fact that it was their business judgement, as long as they show they had the necessary information and actually deliberated; - Companies can't be prosecuted for screwing shareholders, they can only be sued--of course, they are sued for pretty much anything and everything anyway, so a few extraneous lawsuits resulting from truly egregious bad behaviour probably doesn't really deter them; - Shareholders almost never have a shot at putting items on the agenda of the board or of the AGM--even if they are and are approved, they are almost never legally binding: they are "taken under advisement" by the board.
Remember Ovitz' $90 million severance payout on being fired as CEO of Disney? That was the subject of an unsuccessful shareholder suit. Why was it thrown out?--business judgement rule. What shareholder in their right mind would have given $90 million to the guy being pushed out the door?
Corporate governance in this country (and every other, as far as I know) is horrendous. The only protection a shareholder has is voting with his feet. The concept of actual "ownership" has become a sham. And, unfortuneately, Congress has decided it is in the better interests of their constituents to hold meaningless hearings and pass useless, redundant rules (Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?) than to try and correct the real deficiencies in the system.
Of course, since the company was funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sequioa (ultra-establishment venture capital firms), the pressure to make the equity liquid comes from more than just the employees. With firms like KPCB involved, the decision on when to go public will be made on purely financial grounds... nothing to do with how soft and fuzzy it makes the employees feel.
So, driving to work in my Lincoln Navigator while smoking dope and listening to my pirated copy of Rage Against the Machine was probably not the best way to start the day?
otoh, all of the traits you mention in your second sentence are in the books I am reading right now, E. Morris' Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex . What's more, since the books happen to be based on fact, the traits represented are only romanticized to a medium degree, not to a very large degree as in some fiction. Although I suppose I could be inspired by Gandalf's being resurrected/reincarnated to battle evil, I am more inspired by TR's ability to lead a very full and rewarding life while remaining an offbeat personality, probably because it actually happened.
I have to admit, though, those EE textbooks shirk on the loyalty bit (but they're pretty good on tolerance! yuk yuk yuk. Sorry.)
I did not say these communities were wrong to reject the big-box proposals, just that I did not understand their reasoning. And when I said "groceries", I meant the goods, not the stores.
I agree that it would be much harder to get a loan to open a store in Harlem than in, say, Chelsea, but that sort of begs the point: when a store was to be opened by a chain able to self-finance, it was rejected by the community board. I would agree that, if the retailer was to remove jobs from the neighborhood, that would be a good reason to derail the project, but that didn't seem to be the case (at least from published reports.) If I had to offer a rational reason for the rejection, I would have to think it was an issue of local control, although that's just a guess. The question in my mind is, do the local citizens care about local control as much as the local politicians? A difference in opinion between represented and representative would not be the first in the history of democracy:-), but it's still troublesome.
In the case of Mt Vernon, the big-box retailer was, IIRC, Ikea, which would not have benefited the community much aside from the taxes, which might have been substantial. An example of the benefits of something similar can be seen in a comparison of property taxes in other NY area communities. Take Short Hills and Glen Ridge New Jersey, similar towns near each other with some of the best public school systems in the country. Short Hills has a mall while Glen Ridge has almost no businesses. The property taxes in Short Hills are 25%-33% lower than in Glen Ridge because of the offsetting taxes on the mall. Mt. Vernon has some of the worst public schools in the New York City area.
I guess, being something of a limousine liberal (well, Subaru liberal anyway) these decisions seem counter-productive, but in the end they are the choice of the communities.
Sorry for the poke... I seem to be on an unconscious mission to get myself a Freak recently. Unsuccesful so far. I think I will have to be a little meaner in the future:-)
I also lived in one of those places, getting my Masters (although it was in EE, not business or econ.) I am not arguing that the "wrong side of the tracks" is well-served, just that I don't believe that it is any longer a function of class distinctions or racism, per se. The intervention of the government in the '60s and prior is, probably, a good argument that it was not the free-market that made the decision to not lend in those areas.
I agree that, in the free-market, the poor are more harshly treated than the rich, and I can't provably explain why that is so. But, the Bonfire of the Vanities schtick is pretty weak: if you believe it, open a mortgage broker for those you believe are excluded--you can be a hero, make a lot of money, and probably get government assistance besides.
Many of these communities seem to make decisions that economists of the classical/rational school would be amazed at, however. For various reasons, both the community of Harlem and the town of Mount Vernon (both New York) have turned down proposals by big-box retailers to open in their neighborhoods, forgoing both the tax benefits and the lower prices that would result. I can't speak for why they did this, but it is one answer to the bizarre mystery of why groceries are more expensive in poor neighborhoods than anywhere else in New York City.
First, just for kicks, I'd like to see an example of a 10,000% difference in credit cost. A very cheap mortgage, one of the cheapest of consumer credits, is about 6%, all in. That would mean there is someone charging 600% to some poor devil. Doubtful--yes, illegal--almost certainly. If you're talking about "no interest" car loans, you should read the financial statements of a car company with a finance division, and try to seperate credit cost from price. You'll find that the credit cost GMAC records is not what you see in the flashy Pontiac ad.
Second, plenty of SuperBanks are trying to do business in less affluent neighborhoods while making money, but quietly. For instance, many large banks have been trying to buy into the storefront check cashing business. They try to stay low profile because the vig these places extract is insultingly high, and they don't want to insult anyone. On the other hand, if they opened their own, they realize they could not charge much less and make money.
There are plenty of places that even you wouldn't want to drive your car (despite your superior attitude) that greedy capitalists have been happy to invest in--think Nigeria, Colombia and some of the grittier ex-Soviet republics: you will certainly see the familiar red of the Coca-Cola logo and perhaps the golden arches, and you probably won't see the oil/arms company exec behind the tinted glass of his armored Mercedes.
If there is money to be made, believe me, someone will be there to make it.
No solution is perfect, but given the massive amount of time and money it takes to compile these databases, the company has to get paid somehow. Setting price on sunk cost or high-fixed-cost/low-variable-cost goods is always tricky (think prescription drugs, cableTV, telecom, airflight, operating systems) and always controversial. Price discrimination (charging more to those to whom the service is worth more) or regulation seem to be the two solutions that result. Even with regulation price discrimination results (ie. business telecom users subsidize residential telecom users.)
There is no perfect way to discriminate here, but the way they came up with isn't bad. Of course, if you think that LexisNexis charges more overall than can be accounted for by their historic costs, you are welcome to start a competing service and charge less. If nothing else, your fledgling company might be bought by LexisNexis or Westlaw to eliminate the competition.
The author of the article is saying that Lexis and Westlaw won't even sell access to the public libraries.
And LexisNexis says they will sell unlimited access so long as it is librarian-mediated. This is a relatively painless way to discriminate between the public and the professional. The pro can't waste the time to have a librarian pull multiple documents for him while the public probably only needs one or two and can wait a few minutes. Seem like a pretty smart solution, imho.
I thought I was against UCITA, but if the ABA (aka the trial lawyers' union) is not supporting it, perhaps I should be for it.
Since (IN MY HUMBLE OPINION) the ABA seems to support things that generate more business for their constituency, as opposed to good laws, maybe UCITA isn't so bad after all. In any case, you have to wonder what the real reason they aren't pushing for it is.
Of course, if they are using Windows, we could easily cripple their entire country by having Microsoft do a full-scale software license audit. That would keep most of their government personnel tied up for months, at least. Much more effective than weapons inspectors. Plus, what are the chances they are actually complying?
I honestly do not know much about the process, but I assume that the judges are selected from people with law degrees (or relevant), rather than going out to the street and looking there? Now law degree is something that none of slashdot readers seem to have, and I'd like to claim that it matters...
This comes dangerously close to believing that since they have a position, they must deserve the position. Lawyers I know tend to believe that many judges are, essentially, political appointees: they got the judgeship as a political favor for being a good soldier in the local party machinery (like becoming the ambassador to Bermuda, on a much smaller scale.) This doesn't apply to Federal judgeships (or higher), which are also appointed, but get much greater scrutiny.
the lawsuits are about negligence
Well, yes, so they say. You can't win a lawsuit against yourself, so you have to blame someone else.
Coffee people believe coffee should be brewed at between 203 degs and 208 degs for best flavor, anything below doesn't liquify the flavor-carrying oils. So, you have two competing interests: coffee that tastes good and the danger of hot liquids. Who decides which should prevail? In this country the courts have decided: I can no longer get decent coffee except for what I make for myself (on the stovetop, with boiling water.) It seems the default mode here is safety: why are many areas closed to rock-climbing? Because their owners are (justly) afraid of lawsuits. If you have a fish pond on your property and a trespassing child drowns in it, it is your fault (the "attractive nuisance" doctrine.) I am not in favor of children drowning, but not every situation requires blame--sometimes life just sucks. I spill coffee on myself and get badly burnt because of several random contributing factors. It isn't my fault, so it must be someone else's, right? Well, maybe life just sucks. Coffee is hot. Coffee should be hot. But accidents happen, and they can't all be prevented without sanitizing the entire world.
But, I have learned my lesson--I will not mention the coffee case in the future, even in jest. I'll start using the tobacco cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the part that said "College students represent the majority of copyright violators for a simple reason--they are in a learning environment, and they legitimately want to know about musical culture."
In other words, kids like to party and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.
Well, okay, how about:
* You don't dick your customers to increase profits (unless you're a monopoly.) *
That's generally why monopolies are considered bad, they can dick people to increase profits.
Well, what the hell were we supposed to do with our kids all day once they banned child labor? Take them to the bar with us?
Not that anyone who isn't actually buying or selling divisions of companies cares, but here are a couple of other things you might think about to make sure you're protected:
- make sure each legal entity is the licensor of its own licenses (ie. Bluelight should have been the licensor, not Kmart); then when the division is sold or divested, it is transparent to Microsoft (you may lose some volume discount here, of course);
- if you haven't done the above or are selling assets instead of equity, set up a permanent lease of the computers to the buyer instead of transferring ownership; make sure payments are structured (probably through some sort of escrow account or trust) so the lease is a lease and not a sale;
- in a bankruptcy, ask the judge to tell Microsoft to stuff it, which he may well have the power to do, and if he's a Windows user will certainly *want* to do.
Does it need to be said? IANAL.
On a related note, why doesn't some unemployed entrepreneur out there start a company that buys unused MS licenses (for Windows and Office, say) from companies that are downsizing or going out of business, then resell them to large companies that are being audited by MS? I know a few that would pay decent money just to not have to sort out the mess that is their file cabinet full of licenses, even if they do lose SA.
Ah, sorry. I disagree though. They are putting in place, effectively, a military governorship. Its mission will be to establish law and order and to reconstruct a viable system of government. Although local sensibilities need to be primary, history shows that there is no way you can put an American and a Frenchman in the same room and have them agree on anything. The same is probably true, to a lesser degree, with people of any two nations. I think the test of US intentions will be how quickly they relinquish local government to the Iraqis, not how multinational the transitional government is. Since keeping it short is the key, the best transitional government is one that has clear objectives. Personally, I would rather the US earns long-term plaudits for doing it well than short-term praise for doing it inoffensively (although I admit that either would be preferable to doing it badly, which is, given the inevitable difficulty of any reconstruction, most probable.)
but after hearing how the US has *already* formed a government
Geez, I sure hope you're not in charge of project management where you work: "after we finish the code we'll take six months to form a marketing team and plan..."
If they wait until after they need a government to form a government, they're a little bit late, don't you think? Whether or not you agree with the war, there's a good chance the US and UK will be the only ones around to prevent complete anarchy and warlordism when it's over. When it is over, there will be plenty of problems to deal with; having a plan to deal with them will minimize, to the extent possible, the impact on the citizens. I think leaving the entire country under direct rule by troops and in a political vacuum is a solution so bad that your perceived view of the US being arrogant by planning ahead for a likely scenario pales beside it.
VCs are usually smarter than that; they don't want to get stuck with an illiquid investment when the life of their fund ends. Most venture capital contracts are written with one of several possible liquidity-forcing clauses, like demand registration (forces company to register shares for an IPO) or redemption rights (forces company to buy back VCs' shares at purchase price, often plus an accumulated dividend). Not all shares are created equal.
A good reference and surprisingly representative of what was actually being used at the time (they are significantly more punitive, er... conservative, now) is this term sheet. Free registration required.
There is some truth in what you say, but keep in mind that the big shareholders in our economy in companies like TW and Disney are mutual funds. For Disney, there are no owners of more than 5% of the stock of the company so there is no public disclosure except as to officers and directors (who own about 2.6% of the company, as a group), but I would venture to guess that the largest holders of the stock are Fidelity and Vanguard through their various funds (mainly the index funds, again a guess.) For AOLTW, the management owns about 4.6% and the largest non-management holders are Capital Research (owns 7.1%) and FMR Corp. (owns 5%.) Capital Research is a mutual fund company. FMR is Fidelity.
Mutual funds do not want to get involved in the management of the company. Index funds even less (they are an index fund, after all, they hardly care what happens to the company and if they spend money trying to influence it, their expense ratio rises.) For instance, the heads of Fidelity and Vanguard wrote a letter to the WSJ saying that public disclosure of their votes on proxy statements would be bad because, essentially, they didn't want the responsibility of having to run the company well.
There are investors that buy large blocks and try to reform the company, with varying degrees of success--they are often derided as 'breakup artists' (ie. destroyers of value) or 'greenmailers.' But Deleware corporate law discourages these by allowing things like staggered boards and poison pills. The rush to entrench management through state law that happened in the '80s in response to the 'greed is good' perception of LBO shops is one of the causes of the current dismal state of corporate governance, the others being the unbridled use of stock options to avoid compensation expense and the use of fallacious measures of value by investors (ie. 'did the company make their whisper number?')
"Making the equity liquid" certainly has more than one form--an IPO, a sale, large dividend payments, etc.--but the VCs certainly need one or the other of these eventually. Your "don't be evil" comment implies that going public or making money on an investment is wrong, for some reason. I don't believe that: in a normal capitalist environment, a company should be run no differently when public than when private, just with more public disclosure. Although that environment almost disappeared in the boom years, I believe it is coming back. I don't think investors are as concerned with short-term profits right now as much as they are with long-term prospects. On the other hand, they need credible evidence that the company is, in fact, worth what they are paying for it. The burden of credible evidence versus the boom mentality of any evidence, credible or incredible, means valuations are lower, and will be until the next mania in twenty years or so.
VCs have a definite mission and a limited timeframe in which to accomplish it: they are playing with other peoples' money, and held accountable for it. Even if they decided they were a charity, they could not opt for a less than optimal return on investment and hope to have a career for more than a few more years.
Okay, this shouldn't be +5 informative. It should be -1 Wrong.
/. (well, except from me, of course.)
"Going Public" basically means that you, the owner, are offering a percentage ownership to the public in exchange for the public's money
Most IPOs are for "primary" shares: shares that are issued by the company for cash, not by management or the owners. If management or the owners are trying to sell their shares in an IPO, they better have a durn good reason or nobody else in the world is going to buy them.
Shareholder rights are managed like a pure democracy -- majority rules.
This is hialrious, see my previous post.
This is why you usually see that "Pres So-and-so" owns 51% of the stock in the company
The president owning 51% is very unusual, and really unheard of in venture backed companies unless the president was already rich and famous when he started the company.
Now, it's not a good idea to piss off your investors, because they'll just turn and sell your stock, and you have to pay that capital back
As noted in a previous reply, this is just plain wrong. If people sell your stock, the stock price goes down, shareholders are angry and you have a hard time raising more money (because investors are leery of your stock going down again.) Companies never have to buy their stock back, except in certain Preferred issues.
Please don't get your financial education from
Ha ha ha ha ha... plus 5 funny to the parent!
I especially liked the part about being sacked at the annual general meeting! Like that has ever happened in the entire history of corporate America!
Seriously, the shareholders own the company and, classically, the company is supposed to do whatever is in their best interests. But there are numerous caveats, including but not limited to:
- The "agency" problem: the people deciding what is best for the shareholders are not the shareholders and not chosen by the shareholders (voting yea or nay for a single candidate for a board of directors is as much a democracy as Stalinist Russia was);
- The board of directors is protected by the "business judgement rule": any decision they make, however wrongheaded, can be justified by the fact that it was their business judgement, as long as they show they had the necessary information and actually deliberated;
- Companies can't be prosecuted for screwing shareholders, they can only be sued--of course, they are sued for pretty much anything and everything anyway, so a few extraneous lawsuits resulting from truly egregious bad behaviour probably doesn't really deter them;
- Shareholders almost never have a shot at putting items on the agenda of the board or of the AGM--even if they are and are approved, they are almost never legally binding: they are "taken under advisement" by the board.
Remember Ovitz' $90 million severance payout on being fired as CEO of Disney? That was the subject of an unsuccessful shareholder suit. Why was it thrown out?--business judgement rule. What shareholder in their right mind would have given $90 million to the guy being pushed out the door?
Corporate governance in this country (and every other, as far as I know) is horrendous. The only protection a shareholder has is voting with his feet. The concept of actual "ownership" has become a sham. And, unfortuneately, Congress has decided it is in the better interests of their constituents to hold meaningless hearings and pass useless, redundant rules (Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?) than to try and correct the real deficiencies in the system.
I guess I should add, IMHO.
Of course, since the company was funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sequioa (ultra-establishment venture capital firms), the pressure to make the equity liquid comes from more than just the employees. With firms like KPCB involved, the decision on when to go public will be made on purely financial grounds... nothing to do with how soft and fuzzy it makes the employees feel.
So, driving to work in my Lincoln Navigator while smoking dope and listening to my pirated copy of Rage Against the Machine was probably not the best way to start the day?
Right now the five kids from the computer club would be emailing you their resumes.
otoh, all of the traits you mention in your second sentence are in the books I am reading right now, E. Morris' Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex . What's more, since the books happen to be based on fact, the traits represented are only romanticized to a medium degree, not to a very large degree as in some fiction. Although I suppose I could be inspired by Gandalf's being resurrected/reincarnated to battle evil, I am more inspired by TR's ability to lead a very full and rewarding life while remaining an offbeat personality, probably because it actually happened.
I have to admit, though, those EE textbooks shirk on the loyalty bit (but they're pretty good on tolerance! yuk yuk yuk. Sorry.)
I did not say these communities were wrong to reject the big-box proposals, just that I did not understand their reasoning. And when I said "groceries", I meant the goods, not the stores.
:-), but it's still troublesome.
I agree that it would be much harder to get a loan to open a store in Harlem than in, say, Chelsea, but that sort of begs the point: when a store was to be opened by a chain able to self-finance, it was rejected by the community board. I would agree that, if the retailer was to remove jobs from the neighborhood, that would be a good reason to derail the project, but that didn't seem to be the case (at least from published reports.) If I had to offer a rational reason for the rejection, I would have to think it was an issue of local control, although that's just a guess. The question in my mind is, do the local citizens care about local control as much as the local politicians? A difference in opinion between represented and representative would not be the first in the history of democracy
In the case of Mt Vernon, the big-box retailer was, IIRC, Ikea, which would not have benefited the community much aside from the taxes, which might have been substantial. An example of the benefits of something similar can be seen in a comparison of property taxes in other NY area communities. Take Short Hills and Glen Ridge New Jersey, similar towns near each other with some of the best public school systems in the country. Short Hills has a mall while Glen Ridge has almost no businesses. The property taxes in Short Hills are 25%-33% lower than in Glen Ridge because of the offsetting taxes on the mall. Mt. Vernon has some of the worst public schools in the New York City area.
I guess, being something of a limousine liberal (well, Subaru liberal anyway) these decisions seem counter-productive, but in the end they are the choice of the communities.
Sorry for the poke... I seem to be on an unconscious mission to get myself a Freak recently. Unsuccesful so far. I think I will have to be a little meaner in the future :-)
I also lived in one of those places, getting my Masters (although it was in EE, not business or econ.) I am not arguing that the "wrong side of the tracks" is well-served, just that I don't believe that it is any longer a function of class distinctions or racism, per se. The intervention of the government in the '60s and prior is, probably, a good argument that it was not the free-market that made the decision to not lend in those areas.
I agree that, in the free-market, the poor are more harshly treated than the rich, and I can't provably explain why that is so. But, the Bonfire of the Vanities schtick is pretty weak: if you believe it, open a mortgage broker for those you believe are excluded--you can be a hero, make a lot of money, and probably get government assistance besides.
Many of these communities seem to make decisions that economists of the classical/rational school would be amazed at, however. For various reasons, both the community of Harlem and the town of Mount Vernon (both New York) have turned down proposals by big-box retailers to open in their neighborhoods, forgoing both the tax benefits and the lower prices that would result. I can't speak for why they did this, but it is one answer to the bizarre mystery of why groceries are more expensive in poor neighborhoods than anywhere else in New York City.
First, just for kicks, I'd like to see an example of a 10,000% difference in credit cost. A very cheap mortgage, one of the cheapest of consumer credits, is about 6%, all in. That would mean there is someone charging 600% to some poor devil. Doubtful--yes, illegal--almost certainly. If you're talking about "no interest" car loans, you should read the financial statements of a car company with a finance division, and try to seperate credit cost from price. You'll find that the credit cost GMAC records is not what you see in the flashy Pontiac ad.
Second, plenty of SuperBanks are trying to do business in less affluent neighborhoods while making money, but quietly. For instance, many large banks have been trying to buy into the storefront check cashing business. They try to stay low profile because the vig these places extract is insultingly high, and they don't want to insult anyone. On the other hand, if they opened their own, they realize they could not charge much less and make money.
There are plenty of places that even you wouldn't want to drive your car (despite your superior attitude) that greedy capitalists have been happy to invest in--think Nigeria, Colombia and some of the grittier ex-Soviet republics: you will certainly see the familiar red of the Coca-Cola logo and perhaps the golden arches, and you probably won't see the oil/arms company exec behind the tinted glass of his armored Mercedes.
If there is money to be made, believe me, someone will be there to make it.
No solution is perfect, but given the massive amount of time and money it takes to compile these databases, the company has to get paid somehow. Setting price on sunk cost or high-fixed-cost/low-variable-cost goods is always tricky (think prescription drugs, cableTV, telecom, airflight, operating systems) and always controversial. Price discrimination (charging more to those to whom the service is worth more) or regulation seem to be the two solutions that result. Even with regulation price discrimination results (ie. business telecom users subsidize residential telecom users.)
There is no perfect way to discriminate here, but the way they came up with isn't bad. Of course, if you think that LexisNexis charges more overall than can be accounted for by their historic costs, you are welcome to start a competing service and charge less. If nothing else, your fledgling company might be bought by LexisNexis or Westlaw to eliminate the competition.
The author of the article is saying that Lexis and Westlaw won't even sell access to the public libraries.
And LexisNexis says they will sell unlimited access so long as it is librarian-mediated. This is a relatively painless way to discriminate between the public and the professional. The pro can't waste the time to have a librarian pull multiple documents for him while the public probably only needs one or two and can wait a few minutes. Seem like a pretty smart solution, imho.
I thought I was against UCITA, but if the ABA (aka the trial lawyers' union) is not supporting it, perhaps I should be for it.
Since (IN MY HUMBLE OPINION) the ABA seems to support things that generate more business for their constituency, as opposed to good laws, maybe UCITA isn't so bad after all. In any case, you have to wonder what the real reason they aren't pushing for it is.
Please, this is America. We have respect for private property here.
You can be on the panel when you buy your own congressman.
Of course, if they are using Windows, we could easily cripple their entire country by having Microsoft do a full-scale software license audit. That would keep most of their government personnel tied up for months, at least. Much more effective than weapons inspectors. Plus, what are the chances they are actually complying?
Too late indeed. Someday I will learn that lesson.
I honestly do not know much about the process, but I assume that the judges are selected from people with law degrees (or relevant), rather than going out to the street and looking there? Now law degree is something that none of slashdot readers seem to have, and I'd like to claim that it matters...
This comes dangerously close to believing that since they have a position, they must deserve the position. Lawyers I know tend to believe that many judges are, essentially, political appointees: they got the judgeship as a political favor for being a good soldier in the local party machinery (like becoming the ambassador to Bermuda, on a much smaller scale.) This doesn't apply to Federal judgeships (or higher), which are also appointed, but get much greater scrutiny.
the lawsuits are about negligence
Well, yes, so they say. You can't win a lawsuit against yourself, so you have to blame someone else.
Coffee people believe coffee should be brewed at between 203 degs and 208 degs for best flavor, anything below doesn't liquify the flavor-carrying oils. So, you have two competing interests: coffee that tastes good and the danger of hot liquids. Who decides which should prevail? In this country the courts have decided: I can no longer get decent coffee except for what I make for myself (on the stovetop, with boiling water.) It seems the default mode here is safety: why are many areas closed to rock-climbing? Because their owners are (justly) afraid of lawsuits. If you have a fish pond on your property and a trespassing child drowns in it, it is your fault (the "attractive nuisance" doctrine.) I am not in favor of children drowning, but not every situation requires blame--sometimes life just sucks. I spill coffee on myself and get badly burnt because of several random contributing factors. It isn't my fault, so it must be someone else's, right? Well, maybe life just sucks. Coffee is hot. Coffee should be hot. But accidents happen, and they can't all be prevented without sanitizing the entire world.
But, I have learned my lesson--I will not mention the coffee case in the future, even in jest. I'll start using the tobacco cases.