Maybe we need a law like that for government contracting and outsourcing.
Why on earth would anybody (except the lucky government contractors) need that? And if there were something good about this idea, why wouldn't it be even better to ban all foreign spending by all private entities? There is nothing about a "tax dollar" that makes it different from any other dollar once it is spent.
No, there may be some security reasons for restricting military spending, but the economic interests of America and Americans are best served by minimizing tax expenditure, not by restricting it to America.
The step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara is closer to 5,000 years old than 4,000, as any educated person knows and a quick google would have told you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Djoser/
4,000 years would put it outside the Old Kingdom dates and the major pyramid-building era altogether. But hey, it all happened a long time ago, and anything that happened a long time ago practically happened on the same date!
Now everyone knows the BMI is only a rough guide, and that there are better ways to measure obesity. But if it's the main instrument for claiming an "obesity epidemic" then we have to know how rough.
Not so. You have over-generalized, assuming that if BMI gives the wrong answer for an individual it must give the wrong answer for a population. But BMI is calibrated against the population; it gives the right answer on average by construction. It has been demonstrated that statistically, BMI has very good predictive power by validating against other methods of assessing fatness, such as calipers & tape or scales & immersion.
The "obesity epidemic" you mention means that we are comparing two populations, one current and one historical, and finding that today's population has a higher BMI. It would be invalid to assume that this higher BMI implies higher obesity if in fact people today merely have more muscle than their forebears. But if that is your claim, I think you are wrong.
As long as there is money, there will be greed and corruption. As long as there are humans, there will be a desire for power and control.
So what? As long as there are humans, there will be love, gratitude, kindness, and self-sacrifice. You don't even need the humans; you can observe all of these behaviours in animals too. Any philosophy that tries to pretend that humans have no "good" attributes is just as nutty as a philosophy such as communism that tries to pretend they have no bad ones.
But we're far from a perfect society, and I dare say that we won't see one... ever.
Well, of course not! But that's hardly the point. Making things worse is easy, making them perfect is impossible. But just making them better is not impossible, even if it's hard work. At this point, it would be progress just to stop making things worse.
To those who would argue that repressive countries such as China or Saudi Arabia could try the same thing for basically innocuous things like pointing out how repressive they are (as opposed to something arguably more serious, such as illegally running gambling operations), let's remember that they are repressive countries and thus no one should ever want to go there until they clean up their act.
That advice may seem reasonable to a lawyer; the nature of your calling requires little international travel. But doing business with China requires someone to go there, whether it is repressive or not, and few Americans would now wish to forego the cheap goods that this business delivers.
In fact, there is no need to invoke the bogeyman of repression at all. For instance, it is plausible that China might someday impose a blockade on Taiwan. That is something that could happen in a free and open China, just as one can imagine America imposing a blockade on on Hawaii, were it to attempt to separate.
The principle is the same as this case: you might not be Chinese, and you might not have committed your crime in China. But you dealt with Taiwanese citizens whom China claims as its own. The stakes are arguably more serious to China than internet gambling operations are to America.
Exactly. Like sausages, the authoratative appeal of a reference work is inversely proportional to how much one knows about its manufacture.
Another good example is the British Dictionary of National Biography. An amazing quantity of ink was spilled in the letters section of the TLS (the erstwhile Times Literary Supplement) when the most recent edition was published. Infective flew back and forth for weeks, with both contributors and letter writers accused of partiality, special pleading, ignorance and incompetence. And yet the contributors were selected by invitation, chosen for their reputations and knowledge of the persons and periods they were to cover. It is simply impossible to get everything right in a work of such vast scope, and with so many contributors (about ten thousand, apparently - the index of contributors runs to 480 pages.)
On the contrary, the GP post is accurate and all of your points are wrong.
The type of faired recumbent that sets these speed records has a very low drag coefficient, much lower than a modern automobile, for instance, and yet has lower top speeds than a car. Not only is there no benefit to drafting, there is a positive disadvantage to riding in the residual turbulence. Also, these vehicles are very unwieldy compared to diamond-frame bikes; following closely is much more dangerous.
This last point is an important one which do not seem to have considered. The fininshing sprints of pro races are already very dangerous, with speeds of about 70km/h and masses of riders packed together jostling each other. The combination of even higher speeds and lower manouverability would make things even worse than they already are (a pro rider has about a one in four chance of spending time in hospital in a racing season.)
Contrary to your assertion, the UCI continually allows innovations in equipment. Your example of aerobars is a good one that proves you wrong: they are in fact allowed but not on mass start stages. The reason is safety, not conservativism; they were allowed at one point but again, the reduction in handling caused too many crashes.
Finally, the UCI doesn't have a monopoly on racing bicycles, you know. There's nothing stopping you from making your own rules and holding your own races. In fact, there are already recumbent bicycle races - they're just not very popular with fans.
Yes, the headline summary is wrong in every significant respect (except that they got Apple's name right.)
1) Apple is not yet being investigated; they found and reported the problem themselves.
2) The problem has not been confirmed to be backdating.
3) Backdating is in fact illegal because it fraudulently mistates a company's earnings and evades taxes. The exception would be if the backdating is disclosed and appropriate taxes paid - but that isn't really backdating at all (just striking an option off-market.)
Whereas only a single billion dollars in telco stock is at stake. Why? because the proposed barriers to trade (which is what net-biasedness is about) will have the usual economic effect of destroying value. Raising the cost of non-telco business means that less of this business will be produced and consumed - a deadweight loss. It is a negative-sum game, where everybody loses except the lucky oligopolists and whichever politicians they bribed.
Personally, I feel that extra work for you (or your accounting department, or whoever) is worth it if it helps to ensure that 10-Ks and the like are as accurate as possible.
Yes, no doubt that is what you "feel", but you are wrong. Wrong as in a point of fact, you-could-look-it-up wrong. It is an official, carved in stone, fundamental principal of accounting that the cost of an accounting procedure should not exceed the benefits. You are not supposed to make an accounting statement "as accurate as possible", only as accurate as is beneficial to the shareholders.
It is self-defeating to prevent a billion dollars worth of fraud by incurring a trillion dollars worth of cost. Note that most of your post implicitly conceeds this point by arguing the premiss that SOX is really as expensive as people claim. This is a debatable point and you are quite right to question it. But your comment I quoted betrays your underlying mistake: you are thinking of this as essentially a moral issue, as so many other confused posters have done.
I can't help but think that this moral confusion is sanctimonious. The morality posts seem to assume that the victims of SOX are the corporate executives who complain. That is exactly wrong. If SOX is really as bad as they say, it is you and I who are the victims. We will suffer because as the cost of doing business rises, the cost of the goods and services they provide will rise accordingly. We will be able to afford fewer of these goods and services. The total economy will shrink, and our retirement investments will shrink too. There will be fewer jobs and the available jobs will be less profitable for our employers and will therefore pay less.
But the CEO's will still be laughing all the way to the bank, same as always.
... would the studio not be guilty of tax evasion if the movie made way more than reported?
Not as long as the studio reported its own income accurately and paid tax on the same. How a studio could make money while all its movies lose money is another matter.
I love cycling. My wife and I also both commute by bicycle. However, I think you are overlooking some reasons why cycling is not for everyone.
First, cycling is best in rural areas or in the downtown core. In the trackless medium-density sprawl of the suburbs, traffic speed is high, tolerance for bicycles is low, and the edge of the road is littered with drain gratings, broken glass, and other hazards. Yet this is where most Americans live and drive.
Second, cycling is work. One reason commuting by bicycle is easier for me is that I am able to match downtown traffic speeds. Not everyone is strong enough to do this, and those who are arrive at work covered in sweat. (And you live in Australia! You are going to get sweaty no matter how slow you go when the temperature is 40+) I happen to have access to a shower at work; if I didn't, I would take out a "shower membership" at a local fitness club. Not everyone has these luxuries.
Third, we can't all live in Australia. Where I live we have this stuff called snow in winter. People can and do cycle year-round, but once roads are reduced to 3/4 their normal width by heaps of snow on either side, the traffic risks exceed my personal tolerance.
Finally, I am skeptical about claims of commutes that are faster by bike than by car. Perhaps you have convenient bike paths or lanes that facilitate this, but in my experience, most of these commutes are achieved by making dangerous passes, running stop signs and even red lights. These riding habits are simply not sustainable over a lifetime of commuting; eventually statistics will catch up with you.
If you don't like how much Wal-Mart influences what producers produce, DON'T SHOP THERE.
Right. Oh, and try to get millions of other people to stop shopping there too. Oh, but wait... that would mean sharing your opinion with other people, maybe on a blog - that's what they're for. Gosh, will capitalism survive?
Maybe the guy is wrong, but if you think so why don't you STATE YOUR CASE? Trying to censor him in order to make the world safe for capitalism is both pernicious and futile.
The world's victim mentality really pisses me off.
Well you have created your own misfortune there - setting up Wal-Mart as the victim.
Google would be crazy to pay dividends at this stage in its growth. Huge growth rates are wonderful for investors, but looked at from the company's point of view, this growth is the opportunity cost of capital. When capital is expensive it is madness to throw it away.
Nor do dividends make sense from an investor's point of view, because there are few high-growth opportunities available. Tired of Google and want to reduce your exposure? Well then good grief, just sell some!
Real-life trees, being neither Capitalist nor Socialist, both compete and cooperate. Look up mycorrizha" or soil life" on Wikipedia for examples of socialist-style cooperation. From Wikipedia:
... in situations where little light is able to reach the forest floor, such as the North American pine forests, a young seedling cannot obtain sufficient light to photosynthesise for itself and will not grow properly in a sterile soil. But if the ground is underlain by a mycorrhizal mat then the developing seedling will throw down roots that can link with the fungal threads and through them obtain the nutrients it needs...
The M2 is a retired weapon, and pretty much has been since the 60s.
I don't know why the M2 is coming up in this thread about rifles, since it is a.50 cal machine gun. Although initially adapted for infantry use in 1921 (from an earlier aircraft weapon), derivatives of ma deuce are still in service today.
the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits
Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation. Most CEOs have been compensated mostly in options, and until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley. Historically, CEOs have had significant influence over the appointment of directors to the boards that are meant to oversee them. As it is the board that nominally decides how a CEO is compensated, the effect is that CEOs get to set their own compensation. Be honest: don't you think your compensation might be a little bit on the high side if you got to set it yourself?
Yes, I am aware that we are supposed to be entering a new era of responsible corporate governance: options will be accounted for, CEOs will be paid in shares (giving them downside risk), and board members will be impeccably independent. Historically, however, the last great scam has always been the next one.
If someone's written work is devoid of some common rules of grammar and usage, does it matter if you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing?
Well, the first problem is that you are begging the question: why do you think it is possible to write clearly and unambiguously without recourse to conventional spelling, grammar, and usage? I think this is a highly doubtful proposition, because even clear and correct writing is often ambiguous. When I do understand bad writing, it is because I am smarter and have worked harder than the person who wrote it (remember, we are talking about native speakers, not geniuses who don't know the language.) Then too, bad writing is rude because it conveys the implicit message that time you save in writing is worth more than time I save in reading. But why do you think I should bother to read something you can't be bothered to write?
I think you are also mistaken in assuming that the only drawback of bad writing is that other people can't understand you. Literacy is a system, and if you are a bad writer you are unlikely to be a very good reader. Consider the locution I employed in my first paragraph: "begging the question." This phrase derives from a meaning of "begging" that is no longer current, namely "taking for granted." Because this is an antiquated meaning, many people interpret the phrase as "begging for the question." What's wrong with that? After all, language is continuously changing. Certainly. But if you don't even know the old meaning, and make a point of refusing to learn it, you have cut yourself off from the writings of earlier generations; writings that in many cases are more interesting than what you have to say now (that, after all, is why they have been preserved.) For my part, I believe that most people who misuse phrases like this do so in ignorance and are tacitly acknowledging my point: they have adopted the phrase, without understanding it, in hopes that by emulating better writing, their own will be more favourably received.
The fact that Google has issued more stock and has a higher stock price than AOL Time Warner only means that Google has more publicly held debt.
As other replies to you have stated, equity is not debt. I see in one of your responses that you are aware of this, and reckon that you are "simplifying a complex issue." Not to me: I think you are complicating a simple one. The idea that a higher stock price equates to more debt is at best worthless. In general, debt issuance has a neutral effect on stock price because the liability (debt) is balanced by the asset (money borrowed.)
Equity is equivalent to a long call on a firm's assets; debt is equivalent to a short put. Debt and equity are polar opposites, not equals.
Like privately held debt, Google must pay interest on the stock they issued. Those are called dividends. Additionally, Google may have to buy back shares at some point.
No, on all counts. Dividends are not interest, Google has no obligation to pay dividends, and "they" never need to buy the shares back. You shouldn't be thinking about "they" at all; as soon as you buy their shares, you become "them". That's the point of equity.
The only way that Google can "even the score" and become a comparable investment would be either for the earnings per share to rise. The price of $282.30 is not sustainable given Google's earnings
Well, that's exactly right, but the stock isn't trading on current earnings; it's trading on anticipated future earnings. Why are those future earnings implied to be so high? Because earnings have grown very rapidly during Google's existence. Isn't it just a guess to assume that past earnings growth will continue? Of course. But any other earnings assumption would also be just a guess.
Personally, I don't own any Google stock and don't intend to buy any because I don't see any reason why earnings should grow any faster than the current stock price already implies. But I am not going to short the stock either, because I don't know of any specific reason why earnings shouldn't grow. There's just as much risk on the upside as on the downside.
I think you mean that a genetic predisposition to be intelligent is complimentary, not insulting. That may seem obvious, but the situation is not so simple. Historically, claims that Jews are predisposed to be intelligent are linked to claims that they are predisposed to be evil. Even the claim of intelligence has been used to persecute them.
Here is concrete example. My great-uncle, known in the family for his anti-semitic views, was a physics professor at an American university. For many years, he was responsible for admissions, and he used to say that he hated to admit so many Jews but he had to because "the rascals are so clever." Wonderful. But the implication is that a Jew who did not display superior talent would systematically be excluded in favour of a similar non-Jew. Not so wonderful.
I think that you, like many other posters on this topic, assume that if something is politically incorrect, it must be factually correct. Well that is not true: remember, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. There are several good reasons to doubt the hypothesis of this paper. Many have been mentioned elsewhere, but I'll repeat them for convenience:
Measurement Error Intelligence is not well defined, independently of a score on a test. We all have a vague idea that some people are smarter than others, but it turns out to be hard to pin down what that means.
"Race" What is a race anyway? The paper begs the question (takes for granted that the concept is well-defined.) But this is doubful. How can the scientists be confused on this point, you ask, when you can easily identify people of different races from their skin colour? Relax, nobody doubts that skin colour is genetically determined! But in equating it with race, you are assuming that skin colour is a good marker for other genetic differences, such as intelligence. On the whole, this is not true: there is more genetic variation within a "race" than between races. Races might still exist, but it's not as obvious as you think.
Correlation vs Causation The premiss of the paper is that selection pressure explains the elevated occurrence of high intelligence and genetic disease amongst Ashkenazi Jews. But this is just a conjecture; there is nothing beyond correlation to demonstrate the conclusion, and there are many problems with this conclusion. Why was there selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews but not on anyone else? Why shouldn't intelligence be a reproductive advantage to the persecutors, as well as the persecuted? In any case, Sephardic Jews have endured plenty of persecution; why haven't they experienced the same genetic outcome? And there are many other groups with similar levels of the genetic diseases identified in this paper. If these diseases are linked to intelligence, why aren't these groups also smarter?
It is standard operating procedure to include in SEC filings discussion of any factors that will or reasonably may negatively impact business.
That is true, but some of these factors are more far-fetched and amusing than others. My all time favourite was the bubble company NetJ.com. I could never describe NetJ as well as Michael Lewis did here, but in summary, the documents NetJ filed with the SEC indicated that as a matter of policy, it had no business plan. However, the principal risk was not that no business would result in no profit; on the contrary, the main risk identified was competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth would anybody (except the lucky government contractors) need that? And if there were something good about this idea, why wouldn't it be even better to ban all foreign spending by all private entities? There is nothing about a "tax dollar" that makes it different from any other dollar once it is spent.
No, there may be some security reasons for restricting military spending, but the economic interests of America and Americans are best served by minimizing tax expenditure, not by restricting it to America.
The step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara is closer to 5,000 years old than 4,000, as any educated person knows and a quick google would have told you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Djoser/
4,000 years would put it outside the Old Kingdom dates and the major pyramid-building era altogether. But hey, it all happened a long time ago, and anything that happened a long time ago practically happened on the same date!
Not so. You have over-generalized, assuming that if BMI gives the wrong answer for an individual it must give the wrong answer for a population. But BMI is calibrated against the population; it gives the right answer on average by construction. It has been demonstrated that statistically, BMI has very good predictive power by validating against other methods of assessing fatness, such as calipers & tape or scales & immersion.
The "obesity epidemic" you mention means that we are comparing two populations, one current and one historical, and finding that today's population has a higher BMI. It would be invalid to assume that this higher BMI implies higher obesity if in fact people today merely have more muscle than their forebears. But if that is your claim, I think you are wrong.
+5, insightful. I notice that Yahoo! have 1/3.5 the market cap of Google even though they have nearly the same revenue. They should sue!
So what? As long as there are humans, there will be love, gratitude, kindness, and self-sacrifice. You don't even need the humans; you can observe all of these behaviours in animals too. Any philosophy that tries to pretend that humans have no "good" attributes is just as nutty as a philosophy such as communism that tries to pretend they have no bad ones.
Well, of course not! But that's hardly the point. Making things worse is easy, making them perfect is impossible. But just making them better is not impossible, even if it's hard work. At this point, it would be progress just to stop making things worse.
That advice may seem reasonable to a lawyer; the nature of your calling requires little international travel. But doing business with China requires someone to go there, whether it is repressive or not, and few Americans would now wish to forego the cheap goods that this business delivers.
In fact, there is no need to invoke the bogeyman of repression at all. For instance, it is plausible that China might someday impose a blockade on Taiwan. That is something that could happen in a free and open China, just as one can imagine America imposing a blockade on on Hawaii, were it to attempt to separate.
The principle is the same as this case: you might not be Chinese, and you might not have committed your crime in China. But you dealt with Taiwanese citizens whom China claims as its own. The stakes are arguably more serious to China than internet gambling operations are to America.
Exactly. Like sausages, the authoratative appeal of a reference work is inversely proportional to how much one knows about its manufacture.
Another good example is the British Dictionary of National Biography. An amazing quantity of ink was spilled in the letters section of the TLS (the erstwhile Times Literary Supplement) when the most recent edition was published. Infective flew back and forth for weeks, with both contributors and letter writers accused of partiality, special pleading, ignorance and incompetence. And yet the contributors were selected by invitation, chosen for their reputations and knowledge of the persons and periods they were to cover. It is simply impossible to get everything right in a work of such vast scope, and with so many contributors (about ten thousand, apparently - the index of contributors runs to 480 pages.)
There is not a grain of truth in any of this.
On the contrary, the GP post is accurate and all of your points are wrong.
The type of faired recumbent that sets these speed records has a very low drag coefficient, much lower than a modern automobile, for instance, and yet has lower top speeds than a car. Not only is there no benefit to drafting, there is a positive disadvantage to riding in the residual turbulence. Also, these vehicles are very unwieldy compared to diamond-frame bikes; following closely is much more dangerous.
This last point is an important one which do not seem to have considered. The fininshing sprints of pro races are already very dangerous, with speeds of about 70km/h and masses of riders packed together jostling each other. The combination of even higher speeds and lower manouverability would make things even worse than they already are (a pro rider has about a one in four chance of spending time in hospital in a racing season.)
Contrary to your assertion, the UCI continually allows innovations in equipment. Your example of aerobars is a good one that proves you wrong: they are in fact allowed but not on mass start stages. The reason is safety, not conservativism; they were allowed at one point but again, the reduction in handling caused too many crashes.
Finally, the UCI doesn't have a monopoly on racing bicycles, you know. There's nothing stopping you from making your own rules and holding your own races. In fact, there are already recumbent bicycle races - they're just not very popular with fans.
1) Apple is not yet being investigated; they found and reported the problem themselves.
2) The problem has not been confirmed to be backdating.
3) Backdating is in fact illegal because it fraudulently mistates a company's earnings and evades taxes. The exception would be if the backdating is disclosed and appropriate taxes paid - but that isn't really backdating at all (just striking an option off-market.)
Whereas only a single billion dollars in telco stock is at stake. Why? because the proposed barriers to trade (which is what net-biasedness is about) will have the usual economic effect of destroying value. Raising the cost of non-telco business means that less of this business will be produced and consumed - a deadweight loss. It is a negative-sum game, where everybody loses except the lucky oligopolists and whichever politicians they bribed.
Personally, I feel that extra work for you (or your accounting department, or whoever) is worth it if it helps to ensure that 10-Ks and the like are as accurate as possible.
Yes, no doubt that is what you "feel", but you are wrong. Wrong as in a point of fact, you-could-look-it-up wrong. It is an official, carved in stone, fundamental principal of accounting that the cost of an accounting procedure should not exceed the benefits. You are not supposed to make an accounting statement "as accurate as possible", only as accurate as is beneficial to the shareholders.
It is self-defeating to prevent a billion dollars worth of fraud by incurring a trillion dollars worth of cost. Note that most of your post implicitly conceeds this point by arguing the premiss that SOX is really as expensive as people claim. This is a debatable point and you are quite right to question it. But your comment I quoted betrays your underlying mistake: you are thinking of this as essentially a moral issue, as so many other confused posters have done.
I can't help but think that this moral confusion is sanctimonious. The morality posts seem to assume that the victims of SOX are the corporate executives who complain. That is exactly wrong. If SOX is really as bad as they say, it is you and I who are the victims. We will suffer because as the cost of doing business rises, the cost of the goods and services they provide will rise accordingly. We will be able to afford fewer of these goods and services. The total economy will shrink, and our retirement investments will shrink too. There will be fewer jobs and the available jobs will be less profitable for our employers and will therefore pay less.
But the CEO's will still be laughing all the way to the bank, same as always.
... would the studio not be guilty of tax evasion if the movie made way more than reported?
Not as long as the studio reported its own income accurately and paid tax on the same. How a studio could make money while all its movies lose money is another matter.
I love cycling. My wife and I also both commute by bicycle. However, I think you are overlooking some reasons why cycling is not for everyone.
First, cycling is best in rural areas or in the downtown core. In the trackless medium-density sprawl of the suburbs, traffic speed is high, tolerance for bicycles is low, and the edge of the road is littered with drain gratings, broken glass, and other hazards. Yet this is where most Americans live and drive.
Second, cycling is work. One reason commuting by bicycle is easier for me is that I am able to match downtown traffic speeds. Not everyone is strong enough to do this, and those who are arrive at work covered in sweat. (And you live in Australia! You are going to get sweaty no matter how slow you go when the temperature is 40+) I happen to have access to a shower at work; if I didn't, I would take out a "shower membership" at a local fitness club. Not everyone has these luxuries.
Third, we can't all live in Australia. Where I live we have this stuff called snow in winter. People can and do cycle year-round, but once roads are reduced to 3/4 their normal width by heaps of snow on either side, the traffic risks exceed my personal tolerance.
Finally, I am skeptical about claims of commutes that are faster by bike than by car. Perhaps you have convenient bike paths or lanes that facilitate this, but in my experience, most of these commutes are achieved by making dangerous passes, running stop signs and even red lights. These riding habits are simply not sustainable over a lifetime of commuting; eventually statistics will catch up with you.
If you don't like how much Wal-Mart influences what producers produce, DON'T SHOP THERE.
... that would mean sharing your opinion with other people, maybe on a blog - that's what they're for. Gosh, will capitalism survive?
Right. Oh, and try to get millions of other people to stop shopping there too. Oh, but wait
Maybe the guy is wrong, but if you think so why don't you STATE YOUR CASE? Trying to censor him in order to make the world safe for capitalism is both pernicious and futile.
The world's victim mentality really pisses me off.
Well you have created your own misfortune there - setting up Wal-Mart as the victim.
Google would be crazy to pay dividends at this stage in its growth. Huge growth rates are wonderful for investors, but looked at from the company's point of view, this growth is the opportunity cost of capital. When capital is expensive it is madness to throw it away.
Nor do dividends make sense from an investor's point of view, because there are few high-growth opportunities available. Tired of Google and want to reduce your exposure? Well then good grief, just sell some!
... while this tax loophole sucks, it's $3 billion a year [for three years] not $9 billion [for one year.]
...
Yes.
That means it's a year's worth of taxes for 6.6 million people
No. 3x3 is still 9, so it's still one year's tax for 20 million people, or, if you prefer, 3 year's tax for 6.6 million people.
"I have discovered the most marvellous proof that our intervention in Iraq was a good idea! Unfortunately, it is too long to put in this post ..."
The M2 is a retired weapon, and pretty much has been since the 60s.
.50 cal machine gun. Although initially adapted for infantry use in 1921 (from an earlier aircraft weapon), derivatives of ma deuce are still in service today.
I don't know why the M2 is coming up in this thread about rifles, since it is a
See http://world.guns.ru/machine/mg04-e.htm for details.
... takeoff or landing, the two most dangerous parts of any flight, no matter the aircraft's type, purpose, or cruising speed.
:-)
Oh yeah? How about type: air superiority fighter, purpose: enemy fighter interdiction?
Just kidding. Seriously, nice post.
the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits
Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation. Most CEOs have been compensated mostly in options, and until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley. Historically, CEOs have had significant influence over the appointment of directors to the boards that are meant to oversee them. As it is the board that nominally decides how a CEO is compensated, the effect is that CEOs get to set their own compensation. Be honest: don't you think your compensation might be a little bit on the high side if you got to set it yourself?
Yes, I am aware that we are supposed to be entering a new era of responsible corporate governance: options will be accounted for, CEOs will be paid in shares (giving them downside risk), and board members will be impeccably independent. Historically, however, the last great scam has always been the next one.
If someone's written work is devoid of some common rules of grammar and usage, does it matter if you completely and unambiguously understand what they are saying/writing?
Well, the first problem is that you are begging the question: why do you think it is possible to write clearly and unambiguously without recourse to conventional spelling, grammar, and usage? I think this is a highly doubtful proposition, because even clear and correct writing is often ambiguous. When I do understand bad writing, it is because I am smarter and have worked harder than the person who wrote it (remember, we are talking about native speakers, not geniuses who don't know the language.) Then too, bad writing is rude because it conveys the implicit message that time you save in writing is worth more than time I save in reading. But why do you think I should bother to read something you can't be bothered to write?
I think you are also mistaken in assuming that the only drawback of bad writing is that other people can't understand you. Literacy is a system, and if you are a bad writer you are unlikely to be a very good reader. Consider the locution I employed in my first paragraph: "begging the question." This phrase derives from a meaning of "begging" that is no longer current, namely "taking for granted." Because this is an antiquated meaning, many people interpret the phrase as "begging for the question." What's wrong with that? After all, language is continuously changing. Certainly. But if you don't even know the old meaning, and make a point of refusing to learn it, you have cut yourself off from the writings of earlier generations; writings that in many cases are more interesting than what you have to say now (that, after all, is why they have been preserved.) For my part, I believe that most people who misuse phrases like this do so in ignorance and are tacitly acknowledging my point: they have adopted the phrase, without understanding it, in hopes that by emulating better writing, their own will be more favourably received.
The fact that Google has issued more stock and has a higher stock price than AOL Time Warner only means that Google has more publicly held debt.
As other replies to you have stated, equity is not debt. I see in one of your responses that you are aware of this, and reckon that you are "simplifying a complex issue." Not to me: I think you are complicating a simple one. The idea that a higher stock price equates to more debt is at best worthless. In general, debt issuance has a neutral effect on stock price because the liability (debt) is balanced by the asset (money borrowed.)
Equity is equivalent to a long call on a firm's assets; debt is equivalent to a short put. Debt and equity are polar opposites, not equals.
Like privately held debt, Google must pay interest on the stock they issued. Those are called dividends. Additionally, Google may have to buy back shares at some point.
No, on all counts. Dividends are not interest, Google has no obligation to pay dividends, and "they" never need to buy the shares back. You shouldn't be thinking about "they" at all; as soon as you buy their shares, you become "them". That's the point of equity.
The only way that Google can "even the score" and become a comparable investment would be either for the earnings per share to rise. The price of $282.30 is not sustainable given Google's earnings
Well, that's exactly right, but the stock isn't trading on current earnings; it's trading on anticipated future earnings. Why are those future earnings implied to be so high? Because earnings have grown very rapidly during Google's existence. Isn't it just a guess to assume that past earnings growth will continue? Of course. But any other earnings assumption would also be just a guess.
Personally, I don't own any Google stock and don't intend to buy any because I don't see any reason why earnings should grow any faster than the current stock price already implies. But I am not going to short the stock either, because I don't know of any specific reason why earnings shouldn't grow. There's just as much risk on the upside as on the downside.
Here is concrete example. My great-uncle, known in the family for his anti-semitic views, was a physics professor at an American university. For many years, he was responsible for admissions, and he used to say that he hated to admit so many Jews but he had to because "the rascals are so clever." Wonderful. But the implication is that a Jew who did not display superior talent would systematically be excluded in favour of a similar non-Jew. Not so wonderful.
I think that you, like many other posters on this topic, assume that if something is politically incorrect, it must be factually correct. Well that is not true: remember, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. There are several good reasons to doubt the hypothesis of this paper. Many have been mentioned elsewhere, but I'll repeat them for convenience:
Measurement Error
Intelligence is not well defined, independently of a score on a test. We all have a vague idea that some people are smarter than others, but it turns out to be hard to pin down what that means.
"Race"
What is a race anyway? The paper begs the question (takes for granted that the concept is well-defined.) But this is doubful. How can the scientists be confused on this point, you ask, when you can easily identify people of different races from their skin colour? Relax, nobody doubts that skin colour is genetically determined! But in equating it with race, you are assuming that skin colour is a good marker for other genetic differences, such as intelligence. On the whole, this is not true: there is more genetic variation within a "race" than between races. Races might still exist, but it's not as obvious as you think.
Correlation vs Causation
The premiss of the paper is that selection pressure explains the elevated occurrence of high intelligence and genetic disease amongst Ashkenazi Jews. But this is just a conjecture; there is nothing beyond correlation to demonstrate the conclusion, and there are many problems with this conclusion. Why was there selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews but not on anyone else? Why shouldn't intelligence be a reproductive advantage to the persecutors, as well as the persecuted? In any case, Sephardic Jews have endured plenty of persecution; why haven't they experienced the same genetic outcome? And there are many other groups with similar levels of the genetic diseases identified in this paper. If these diseases are linked to intelligence, why aren't these groups also smarter?
It is standard operating procedure to include in SEC filings discussion of any factors that will or reasonably may negatively impact business.
That is true, but some of these factors are more far-fetched and amusing than others. My all time favourite was the bubble company NetJ.com. I could never describe NetJ as well as Michael Lewis did here, but in summary, the documents NetJ filed with the SEC indicated that as a matter of policy, it had no business plan. However, the principal risk was not that no business would result in no profit; on the contrary, the main risk identified was competition.