First, private equity firms do invest a lot of their own money in the firms they buy (hence the name. They invest private money (that of their owners/shareholders) into equity by buying firms). If they didn't banks would be rightly suspicious of the deal since the private equity firm would get paid no matter what happened.
Second, because of this, it is in the interests of the private equity firm that the company do well. In theory, if the PE firm bought a controlling share (say 51%) they would be in a position to screw over the remaining 49%, for example by selling the firm's assets to some other company owned by the PE firm, at a discount rate. This would most likely be illegal. Apart from this mechanism, the interests of the PE firm are exactly the same as the remaining shareholders: to get as much money from the firm as possible.
Finally, if it is more profitable to sell a companies assets and fire all its workers, then this is a good thing. If you don't already believe this then I don't have space to prove it in this post, but the general idea is that labor and capital are just like any other commodity, and so a company whose share price today is less than the value of its in place assets, is like a giant inefficient machine that consumes capital and labor for what is effectively negative profit.
As others have said VC's care about money, but the money your company can make is a direct function of the value of your algorithm (and also team etc.). Other commenters have talked about business plans, market reserach etc. but this is really secondary. What is of primary importance is what is your algorithm in itself, what does it do? Nothing you have claimed so far makes your algorithm stand out as something of value. If I were a VC I would ask you the following: Does your algorithm automatically fix the video with no input parameters needing to be speicifed? If it needs parameters, how is it different to composing a number of conventional video filters? Also do you have videos comparing the "best" current algorithms applied to video, with your own? Remember you are selling your algorithm, not the video editing software that could theoretically be built using your algroithm, as such software could also use other algorithms too, so that is not your competitive advantage.
I am arguing with YouTube's claim that they defend freedom of speech, no matter how offensive. If they decide not to actually defend free speech by censoring certain videos, that is their right, but it invalidates their claim to stand for freedom of speech for their uploaders (although they are still defending their own freedom of speech as a company).
YouTube claim to stand for free speech but they also have TOS that contain the usual vague disclaimers about "hate speech". For example I'd be interested to know which people can view each of these videos (it varies by country)
While there are some things that must be clearly rejected, like claims that the earth is only 6000 years old, there are issues relating to the philosophy and interpretation of the theory of evolution where there is room for compromise, and this would go a long way to diffusing the conflict.
My understanding is that many Christians object not to the content of the theory of evolution, but the the claim that it operates by "blind chance". We can compare it to Carl Sagan's idea that God has left a message in Pi. Should we be teaching in schools that such a message is absolutely impossible? I personally don't believe that God has left a message in Pi, but there is no conclusive evidence either way. Similarly the evidence doesn't rule out that God guides evolution. Evolution involves apparent randomness, just like the digits of pi. But there is no conclusive evidence that his apparent randomness is true randomness.
But you also said "let's forget about the "best solution" and see what we can do about merely good solutions." I was pointing out that there was a scale from optimal solutions (carbon taxes) to sub-optimal solutions (gas taxes, mileage taxes) to the worst options (encouraging very specific things like rooftop solar or grocery delivery). My claim was that the worst options do not even qualify as "merely good solutions".
All theory says that anti-matter should behave like matter becasue both kinds of matter have positive energy (hence the release of energy when they annihilate). Negative energy is harder to produce than anti-matter, and it is possible that there are fundamental limits to its production. Negative energy would produce anti-gravity (at least I think, given my rudimentary knowledge of GR). As "Electricity Likes Me" said in his/her reply, it is *possible* that contrary to what is expected, anti-matter floats up in spite of having positive energy
I'm interested to see what the software model for this will be. Sure they could use OpenCL, but it seems like a lot of the pain in using OpenCL derives from the underlying memory architecture. With a shared virtual address space and fully coherent caches all in hardware, it should be possible to have a much simpler software model than OpenCL. I guess it doesn't really matter what the software model is though since now that everything is in main memory, GPU functions can be called just like regular functions and the caller doesn't need to care how they are implemented. E.g. it should be possible to have a BLAS GPU library that operates on main memory pointers, where before the cost of copying a matrix to the GPU and back for a single operation woudn't have been worth it.
It doesn't have to be a carbon tax. Road mile taxes, or higher gasoline taxes would serve the same purpose in this instance. But when you get to the level of encouraging very specific behaviors like getting grocery delivery, I think that the combination of not knowing if this really incentivizes the right behavior, and the cost of setting up such schemes, makes these "solutions" worse than the status quo.
Fundamentally, environmental problems are economic problems: how to minimize environmental damage at minimal cost. Economic theory points to pollution taxes as the best solution. So while I disagree with the articles conclusion that governments should give incentives for ordering groceries by delivery, this kind of study does point people and companies in the direction of how to efficiently reduce pollution once the right incentives (pollution taxes) are provided.
And of course, in the meantime it's good for people to know how to efficiently reduce their own pollution even though there is no financial incentive to do so.
Capitalist economies always tend to work in strange ways. The first European explorers went in search of trivial luxury items like pepper. When you let people spend their money on precisely what they want, they often spend it in ways that don't seem to match up with what a rational person's wants and needs would seem to be.
Ads make money because people, for whatever reason, choose to click on ads. In the future, is is possible that people will prefer to pay a flat fee and see no ads? I think this is very likely, but we are not at the stage now, and so ads play a vital role in the economy, forming a kind of implicit micro-payment system.
The Luddites are out in force today. Try putting a little thought into it instead of letting your imagination run riot with doomsday scenarios.
Try dropping the attitude, mate.
Google Glass stands out like dogs balls making it a very poor choice for surreptitious recording.
When lots of people are using Google glass, they won't stand out very much. A person holding up their smartphone constantly to record things will. The light exists now, but since smartphones no longer all have "recording" lights, how long will Glass?
On the light, I see now that Google glass comes with a "recording" light. However, this could be changed in the future. Smartphones generally do not have such lights anymore.
If Google glass were to become popular, it would combine four elements: pervasiveness, non knowing when you are being recorded, the appearance of a legitimate motive for recording people, and connectivity.
With smartphones it is usually clear when someone is recording someone else because of the physical location of the camera. It is not common or socially acceptable to record a person that you are interacting with. And glass has the potential to be recording all the time while it is very inconvenient to walk around recording everything with your cellphone.
A person who wears a spycam all the time and is found out will generally be shunned. Google glass has the appearance of legitimacy.
Video cameras by the government or private companies are governed by some set of regulations that mean they can't just post something you said to facebook or youtube.
The end result of Google glass is that now you have a situation where, so long as you are interacting with a person wearing Google glass, you may be being recorded. This will end up being very tiresome as people have to "watch what they say" all the time. The change is not a qualitative change: whenever people interact with others, in private or public, what they say or do may become known in another context. It is a quantitative change: now there is only one context: your boss can hear the dirty joke you tell at a party. Your friends and coworkers can hear the awkward one liner you use on a girl at a bar. Every political statement you make must be vetted for "racism", "sexism", "homophobia" and "anti-semitism", or you will be thrown out of university.
Btw I'm not saying they should be banned, I'm just explaining why I think Google glass does raise novel concerns about privacy.
Not that people don't independently come up with existing ideas, but credit is due to Vernor Vinge for suggesting this first in his novel "Marooned in Realtime"
The summary's reasoning is that "Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat..." but this same reasoning implies that if there hadn't been an influx of foreign workers, then wages would have risen, and thus their definition of a labor shortage would have been met.
I think the usage of terms like "shortage" on both sides is misleading. What there really is is a supply curve for IT related labor, and a demand curve for IT related labor. H-1B's increase the supply of IT related labor, lowering prices (i.e. wages). No matter what rules are imposed such as "equal wages for the equivalent job" H-1B's will lower wages, and if they didn't then they would not benefit industry in any way since (as is rightly pointed out by anti H-1B advocates) when people say they can't find an employee with certain traits, what they really mean is they can't find someone with those traits for that particular price
While I think there is room for debate on this issue, my problem is that this is essentially a political issue, and that people contributing to children's charities would be as likely to be on one side of the issue as the other. Maybe these "charities" are really just lobby groups that are technically charities, and that's fine if that's how lobby groups usually operate. But if they collect donations as generic children's charities and then use that money to campaign on political issues where the link to children's welfare is somewhat tenuous, then this seems like a bad use of the money that was donated.
That video is very interesting. However, according to the video, more is going on the a simple tragedy of the commons. Congestion actually decreases the capacity of the road (in vehicles per lane per hour). The case he makes for congestion pricing is very strong, even stronger than the argument you made in your post.
His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.
Because when I donate money to a children's charity, that's exactly what I'm hoping the money will be spent on. Think of all the children saved by these campaigns.
Those statements by Chris Kain sound anti-semitic: asking if the guy is Jewish and implying the the Israelis have magical powers to hack email addresses.
Executives conceptualize them differently because they aren't mathematical equivalents when it comes to the effect on the wealth of the shareholders. In both cases they return wealth to the shareholders, however they have different tax consequences and different methods by which one can tap that revenue source. When I get a dividend, I can have it reinvested or I can have that money available for other uses. With a stock buy back, I have to sell shares in order to make use of the extra money. What's more, I have to pay for the privilege.
So when you get dividends, you have to pay transaction fees if you want to re-invest. If there is a buy-back (and you choose not to sell), then you effectively have your "divident" re-invested for you, and you have to pay not to re-invest. So in both cases there is a "default" and you have to pay transaction fees if you do something other than the default. The thing with being over/undervalued is that everyone has their own opinion and there is no obvious reason why the opinion of management is espeically important. After all, if it was really obvious that managment only made buy-out offers when the stock really was undervalued, no one would agree to sell their stocks once the buyback was announced. On tax, I agree there is a difference, but given that the original question was about the mechanics of a buyback, I think the term "functionally equivalent" is quite fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post contains a lot of contradictions.
First, private equity firms do invest a lot of their own money in the firms they buy (hence the name. They invest private money (that of their owners/shareholders) into equity by buying firms). If they didn't banks would be rightly suspicious of the deal since the private equity firm would get paid no matter what happened.
Second, because of this, it is in the interests of the private equity firm that the company do well. In theory, if the PE firm bought a controlling share (say 51%) they would be in a position to screw over the remaining 49%, for example by selling the firm's assets to some other company owned by the PE firm, at a discount rate. This would most likely be illegal. Apart from this mechanism, the interests of the PE firm are exactly the same as the remaining shareholders: to get as much money from the firm as possible.
Finally, if it is more profitable to sell a companies assets and fire all its workers, then this is a good thing. If you don't already believe this then I don't have space to prove it in this post, but the general idea is that labor and capital are just like any other commodity, and so a company whose share price today is less than the value of its in place assets, is like a giant inefficient machine that consumes capital and labor for what is effectively negative profit.
As others have said VC's care about money, but the money your company can make is a direct function of the value of your algorithm (and also team etc.). Other commenters have talked about business plans, market reserach etc. but this is really secondary. What is of primary importance is what is your algorithm in itself, what does it do? Nothing you have claimed so far makes your algorithm stand out as something of value. If I were a VC I would ask you the following: Does your algorithm automatically fix the video with no input parameters needing to be speicifed? If it needs parameters, how is it different to composing a number of conventional video filters? Also do you have videos comparing the "best" current algorithms applied to video, with your own? Remember you are selling your algorithm, not the video editing software that could theoretically be built using your algroithm, as such software could also use other algorithms too, so that is not your competitive advantage.
I am arguing with YouTube's claim that they defend freedom of speech, no matter how offensive. If they decide not to actually defend free speech by censoring certain videos, that is their right, but it invalidates their claim to stand for freedom of speech for their uploaders (although they are still defending their own freedom of speech as a company).
YouTube claim to stand for free speech but they also have TOS that contain the usual vague disclaimers about "hate speech". For example I'd be interested to know which people can view each of these videos (it varies by country)
Innocence of Muslims
Jews Lead Gun Control Charge
Thank you for your helpful comment.
While there are some things that must be clearly rejected, like claims that the earth is only 6000 years old, there are issues relating to the philosophy and interpretation of the theory of evolution where there is room for compromise, and this would go a long way to diffusing the conflict.
My understanding is that many Christians object not to the content of the theory of evolution, but the the claim that it operates by "blind chance". We can compare it to Carl Sagan's idea that God has left a message in Pi. Should we be teaching in schools that such a message is absolutely impossible? I personally don't believe that God has left a message in Pi, but there is no conclusive evidence either way. Similarly the evidence doesn't rule out that God guides evolution. Evolution involves apparent randomness, just like the digits of pi. But there is no conclusive evidence that his apparent randomness is true randomness.
Whenever men are discriminated against, come of with reasons after the fact why this discrimination works in their favor.
I'm more concerned about your magical ability to turn anyone approaching you into a man, than your propensity for violence.
But you also said "let's forget about the "best solution" and see what we can do about merely good solutions." I was pointing out that there was a scale from optimal solutions (carbon taxes) to sub-optimal solutions (gas taxes, mileage taxes) to the worst options (encouraging very specific things like rooftop solar or grocery delivery). My claim was that the worst options do not even qualify as "merely good solutions".
All theory says that anti-matter should behave like matter becasue both kinds of matter have positive energy (hence the release of energy when they annihilate). Negative energy is harder to produce than anti-matter, and it is possible that there are fundamental limits to its production. Negative energy would produce anti-gravity (at least I think, given my rudimentary knowledge of GR). As "Electricity Likes Me" said in his/her reply, it is *possible* that contrary to what is expected, anti-matter floats up in spite of having positive energy
I'm interested to see what the software model for this will be. Sure they could use OpenCL, but it seems like a lot of the pain in using OpenCL derives from the underlying memory architecture. With a shared virtual address space and fully coherent caches all in hardware, it should be possible to have a much simpler software model than OpenCL. I guess it doesn't really matter what the software model is though since now that everything is in main memory, GPU functions can be called just like regular functions and the caller doesn't need to care how they are implemented. E.g. it should be possible to have a BLAS GPU library that operates on main memory pointers, where before the cost of copying a matrix to the GPU and back for a single operation woudn't have been worth it.
It doesn't have to be a carbon tax. Road mile taxes, or higher gasoline taxes would serve the same purpose in this instance. But when you get to the level of encouraging very specific behaviors like getting grocery delivery, I think that the combination of not knowing if this really incentivizes the right behavior, and the cost of setting up such schemes, makes these "solutions" worse than the status quo.
Fundamentally, environmental problems are economic problems: how to minimize environmental damage at minimal cost. Economic theory points to pollution taxes as the best solution. So while I disagree with the articles conclusion that governments should give incentives for ordering groceries by delivery, this kind of study does point people and companies in the direction of how to efficiently reduce pollution once the right incentives (pollution taxes) are provided.
And of course, in the meantime it's good for people to know how to efficiently reduce their own pollution even though there is no financial incentive to do so.
Capitalist economies always tend to work in strange ways. The first European explorers went in search of trivial luxury items like pepper. When you let people spend their money on precisely what they want, they often spend it in ways that don't seem to match up with what a rational person's wants and needs would seem to be.
Ads make money because people, for whatever reason, choose to click on ads. In the future, is is possible that people will prefer to pay a flat fee and see no ads? I think this is very likely, but we are not at the stage now, and so ads play a vital role in the economy, forming a kind of implicit micro-payment system.
The Luddites are out in force today. Try putting a little thought into it instead of letting your imagination run riot with doomsday scenarios.
Try dropping the attitude, mate.
Google Glass stands out like dogs balls making it a very poor choice for surreptitious recording.
When lots of people are using Google glass, they won't stand out very much. A person holding up their smartphone constantly to record things will. The light exists now, but since smartphones no longer all have "recording" lights, how long will Glass?
On the light, I see now that Google glass comes with a "recording" light. However, this could be changed in the future. Smartphones generally do not have such lights anymore.
With smartphones it is usually clear when someone is recording someone else because of the physical location of the camera. It is not common or socially acceptable to record a person that you are interacting with. And glass has the potential to be recording all the time while it is very inconvenient to walk around recording everything with your cellphone.
A person who wears a spycam all the time and is found out will generally be shunned. Google glass has the appearance of legitimacy.
Video cameras by the government or private companies are governed by some set of regulations that mean they can't just post something you said to facebook or youtube.
The end result of Google glass is that now you have a situation where, so long as you are interacting with a person wearing Google glass, you may be being recorded. This will end up being very tiresome as people have to "watch what they say" all the time. The change is not a qualitative change: whenever people interact with others, in private or public, what they say or do may become known in another context. It is a quantitative change: now there is only one context: your boss can hear the dirty joke you tell at a party. Your friends and coworkers can hear the awkward one liner you use on a girl at a bar. Every political statement you make must be vetted for "racism", "sexism", "homophobia" and "anti-semitism", or you will be thrown out of university.
Btw I'm not saying they should be banned, I'm just explaining why I think Google glass does raise novel concerns about privacy.
Not that people don't independently come up with existing ideas, but credit is due to Vernor Vinge for suggesting this first in his novel "Marooned in Realtime"
The summary's reasoning is that "Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat..." but this same reasoning implies that if there hadn't been an influx of foreign workers, then wages would have risen, and thus their definition of a labor shortage would have been met.
I think the usage of terms like "shortage" on both sides is misleading. What there really is is a supply curve for IT related labor, and a demand curve for IT related labor. H-1B's increase the supply of IT related labor, lowering prices (i.e. wages). No matter what rules are imposed such as "equal wages for the equivalent job" H-1B's will lower wages, and if they didn't then they would not benefit industry in any way since (as is rightly pointed out by anti H-1B advocates) when people say they can't find an employee with certain traits, what they really mean is they can't find someone with those traits for that particular price
While I think there is room for debate on this issue, my problem is that this is essentially a political issue, and that people contributing to children's charities would be as likely to be on one side of the issue as the other. Maybe these "charities" are really just lobby groups that are technically charities, and that's fine if that's how lobby groups usually operate. But if they collect donations as generic children's charities and then use that money to campaign on political issues where the link to children's welfare is somewhat tenuous, then this seems like a bad use of the money that was donated.
That video is very interesting. However, according to the video, more is going on the a simple tragedy of the commons. Congestion actually decreases the capacity of the road (in vehicles per lane per hour). The case he makes for congestion pricing is very strong, even stronger than the argument you made in your post.
Yes. Preferably in a Hank Hill voice.
His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.
Because when I donate money to a children's charity, that's exactly what I'm hoping the money will be spent on. Think of all the children saved by these campaigns.
Those statements by Chris Kain sound anti-semitic: asking if the guy is Jewish and implying the the Israelis have magical powers to hack email addresses.
Executives conceptualize them differently because they aren't mathematical equivalents when it comes to the effect on the wealth of the shareholders. In both cases they return wealth to the shareholders, however they have different tax consequences and different methods by which one can tap that revenue source. When I get a dividend, I can have it reinvested or I can have that money available for other uses. With a stock buy back, I have to sell shares in order to make use of the extra money. What's more, I have to pay for the privilege.
So when you get dividends, you have to pay transaction fees if you want to re-invest. If there is a buy-back (and you choose not to sell), then you effectively have your "divident" re-invested for you, and you have to pay not to re-invest. So in both cases there is a "default" and you have to pay transaction fees if you do something other than the default. The thing with being over/undervalued is that everyone has their own opinion and there is no obvious reason why the opinion of management is espeically important. After all, if it was really obvious that managment only made buy-out offers when the stock really was undervalued, no one would agree to sell their stocks once the buyback was announced. On tax, I agree there is a difference, but given that the original question was about the mechanics of a buyback, I think the term "functionally equivalent" is quite fair.