Going back to read the parent post, it doesn't accurately represent my views, and seems excessively inflammatory.
I should have noted that there is a distinctly inconsistent court record. Many judges have upheld what I see as the letter and original spirit of the law.
I do, however, feel that the court system is far too easily influenced by high-priced lawyers. There is far too much of a tennis match spirit with the judge as referee awarding the case to the better lawyer, and not seeing through and punishing misleading tactics. Judges should get properly pissed off when a lawyer tries to pull the wool over his eyes, and start throwing contempt-of-court charges around, not silently congratulate him.
It seems to me that most of these cases are decided by who has the better legal team, not by who is on the right side of the law.
The way copyright law is written, you are only supposed to be able to successfully sue people who have damaged your sales by unauthorized copying (or creation of derivative works).
IOW, if you're not selling or even attempting to sell, you may still technically have copyright protection, but since copyright violation isn't doing you any harm, any lawsuit should be considered spiteful and frivolous. The concept of abandonware does have some legal basis.
I believe there is also a copyright violation crime, but I think it is only applicable to commercial operations (correct me if I'm wrong). It is a bad law that came about through industry lobbying after copyright had been extended beyond any reasonable limit and abused for some time. Copyright was originally a matter of civil law for good reason: it's a purely economic matter that only does indirect harm, just like patent infringement.
And where on Earth did the idea that merchandising rights are protected come from? Titles are not supposed to be trademarked; trademark is for identifying products of your company. A toy is not copyrightable and therfore can't be a derivative work. Exact duplication of certain toys can violate industrial design protection, but making something based on the same character isn't (a 12" plushie isn't the same I.D. as a 3" hard-plastic action figure). There is no true legal justification for the monopoly on merchandising rights granted to copyright-holders.
More abuse of copyright, and of trademark, which the corrupt courts (starting from political appointees in the supreme court and going down from there) have been supporting for far too long. The judges are blatantly ignoring (which they like to call "interpreting") the clearly written law to follow their own opinions of what is "fair" (whether coerced by big I.P.-based companies or not). Now it's easier for them to justify, given the long precedence of bad judgements, but that shouldn't excuse them.
Not only will it be "challenging" but it will be quite an "enterprise" that will likely result in the "discovery" that they are as likely to "find a path" to "Atlantis" as the money needed.
Indeed, it seems a hopeless "endeavor" for a has-been superpower that is now almost as poor as "Columbia".
(while groans are acceptable, a barrage of rotten turnips would be frowned upon by the management, and reckless discharge of a firearm within city limits is a serious felony)
IMHO nobody would be stressed if they were doing truly important work. At least something that was important to themselves?
In 1962 the Addison-Wesley suggested that Donald Knuth write a book on compiler construction. The offer was accepted and lead to now famous "The Art of Computer Programming". At first Knuth believed that he would write a book on compilers. But after
drafting some chapters he change the content to encyclopedia of programming. In June 1965 he completed a first draft of twelve chapters. It was 3,000 hand-written pages long. In October after he send the draft of the first chapter to Addison-Wesley they
proposed that the book be published as seven separate volumes. Knuth worked around the clock writing the book and that prompted a
ulcer attack in the summer of 1967.
-Nikolai Bezroukov, "Portraits of Open Source Pioneers"
Feeling that your work is worthless certainly adds to stress, but I don't think it's the main factor. The main problem is pushing your brain too hard for too long every day.
People aren't made to worry all day over ten-thousand details. You have to know your limits and simply insist on living within them.
I've done farm work, pumped gas (outdoors in the Canadian winter), served food in busy restaurants, and did janitorial work. While each of these suck in their own way, none compares to the stress and bad health effects of office work (sitting still for that long each day causes all sorts of problems from muscle wasting to poor digestion).
Sure, there is the chance of mishaps (or asshole customers), but you're busy moving around and don't have time to focus on them. They happen, it sucks until you heal (or calm down), you don't really think about it otherwise.
Office jobs tend to put one in the role of "professional worrier". A programmer worries about bugs, a secretary worries about schedules and messages, and a manager worries about everything. The push to efficiently do non-mechanical work in isolation that requires human evaluation and judgement is brutally stressful in a way humans were never meant to deal with (the normal pattern being: spend a few minutes figuring out how to do something and worrying about how it can go wrong, then work for several hours simply following the plan you thought out).
Go work on a farm or even pushing a mop for a while, you'll sleep better, eat better, put on muscle, and have generally better health (after a short but rough initial period of adjustment). Unfortunately, you can't get paid well that way, and may find it unsatisfying for other reasons.
Office hours should be shorter than labour hours and breaks should be more frequent; the mind tires more quickly than the body. Frequent meetings without rigid agendas should be scheduled with the recognition that they serve a social meeting/group therapy function that is as important as the information sharing function that is normally considered their purpose. It might also be much healthier not to hire janitors for office buildings, but to have people clean their own work areas. It is relaxing, mechanical work that gives your body a chance to pump lymph around and your brain a chance to shut down for a moment to recouperate.
(sitting around all day worrying about everything) != (good working conditions)
I think children will still play pong and pacman a thousand years from now. They're classics, like checkers.
Retro gaming isn't an oddity. There's no particular virtue in novelty; Quake isn't better than Doom unless you've already played Doom until you're bored of it.
There are two areas in which the newest games are advancing: prettier graphics and larger, more complex, settings. The novelty of pretty graphics wears off quickly, and game worlds you can spend your life exploring don't really add anything for the casual gamer.
The old games are as much fun as the new ones. What they lack is the "progress high" of witnessing the latest and greatest step forward. That is a powerful thing; I remember the first time I played Doom as something like a religious experience. The same thing happened with Quake and Zelda64.
At some point, virtual reality will develop to be indistinguishable from reality. One thing people will use it for (between fantasies about barbarian killing sprees, orgies, and exploring surreally beautiful worlds) is to simulate the original forms of classic games (like the Q-Bert box that went "THUMP!" when Q-Bert fell off the pyramid), just as they'll simulate checkers (and I suspect that they'll simulate abacii, too; the ultimate case of emulation lag;) ).
It is not a reasonable approximation of monetary/banking system
You're right, I've got it completely backwards on that one. The switch to bank-issued fiat money was a simple case of government coercion, bank fraud, and mass delusion.
There is no underlying game which explains it, or even helps illustrate it, because its survival or crash is inextricably connected to the real world of productivity, believe in the value of a dollar, and continual government intervention.
I urge all of you to hedge your MS stock exposure with the appropriate investments which will become invaluable after the crash:
- shotgun shells
- canned food
BTW, thanks y'all for correcting me. I read the Motley Fool article, but I thought they were being deliberately misleading to make a more sensational story. I still think it is a bit misleading in the way they present MS as an entirely seperate being who is somehow maliciously cheating both the employees and the shareholders (not to mention the gov't and its customers, while unfairly attacking the industry through monopolistic articles). If they attacked Bill G. specifically, I might have agreed with them. He's the one who profited most, screwed everyone along the way, and set it up the way it is. But just blaming it all on this fictional independent MS boogeyman confuses the issue.
MS the corporate entity doesn't pay income tax (though it pays sales taxes and government fees and taxes for this, that, and the other thing... don't confuse "no income tax" with "no tax at all"). MS the co-operating group of workers pays income taxes, MS the group of shareholders pays capital gains taxes. Don't doubt that every dollar MS (the corporate entity) takes in ends up being taxed heavily on the way out, and if more wasn't going out than coming in, it'd be taxed on the way in, too.
If MS the corporate entity paid taxes, MS the group of shareholders would be taxed twice.
Yes, I think you're an idiot, too, for not recognizing the simple difference between a free citizen who spends their money however they please and a corporate entity which exists only to hand over its profits to its shareholders. What you're insisting is analagous to demanding that a vending machine should pay income tax for every quarter that goes into it, even though the owner of the machine must pay income tax on that same income.
Fast charging, fast discharging, add these babies on top of the main battery in your electric car (or hybrid) and you have the potential to regain maybe 80% of the energy when you stop and use it to start moving again.
In city driving, that means probably doubling the range of an electric car, and not having to worry too much about low mass for efficiency. This means having an efficient city car that carries enough batteries for long-range highway use. Sweeeeet.
Sure, there are plenty of other applications for something halfway between a battery and a capacitor, but this is the one I bet you're most likely to end up using, and the one that saves you the most money.
if MS clearly had a loss, it's not reflected on the balance sheets, nor in the cash on hand, nor in the price of the stock.
It's reflected in the balance sheets they use for tax purposes. The gov't considers it a loss (which is why they don't pay taxes), and I think they're right.
Perhaps I misunderstand the situation, I'm no expert on the details of publically traded corporations. I believe that there are a certain fixed number of stock shares for a company. I find it a little odd that the company can own some of those shares itself, but it apparently can (and this increases the inherent value of all other shares, as each includes ownership of a portion of the company-held shares; but then, all company property contributes to the inherent value of all shares... but what if it bought all the shares? would it just disappear into its own navel? I'll have to look into it some more and see how such absurdities are avoided).
The company could sell these shares to anyone, presumably at near current market value. So when employees exercise their stock options, the company takes a loss roughly equal to the difference between the price the employee pays and the current market value of the shares. Yes, they gain a little cash, but they lose shares of greater value.
Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I have a sneaking suspicion that I am... I hate to think that the system is even more screwy than I thought), but the company isn't free to just print up as many shares as they wish, they have a limited supply. At some point they run out, and either have to buy back stock or stop paying employees in stock options.
However, even if they can just print up stock, it doesn't change things much. In a rational system, printing up more stock directly reduces the value of all existing stock. If you make the assumption that the system isn't rational (despite the fact that you're probably right), then no calculations about value, profit, or loss are meaningful. You can hardly expect the IRS to just say "Aw, screw it! The whole system is fucked up, you guys are a big company, and your stock price is going up, so you must be profitable and we're taking a chunk of what your stock price went up by."
I think the characterization in that article of MS somehow simultaneously scamming the IRS, the employees, and the shareholders alike is very misleading. MS may be a legal entity, but it doesn't have a truly independent existence. From different points of view, MS is a co-operating group of workers, a shareholder-owned engine of profit, and even a branch of the government. The three split up MS's income between them.
I can see the idea of early shareholders screwing later shareholders, but that's about it.
At any rate, the point has been well made by others that plenty of taxes are being paid on those profits anyway. How many times do you think a corporation's profit should be taxed, anyway?
MS as a seperate entity from both employees and shareholders? Absurd!
Everyone involved is one or both of these things.
The shareholders are playing the silly game, and the employees are taking a slice here and there from the game as part of their salary.
I don't see anything wrong with the tax deduction, but I'm pretty shocked that they are allowed to report huge profits when they're clearly losing money between profit and expense.
I feel no sympathy for either the employees (who are well-paid by any measure) or the investors (who should know better).
The really brutal part here is that because of the way the monetary system is structured, this could go on forever, and instead of the money ultimately coming from the poor suckers caught in the crash (who chose to take their risk of their own free will), it could come from everyone in the form of inflation (and possibly higher taxes due to government bail-outs). Understanding why is left as an exercise to the reader (hint: first find out how the supply of money can be increased).
get someone to explain the time-value of money to you
I understand it perfectly well, but such concepts only have relevance when there is some basic means of extracting the stored value.
With dividends, the profits of the company are put directly into the hands of the shareholders. The stock price can be justified by comparing it to current dividends and projected future dividends, which have a rock-solid base on the company's profits.
Without dividends, the only direct means of extracting money from a company is by breaking it down and liquidating its assets, which consistently will get only a small fraction of the company's true worth. So there really isn't any future redemption or withdrawal of invested capital, just the future chance of reselling the stock on the rootless market.
Cut loose from the foundation of dividends, stock market values float freely (until they happen to dip below liquidation cost and the corporate raiders hit).
As for my crack about the monetary/banking system, that was about the sad fiat money situation. Our money isn't worth anything, and is supported purely by irrational belief in its value.
Usury (in the original sense of "charge for use", I find this term clearer and more descriptive than the euphemism "interest") is entirely sensible and fair: with commodity money (such as gold) it is practically indistinguishable from renting. However, fractional reserve "banking" is a fraud, and non-redeemable banknotes an absolutely absurd fraud.
I know that these things originally were based on the time-value of real money and that banknotes once were warehouse chits for stored precious metals, but the foundation of these systems has been cut away, and they now function as tokens in absurd, senseless games. Only the fact that the vast majority of the population either doesn't know this or finds it so distasteful that they ignore it, allows them to continue to serve the functions they did with their foundations intact. Even so, the small class which really understands the nature of modern money, and profits by playing games with it, can cause terrible damage to the people who don't understand it.
Utterly baseless money is part of the reason that whole countries can just fall apart economically like Russia did. Gold and silver coins might lose half of their value over 10 years, but they never just drop to 1% of their value in a few months like non-redeemable fiat money can. All the industrial wealth and human resources of this superpower were basically intact, but no economic mechanisms to exploit these resources could be formed without a stable currency.
The same thing could happen to any of us who can't give a reason for wanting money other than that other people want it. The market would just have to turn on your country (or collapse into itself, which it can do quite spontaneously, and screw everyone) for a little while to make you and your countrymen into pathetic beggars.
They don't guarantee a return on the purchase of their stock, as Mr. Ponzi did on his promissary notes.
However, their apparent profits are based on the same pyramid principle: new capital provides the return on investment for old investors.
This is what happens when people think that a simple extrapolation of past results is a reasonable model of future results.
An illustrative game: Gimme Double!
You hand someone a penny, and say "if you give me twice what I gave you, I might give you twice what you gave me".
They think "what the hell, it's only a penny!" and does it.
It goes back and forth for a while, with both players showing a 100% profit for each transaction (when it comes back to them), and wondering how far they should push it. Both want a significant profit, so they push it at least until it's enough money to care about.
Then one guys stops and keeps the money (hint, only play this game against compulsive gamblers).
In its purest form it's an honest game, just not a sensible one. The problem is when people don't recognize this game (the social stigma attached to gambling helps prevent people from learning these sorts of lessons).
Extend this to millions of players, add tokens to track who gave last, a system that lists the last payments as the "current price", and a class of professional analysts who pretend that it's all a sensible economic behavior, and you've created a pretty good model of a bubble stock like MS. Also, a pretty good model of the whole stock market. Not to mention a reasonable approximation of the monetary/banking system.
(BTW, anyone who sends me a penny at e-gold account number 134343 might get 2 pennies back... in some twisted alternate universe)
Slashdot Mirror
Won't someone please think of the ice sculptors!
--------
For only $39.95, you too can download a perfect copy of Nathalie Portman's breasts,
Personally, I'd kind of like the popsicle version.
--------
Parodies like Weird Al are an obvious example.
Except that he gets permission from everyone he parodies. He probably doesn't have to, but he does.
--------
I'm beginning to understand what God sees in this game. It looks like fun, from the player's perspective.
--------
Going back to read the parent post, it doesn't accurately represent my views, and seems excessively inflammatory.
I should have noted that there is a distinctly inconsistent court record. Many judges have upheld what I see as the letter and original spirit of the law.
I do, however, feel that the court system is far too easily influenced by high-priced lawyers. There is far too much of a tennis match spirit with the judge as referee awarding the case to the better lawyer, and not seeing through and punishing misleading tactics. Judges should get properly pissed off when a lawyer tries to pull the wool over his eyes, and start throwing contempt-of-court charges around, not silently congratulate him.
It seems to me that most of these cases are decided by who has the better legal team, not by who is on the right side of the law.
--------
The way copyright law is written, you are only supposed to be able to successfully sue people who have damaged your sales by unauthorized copying (or creation of derivative works).
IOW, if you're not selling or even attempting to sell, you may still technically have copyright protection, but since copyright violation isn't doing you any harm, any lawsuit should be considered spiteful and frivolous. The concept of abandonware does have some legal basis.
I believe there is also a copyright violation crime, but I think it is only applicable to commercial operations (correct me if I'm wrong). It is a bad law that came about through industry lobbying after copyright had been extended beyond any reasonable limit and abused for some time. Copyright was originally a matter of civil law for good reason: it's a purely economic matter that only does indirect harm, just like patent infringement.
And where on Earth did the idea that merchandising rights are protected come from? Titles are not supposed to be trademarked; trademark is for identifying products of your company. A toy is not copyrightable and therfore can't be a derivative work. Exact duplication of certain toys can violate industrial design protection, but making something based on the same character isn't (a 12" plushie isn't the same I.D. as a 3" hard-plastic action figure). There is no true legal justification for the monopoly on merchandising rights granted to copyright-holders.
More abuse of copyright, and of trademark, which the corrupt courts (starting from political appointees in the supreme court and going down from there) have been supporting for far too long. The judges are blatantly ignoring (which they like to call "interpreting") the clearly written law to follow their own opinions of what is "fair" (whether coerced by big I.P.-based companies or not). Now it's easier for them to justify, given the long precedence of bad judgements, but that shouldn't excuse them.
(IANAL, and I am especially not your lawyer)
--------
We're even closer to world-destruction than I thought.
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Jeebus is the true son of dog! This "Jebus" character is a false prophet.
--------
"comp.lang.forth has been talking about a Forth logo ... an anime Jedi warrior girl, scantily clad."
--Chuck Moore
Let's see a camel or a cup of coffee compete with that!
--------
Not only will it be "challenging" but it will be quite an "enterprise" that will likely result in the "discovery" that they are as likely to "find a path" to "Atlantis" as the money needed.
Indeed, it seems a hopeless "endeavor" for a has-been superpower that is now almost as poor as "Columbia".
(while groans are acceptable, a barrage of rotten turnips would be frowned upon by the management, and reckless discharge of a firearm within city limits is a serious felony)
--------
Heh, same here, but Judo, not TKD. There's no amount of code-related stress that can't be cured by throwing someone to the ground and strangling him.
I also get up and pace whenever I think, and do lots of calesthenics like free squats and handstand pushups.
--------
Is that a Jeebus-ghoti?
--------
IMHO nobody would be stressed if they were doing truly important work. At least something that was important to themselves?
-Nikolai Bezroukov, "Portraits of Open Source Pioneers"Feeling that your work is worthless certainly adds to stress, but I don't think it's the main factor. The main problem is pushing your brain too hard for too long every day.
People aren't made to worry all day over ten-thousand details. You have to know your limits and simply insist on living within them.
--------
I've done farm work, pumped gas (outdoors in the Canadian winter), served food in busy restaurants, and did janitorial work. While each of these suck in their own way, none compares to the stress and bad health effects of office work (sitting still for that long each day causes all sorts of problems from muscle wasting to poor digestion).
Sure, there is the chance of mishaps (or asshole customers), but you're busy moving around and don't have time to focus on them. They happen, it sucks until you heal (or calm down), you don't really think about it otherwise.
Office jobs tend to put one in the role of "professional worrier". A programmer worries about bugs, a secretary worries about schedules and messages, and a manager worries about everything. The push to efficiently do non-mechanical work in isolation that requires human evaluation and judgement is brutally stressful in a way humans were never meant to deal with (the normal pattern being: spend a few minutes figuring out how to do something and worrying about how it can go wrong, then work for several hours simply following the plan you thought out).
Go work on a farm or even pushing a mop for a while, you'll sleep better, eat better, put on muscle, and have generally better health (after a short but rough initial period of adjustment). Unfortunately, you can't get paid well that way, and may find it unsatisfying for other reasons.
Office hours should be shorter than labour hours and breaks should be more frequent; the mind tires more quickly than the body. Frequent meetings without rigid agendas should be scheduled with the recognition that they serve a social meeting/group therapy function that is as important as the information sharing function that is normally considered their purpose. It might also be much healthier not to hire janitors for office buildings, but to have people clean their own work areas. It is relaxing, mechanical work that gives your body a chance to pump lymph around and your brain a chance to shut down for a moment to recouperate.
(sitting around all day worrying about everything) != (good working conditions)
--------
I think children will still play pong and pacman a thousand years from now. They're classics, like checkers.
;) ).
Retro gaming isn't an oddity. There's no particular virtue in novelty; Quake isn't better than Doom unless you've already played Doom until you're bored of it.
There are two areas in which the newest games are advancing: prettier graphics and larger, more complex, settings. The novelty of pretty graphics wears off quickly, and game worlds you can spend your life exploring don't really add anything for the casual gamer.
The old games are as much fun as the new ones. What they lack is the "progress high" of witnessing the latest and greatest step forward. That is a powerful thing; I remember the first time I played Doom as something like a religious experience. The same thing happened with Quake and Zelda64.
At some point, virtual reality will develop to be indistinguishable from reality. One thing people will use it for (between fantasies about barbarian killing sprees, orgies, and exploring surreally beautiful worlds) is to simulate the original forms of classic games (like the Q-Bert box that went "THUMP!" when Q-Bert fell off the pyramid), just as they'll simulate checkers (and I suspect that they'll simulate abacii, too; the ultimate case of emulation lag
--------
It is not a reasonable approximation of monetary/banking system
You're right, I've got it completely backwards on that one. The switch to bank-issued fiat money was a simple case of government coercion, bank fraud, and mass delusion.
There is no underlying game which explains it, or even helps illustrate it, because its survival or crash is inextricably connected to the real world of productivity, believe in the value of a dollar, and continual government intervention.
--------
I urge all of you to hedge your MS stock exposure with the appropriate investments which will become invaluable after the crash:
- shotgun shells
- canned food
BTW, thanks y'all for correcting me. I read the Motley Fool article, but I thought they were being deliberately misleading to make a more sensational story. I still think it is a bit misleading in the way they present MS as an entirely seperate being who is somehow maliciously cheating both the employees and the shareholders (not to mention the gov't and its customers, while unfairly attacking the industry through monopolistic articles). If they attacked Bill G. specifically, I might have agreed with them. He's the one who profited most, screwed everyone along the way, and set it up the way it is. But just blaming it all on this fictional independent MS boogeyman confuses the issue.
--------
MS DOESN'T PAY ANY TAXES!!!!
MS the corporate entity doesn't pay income tax (though it pays sales taxes and government fees and taxes for this, that, and the other thing... don't confuse "no income tax" with "no tax at all"). MS the co-operating group of workers pays income taxes, MS the group of shareholders pays capital gains taxes. Don't doubt that every dollar MS (the corporate entity) takes in ends up being taxed heavily on the way out, and if more wasn't going out than coming in, it'd be taxed on the way in, too.
If MS the corporate entity paid taxes, MS the group of shareholders would be taxed twice.
Yes, I think you're an idiot, too, for not recognizing the simple difference between a free citizen who spends their money however they please and a corporate entity which exists only to hand over its profits to its shareholders. What you're insisting is analagous to demanding that a vending machine should pay income tax for every quarter that goes into it, even though the owner of the machine must pay income tax on that same income.
--------
Fast charging, fast discharging, add these babies on top of the main battery in your electric car (or hybrid) and you have the potential to regain maybe 80% of the energy when you stop and use it to start moving again.
In city driving, that means probably doubling the range of an electric car, and not having to worry too much about low mass for efficiency. This means having an efficient city car that carries enough batteries for long-range highway use. Sweeeeet.
Sure, there are plenty of other applications for something halfway between a battery and a capacitor, but this is the one I bet you're most likely to end up using, and the one that saves you the most money.
--------
if MS clearly had a loss, it's not reflected on the balance sheets, nor in the cash on hand, nor in the price of the stock.
It's reflected in the balance sheets they use for tax purposes. The gov't considers it a loss (which is why they don't pay taxes), and I think they're right.
Perhaps I misunderstand the situation, I'm no expert on the details of publically traded corporations. I believe that there are a certain fixed number of stock shares for a company. I find it a little odd that the company can own some of those shares itself, but it apparently can (and this increases the inherent value of all other shares, as each includes ownership of a portion of the company-held shares; but then, all company property contributes to the inherent value of all shares... but what if it bought all the shares? would it just disappear into its own navel? I'll have to look into it some more and see how such absurdities are avoided).
The company could sell these shares to anyone, presumably at near current market value. So when employees exercise their stock options, the company takes a loss roughly equal to the difference between the price the employee pays and the current market value of the shares. Yes, they gain a little cash, but they lose shares of greater value.
Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I have a sneaking suspicion that I am... I hate to think that the system is even more screwy than I thought), but the company isn't free to just print up as many shares as they wish, they have a limited supply. At some point they run out, and either have to buy back stock or stop paying employees in stock options.
However, even if they can just print up stock, it doesn't change things much. In a rational system, printing up more stock directly reduces the value of all existing stock. If you make the assumption that the system isn't rational (despite the fact that you're probably right), then no calculations about value, profit, or loss are meaningful. You can hardly expect the IRS to just say "Aw, screw it! The whole system is fucked up, you guys are a big company, and your stock price is going up, so you must be profitable and we're taking a chunk of what your stock price went up by."
I think the characterization in that article of MS somehow simultaneously scamming the IRS, the employees, and the shareholders alike is very misleading. MS may be a legal entity, but it doesn't have a truly independent existence. From different points of view, MS is a co-operating group of workers, a shareholder-owned engine of profit, and even a branch of the government. The three split up MS's income between them.
I can see the idea of early shareholders screwing later shareholders, but that's about it.
At any rate, the point has been well made by others that plenty of taxes are being paid on those profits anyway. How many times do you think a corporation's profit should be taxed, anyway?
--------
MS as a seperate entity from both employees and shareholders? Absurd!
Everyone involved is one or both of these things.
The shareholders are playing the silly game, and the employees are taking a slice here and there from the game as part of their salary.
I don't see anything wrong with the tax deduction, but I'm pretty shocked that they are allowed to report huge profits when they're clearly losing money between profit and expense.
I feel no sympathy for either the employees (who are well-paid by any measure) or the investors (who should know better).
The really brutal part here is that because of the way the monetary system is structured, this could go on forever, and instead of the money ultimately coming from the poor suckers caught in the crash (who chose to take their risk of their own free will), it could come from everyone in the form of inflation (and possibly higher taxes due to government bail-outs). Understanding why is left as an exercise to the reader (hint: first find out how the supply of money can be increased).
--------
get someone to explain the time-value of money to you
I understand it perfectly well, but such concepts only have relevance when there is some basic means of extracting the stored value.
With dividends, the profits of the company are put directly into the hands of the shareholders. The stock price can be justified by comparing it to current dividends and projected future dividends, which have a rock-solid base on the company's profits.
Without dividends, the only direct means of extracting money from a company is by breaking it down and liquidating its assets, which consistently will get only a small fraction of the company's true worth. So there really isn't any future redemption or withdrawal of invested capital, just the future chance of reselling the stock on the rootless market.
Cut loose from the foundation of dividends, stock market values float freely (until they happen to dip below liquidation cost and the corporate raiders hit).
As for my crack about the monetary/banking system, that was about the sad fiat money situation. Our money isn't worth anything, and is supported purely by irrational belief in its value.
Usury (in the original sense of "charge for use", I find this term clearer and more descriptive than the euphemism "interest") is entirely sensible and fair: with commodity money (such as gold) it is practically indistinguishable from renting. However, fractional reserve "banking" is a fraud, and non-redeemable banknotes an absolutely absurd fraud.
I know that these things originally were based on the time-value of real money and that banknotes once were warehouse chits for stored precious metals, but the foundation of these systems has been cut away, and they now function as tokens in absurd, senseless games. Only the fact that the vast majority of the population either doesn't know this or finds it so distasteful that they ignore it, allows them to continue to serve the functions they did with their foundations intact. Even so, the small class which really understands the nature of modern money, and profits by playing games with it, can cause terrible damage to the people who don't understand it.
Utterly baseless money is part of the reason that whole countries can just fall apart economically like Russia did. Gold and silver coins might lose half of their value over 10 years, but they never just drop to 1% of their value in a few months like non-redeemable fiat money can. All the industrial wealth and human resources of this superpower were basically intact, but no economic mechanisms to exploit these resources could be formed without a stable currency.
The same thing could happen to any of us who can't give a reason for wanting money other than that other people want it. The market would just have to turn on your country (or collapse into itself, which it can do quite spontaneously, and screw everyone) for a little while to make you and your countrymen into pathetic beggars.
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My bad.
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The stock market makes sense when the primary mode of shareholder profit is dividends.
Too bad they stopped doing that due to income tax being greater than capital gains tax.
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They don't guarantee a return on the purchase of their stock, as Mr. Ponzi did on his promissary notes.
However, their apparent profits are based on the same pyramid principle: new capital provides the return on investment for old investors.
This is what happens when people think that a simple extrapolation of past results is a reasonable model of future results.
An illustrative game: Gimme Double!
You hand someone a penny, and say "if you give me twice what I gave you, I might give you twice what you gave me".
They think "what the hell, it's only a penny!" and does it.
It goes back and forth for a while, with both players showing a 100% profit for each transaction (when it comes back to them), and wondering how far they should push it. Both want a significant profit, so they push it at least until it's enough money to care about.
Then one guys stops and keeps the money (hint, only play this game against compulsive gamblers).
In its purest form it's an honest game, just not a sensible one. The problem is when people don't recognize this game (the social stigma attached to gambling helps prevent people from learning these sorts of lessons).
Extend this to millions of players, add tokens to track who gave last, a system that lists the last payments as the "current price", and a class of professional analysts who pretend that it's all a sensible economic behavior, and you've created a pretty good model of a bubble stock like MS. Also, a pretty good model of the whole stock market. Not to mention a reasonable approximation of the monetary/banking system.
(BTW, anyone who sends me a penny at e-gold account number 134343 might get 2 pennies back... in some twisted alternate universe)
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