OK, the Beaureau of Economic Affairs for '02 has "Personal Income" at $8.9trn, of which
- wages were $5trn, - non-wage compensation (i.e. health care) was $1trm - propreiter's income (i.e. farmers, small business owners) was $1trn and - interest income was $1trn
There is an easy solution to this argument; please give me your source for 40% of GDP from personal salaries.
I don't believe people are spending twice their incomes. I don't believe, given corporate profits are only 8% of GDP, that there is some astonishing "unfiltered" profits somewhere in the system.
Please tell me where you get your figure of $4trn in wages.
The bulk of GDP is paid to workers, either through dividends or wages.
Now - here is the interesting bit; we're actually becoming a more equal society.
The % of people who own their own property, or shares (through their 401K) has never been higher.
Forty years ago, only rich people owned shares in businesses. Now, through mutual funds and 401Ks, millions of people do.
Institutional (rather than rich people) holdings of shares account for 65%+ of stock market capitalisation.
We don't feel richer, because we all need to save for our ever longer and more expensive retirements (rather than relying on extended families, dying young, having cheap health care or the government). But nevertheless, me, an average joe, owns shares in a bunch of enterprises!
I have a (very small!) stake in the future of America. (And Britain, and France, and India...)
Also - I don't get your argument about taxes falling as a % of corporate profits. If you notice, most of the scandals we see these days (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) is about people OVERSTATING profitability;-)
OK, from the beureau of economic affairs (http://www.bea.gov/bea/newsrelarchive/2003/gdp303 f.htm):
'02 GDP - $10.5trn
of which personal consumption (i.e. purchases by individuals) was $7.4trn
and...
gross private domestic investment was $1.6trn
and...
other was the rest
So - 75% of GDP is accounted for by consumer spending. Unless you estimate that people spend TWICE as mich as they earn (well, I do;-)) then your figures are absurd.
Also, your estimate of 15K US households is trivially true, but not relevent. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, etc. account for an absurd proportion of US and world "wealth". But are they really worth that?
If Bill G tried to sell all his MSFT shares (a) he'd pay a fortune in capital gain taxes, and (b) the stock price would sink under the weight of 10s of billions of dollars of stock hitting the market. In fact, when Billy dies, his wife and kids get $10m each, and his charitable foundation gets the rest. Larry and co. (plus Warren B) typically have similar systems in place.
So, your arguments are a little specious, in that Bill G is not screwing the little people through his wealth, only through producing crap software.
-1, completely no understanding of government finance or economics
Your figures are absolutely and completely wrong.
Firstly, corporate profits as a % of US GDP have been falling for the last 8-10 years, and represent c. 8% of GDP from 12% at their peak. In the last 100 years profits as a % of GDP has ranged from 6-12%. (Source: Datastream.)
Secondly, taxes are paid of out of income. Either through consumption taxes (out of income) or straight income taxes. Corporate taxes (see this weeks Economist at www.economist.com) account for only a few percent of GDP.
Thirdly, I tend to agree with you re supply-side. *BUT* that doesn't mean you know diddly-squat about economics.
If they buy land, then they buy it from somebody. The person that has sold the land now has the money in his (or her) pocket.
If they spend their money overseas, then it creates jobs in Italy or Taiwan, and the money is spent on video games made by Nintendo or Electronic Arts.
Which means these companies make a profit, which is good because otherwise your 401K would be empty and you wouldn't be able to afford to retire.
You make a good point, and you highlight the difficulties (as a government) of managing the balance of rights between individuals and the state.
Re the second part of your argument:
It is clearly not a good thing for us collectively to be beholden to one particular part of the world for an essential commodity.
The issue I have is: what is the way to avoid this dependence without walking all over the rights of the people to buy from who they choose. Stopping me from buying Widget A from Person B (who happens to live in China) is wrong. I should be allowed to buy from whoever I want to buy from.
Let me turn the discussion about free trade round a little; right now, the software on my server at home is Linux. You could make the argument that the Finns are "dumping" a free operating system to destroy American companies such as Microsoft.
Should I be banned from choosing Linux because it might put Washington State programmers out of business? No.
If we think about information the same holds true. Would it be right for the Spanish government to ban access to Slashdot to stimulate its own Internet discussion group industry? Or are we all richer from sharing information here, by our own free will.
Getting back to the oil issue: I would rather the govenment spent my money on developing alternative energy sources, than cutting off my ability to trade with Saudi Arabia.
(PS - Saudi Arabia buys TONNES of stuff from the US. I mean TONNES and TONNES and TONNES. Guns, planes, bombs, computer systems, oil equipment from Halliburton, and most importantly US Treasury Bonds that keep interest rates low.)
"Also, I, being a 'run-of-the-mill geek', am quite flattered that I now have the ability to gleefully (and apparently psychotically) 'wreak damage' on people's computers. Guess I picked that up and didn't even realize..."
This reminds me of a 1930s joke in Nazi Germany. An old Jewish man is reading a fascist tabloid newpaper (I forget the name).
His friend says to him: "why are you reading that filth? have you seen what they say about us in there?"
"I am forced to wear a Star of David, I have had my business taken away. But when I read this paper, and discover that Jews are running the world it makes me feel so much better."
"Every job we send overseas is less money and less power for the US. But you believe what you want."
I shall skip the lecture on the law of comparative advantage. I shall avoid talking about how spinning jennys put home textile workers out of business, or how coding software is not bending buts of metal. I shall avoid pointing out the America has lost jobs in manufacturing cars since the '60s, electronics since the '70s, memory chips since the '80s, computer programming since the '90s... and has grown richer not poorer. Accoding to John Mauldin, a distinguished economist (www.frontlinethoughts.com), 96% of the world economy's growth since '98 has been generated in the US. I shall pass on mentioning that the US still has one of the lowest rates of unemplyment in the world. (Certainly compared to more protectionist Europe.)
Instead I shall mention rights and freedom.
Lets say I have a San Jose based consulting business, and am bidding against Cap Gemini E&Y in France for a contract at a Brazilian aerospace company. If Cap E&Y can offer cheaper prices because it hives SOME of the work of to India, then I lose, my company loses, and all my employees lose. What right do YOU have to stop me hiring workers in India, or outsourcing some of my work there?
What right do you have to make ME lose that contract.
OK. I have a question, that is sort of related, to this space shuttle issue.
What is terminal velocity? I mean, what is the concept?
If I put up a very tall ladder that reached all the way too... ohhh... low earth orbit, and walked up it, then surely I would manage it without ever reaching terminal velocity.
OK. I was, and remain, deeply sceptical of the real reason for invasion of Iraq.
Just one thing gets me. If America can topple democratic governments, blow up pipelines, etc., why didn't it plant a few barrels full of chemical weopons in the Iraqi desert.
If you think about it, it would be a lot easier than most covert work. It's not killing people, so consciences are unlikely to work in overdrive. It's a warzone, so its pretty confused. Who's going to notice a helicopter dropping four or five barrels of dodgy stuff outside an airbase?
Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the war, I joked "of course they'll find WMD, all they've got to do is ship them from Virginia...", or "of course they'll find them, Donal Rumsfield still has the invoice."
If the American government is as sneaky and nasty and duplicitious as they're supposed to be, how come they didn't bother planting WMD in Iraq?
Their incompetence is the best evidence of their honesty.
Are yu sure this is insightful? Is looks a little like paranoia, trolling or just plain ignorance.
Economics/Finance 101:
The stock market exists as part of the giant asset allocation machine that is modern capitalism. People with savings (retirement plans, mutual funds) buy shares in companies. These companies have "floated" on the stock exchange because they either need capital (i.e. they sold shares to raise money from the public), or because their founders or early investors wish to realise gains or to diversify their assets.
In theory, a stock's value should be the discounted (net present) value of its future dividends.
Now, the excitement comes for companies whose futures are extremely unclear.
Take SCO - a company I have written about for investors. Now, if SCO wins its court case, then future dividends to shareholders (and David Boies) could be huge. Assume they get $1.5bn from IBM, and then $1bn a year in licensing from Linux. That is a cash flow you can value - and it is probably - after taxes, costs, and expensive security systems - worth about $6-8bn.
Now, SCO is currently valued at (according to Yahoo! Finance) $220m. The market - therefore - is assigning a chance that this court case will succeed of around 2-3%.
Does this Australian court case significantly change the probability of success in the US? No, it doesn't. Which is why SCO's stock price has hardly changed.
(By the way, I wrote a long piece, for investors, on the probability of SCO's case being succesful, and concluded that SCO was "all mouth, and no trousers".)
It's funny, I don't often feel sorry for ICANN. Along with the bulk of/.'ers I've found them heavy handed and only occasionally democratic. Mind you, they're better than some... but that's another story altogether.
That said, they don't deserve this. They are an NGO with an expertise. Not being interested in their opinion, or even giving them a glimpse of how and why decisions are made is worrying to the extreme.
On the positive side, this UN conference seems pretty unlikely to do anything. Mugabe (the "elected" President of Zimbabwe) has already used it to rail against such horrible (liberal, Western, bourgeois) things such as a free press. (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=tec hnologyNews&storyID=3972352&src=eDialog/GetContent §ion=news)
Let us not forget either; it's probably more important to bring clean drinking water and telephones to developing nations than Google and Slashdot.
If everyone timeshifts, then concepts like Prime Time become useless; people watch the program they want, not the one shown at 8pm on a Tuesday evening.
But there are major advantages to advertisers too. There is much better market segmentation; you *know* exactly how many, and what type of person watched your advert.
Try these guys, they pull together odds from all the bookmakers: http://bestbetting.com, or for a "person-to-person" betting exchange there is http://www.betfair.com. (They'll both do you odds on just about anything.)
Of course, using these is probably illegal in the US. So feel free to just delete this message and pretend I don't exist.
Disclaimer: I don't get any money from any of these people, am not employed, etc. This is purely for "information" only.
Unfortunately, these notes have a (c) on them. I was going to run off a few thousand myself, but realised I might be giving the open source community a bad name by my copyright violation;-)
In these days of modern OO programming, variable names have ceased to be a problem.
The solution, call all your variables 'a' and rely on scope to sort everything out. If you're getting confused, you've probably designed your program wrong and need to spend more time in a dark room with a copy of Design Patterns.
The other advantage of using 'a' as your sole variable is that it speeds up programming. 'a' is *much* quicker to type than... well, almost anything.
Re:Missing the biggest stupid software fashion
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 1
It's worse than you think!
For a lot of outsourcing contracts, the assets of the company are "sold" to the services firm as part of the contract. Makes perfect sense, right? If you're going to run the infrastructure, you shoudl own the infrastructure?
Except, it's all too often a bribe. We'll charge you more for outsourcing for the next ten years BUT! we'll buy your photocopier of you for twice what it's really worth. So you'll make your quarter! And all the stock analysts will love you!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, the Beaureau of Economic Affairs for '02 has "Personal Income" at $8.9trn, of which
;-)
- wages were $5trn,
- non-wage compensation (i.e. health care) was $1trm
- propreiter's income (i.e. farmers, small business owners) was $1trn
and
- interest income was $1trn
So - we're both right
OK - I don't believe your numbers.
There is an easy solution to this argument; please give me your source for 40% of GDP from personal salaries.
I don't believe people are spending twice their incomes. I don't believe, given corporate profits are only 8% of GDP, that there is some astonishing "unfiltered" profits somewhere in the system.
Please tell me where you get your figure of $4trn in wages.
See my other post.
;-)
The bulk of GDP is paid to workers, either through dividends or wages.
Now - here is the interesting bit; we're actually becoming a more equal society.
The % of people who own their own property, or shares (through their 401K) has never been higher.
Forty years ago, only rich people owned shares in businesses. Now, through mutual funds and 401Ks, millions of people do.
Institutional (rather than rich people) holdings of shares account for 65%+ of stock market capitalisation.
We don't feel richer, because we all need to save for our ever longer and more expensive retirements (rather than relying on extended families, dying young, having cheap health care or the government). But nevertheless, me, an average joe, owns shares in a bunch of enterprises!
I have a (very small!) stake in the future of America. (And Britain, and France, and India...)
Also - I don't get your argument about taxes falling as a % of corporate profits. If you notice, most of the scandals we see these days (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) is about people OVERSTATING profitability
OK, from the beureau of economic affairs (http://www.bea.gov/bea/newsrelarchive/2003/gdp303 f.htm):
;-)) then your figures are absurd.
'02 GDP - $10.5trn
of which personal consumption (i.e. purchases by individuals) was $7.4trn
and...
gross private domestic investment was $1.6trn
and...
other was the rest
So - 75% of GDP is accounted for by consumer spending. Unless you estimate that people spend TWICE as mich as they earn (well, I do
Also, your estimate of 15K US households is trivially true, but not relevent. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, etc. account for an absurd proportion of US and world "wealth". But are they really worth that?
If Bill G tried to sell all his MSFT shares (a) he'd pay a fortune in capital gain taxes, and (b) the stock price would sink under the weight of 10s of billions of dollars of stock hitting the market. In fact, when Billy dies, his wife and kids get $10m each, and his charitable foundation gets the rest. Larry and co. (plus Warren B) typically have similar systems in place.
So, your arguments are a little specious, in that Bill G is not screwing the little people through his wealth, only through producing crap software.
-1, completely no understanding of government finance or economics
Your figures are absolutely and completely wrong.
Firstly, corporate profits as a % of US GDP have been falling for the last 8-10 years, and represent c. 8% of GDP from 12% at their peak. In the last 100 years profits as a % of GDP has ranged from 6-12%. (Source: Datastream.)
Secondly, taxes are paid of out of income. Either through consumption taxes (out of income) or straight income taxes. Corporate taxes (see this weeks Economist at www.economist.com) account for only a few percent of GDP.
Thirdly, I tend to agree with you re supply-side. *BUT* that doesn't mean you know diddly-squat about economics.
Regards,
Robret
If they buy land, then they buy it from somebody. The person that has sold the land now has the money in his (or her) pocket.
If they spend their money overseas, then it creates jobs in Italy or Taiwan, and the money is spent on video games made by Nintendo or Electronic Arts.
Which means these companies make a profit, which is good because otherwise your 401K would be empty and you wouldn't be able to afford to retire.
And I consider pornography as at least as important as communicating with friends and family.
Just trolling...
You make a good point, and you highlight the difficulties (as a government) of managing the balance of rights between individuals and the state.
Re the second part of your argument:
It is clearly not a good thing for us collectively to be beholden to one particular part of the world for an essential commodity.
The issue I have is: what is the way to avoid this dependence without walking all over the rights of the people to buy from who they choose. Stopping me from buying Widget A from Person B (who happens to live in China) is wrong. I should be allowed to buy from whoever I want to buy from.
Let me turn the discussion about free trade round a little; right now, the software on my server at home is Linux. You could make the argument that the Finns are "dumping" a free operating system to destroy American companies such as Microsoft.
Should I be banned from choosing Linux because it might put Washington State programmers out of business? No.
If we think about information the same holds true. Would it be right for the Spanish government to ban access to Slashdot to stimulate its own Internet discussion group industry? Or are we all richer from sharing information here, by our own free will.
Getting back to the oil issue: I would rather the govenment spent my money on developing alternative energy sources, than cutting off my ability to trade with Saudi Arabia.
(PS - Saudi Arabia buys TONNES of stuff from the US. I mean TONNES and TONNES and TONNES. Guns, planes, bombs, computer systems, oil equipment from Halliburton, and most importantly US Treasury Bonds that keep interest rates low.)
Cheers,
Robert
"Also, I, being a 'run-of-the-mill geek', am quite flattered that I now have the ability to gleefully (and apparently psychotically) 'wreak damage' on people's computers. Guess I picked that up and didn't even realize..."
This reminds me of a 1930s joke in Nazi Germany. An old Jewish man is reading a fascist tabloid newpaper (I forget the name).
His friend says to him: "why are you reading that filth? have you seen what they say about us in there?"
"I am forced to wear a Star of David, I have had my business taken away. But when I read this paper, and discover that Jews are running the world it makes me feel so much better."
I'm sorry, but you're wrong.
"Every job we send overseas is less money and less power for the US. But you believe what you want."
I shall skip the lecture on the law of comparative advantage. I shall avoid talking about how spinning jennys put home textile workers out of business, or how coding software is not bending buts of metal. I shall avoid pointing out the America has lost jobs in manufacturing cars since the '60s, electronics since the '70s, memory chips since the '80s, computer programming since the '90s... and has grown richer not poorer. Accoding to John Mauldin, a distinguished economist (www.frontlinethoughts.com), 96% of the world economy's growth since '98 has been generated in the US. I shall pass on mentioning that the US still has one of the lowest rates of unemplyment in the world. (Certainly compared to more protectionist Europe.)
Instead I shall mention rights and freedom.
Lets say I have a San Jose based consulting business, and am bidding against Cap Gemini E&Y in France for a contract at a Brazilian aerospace company. If Cap E&Y can offer cheaper prices because it hives SOME of the work of to India, then I lose, my company loses, and all my employees lose. What right do YOU have to stop me hiring workers in India, or outsourcing some of my work there?
What right do you have to make ME lose that contract.
Robert
OK. I have a question, that is sort of related, to this space shuttle issue.
What is terminal velocity? I mean, what is the concept?
If I put up a very tall ladder that reached all the way too... ohhh... low earth orbit, and walked up it, then surely I would manage it without ever reaching terminal velocity.
Help required please!
OK. I was, and remain, deeply sceptical of the real reason for invasion of Iraq.
Just one thing gets me. If America can topple democratic governments, blow up pipelines, etc., why didn't it plant a few barrels full of chemical weopons in the Iraqi desert.
If you think about it, it would be a lot easier than most covert work. It's not killing people, so consciences are unlikely to work in overdrive. It's a warzone, so its pretty confused. Who's going to notice a helicopter dropping four or five barrels of dodgy stuff outside an airbase?
Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the war, I joked "of course they'll find WMD, all they've got to do is ship them from Virginia...", or "of course they'll find them, Donal Rumsfield still has the invoice."
If the American government is as sneaky and nasty and duplicitious as they're supposed to be, how come they didn't bother planting WMD in Iraq?
Their incompetence is the best evidence of their honesty.
Now, I know this is completely off topic, but was I the only one who thought that the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged were more like rape scenes.
And the charectarisation? Uggghhhh, awful.
Are yu sure this is insightful? Is looks a little like paranoia, trolling or just plain ignorance.
Economics/Finance 101:
The stock market exists as part of the giant asset allocation machine that is modern capitalism. People with savings (retirement plans, mutual funds) buy shares in companies. These companies have "floated" on the stock exchange because they either need capital (i.e. they sold shares to raise money from the public), or because their founders or early investors wish to realise gains or to diversify their assets.
In theory, a stock's value should be the discounted (net present) value of its future dividends.
Now, the excitement comes for companies whose futures are extremely unclear.
Take SCO - a company I have written about for investors. Now, if SCO wins its court case, then future dividends to shareholders (and David Boies) could be huge. Assume they get $1.5bn from IBM, and then $1bn a year in licensing from Linux. That is a cash flow you can value - and it is probably - after taxes, costs, and expensive security systems - worth about $6-8bn.
Now, SCO is currently valued at (according to Yahoo! Finance) $220m. The market - therefore - is assigning a chance that this court case will succeed of around 2-3%.
Does this Australian court case significantly change the probability of success in the US? No, it doesn't. Which is why SCO's stock price has hardly changed.
(By the way, I wrote a long piece, for investors, on the probability of SCO's case being succesful, and concluded that SCO was "all mouth, and no trousers".)
IDAWIFBANAL (I do actually work in finance but am not a lawyer)...
Unfortunately, what you propose comes under the heading of "market manipulation". And, unfortunately, it is illegal.
Sorry.
It's funny, I don't often feel sorry for ICANN. Along with the bulk of /.'ers I've found them heavy handed and only occasionally democratic. Mind you, they're better than some... but that's another story altogether.
c hnologyNews&storyID=3972352&src=eDialog/GetContent §ion=news)
That said, they don't deserve this. They are an NGO with an expertise. Not being interested in their opinion, or even giving them a glimpse of how and why decisions are made is worrying to the extreme.
On the positive side, this UN conference seems pretty unlikely to do anything. Mugabe (the "elected" President of Zimbabwe) has already used it to rail against such horrible (liberal, Western, bourgeois) things such as a free press. (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=te
Let us not forget either; it's probably more important to bring clean drinking water and telephones to developing nations than Google and Slashdot.
If everyone timeshifts, then concepts like Prime Time become useless; people watch the program they want, not the one shown at 8pm on a Tuesday evening.
But there are major advantages to advertisers too. There is much better market segmentation; you *know* exactly how many, and what type of person watched your advert.
It's not all bad...
In the future, there will be robots...
(Sorry...)
OK.
Martha got done - really - for lying to the Feds and shredding evidence.
If she'd kept schtum, she would have walked away.
Try these guys, they pull together odds from all the bookmakers: http://bestbetting.com, or for a "person-to-person" betting exchange there is http://www.betfair.com. (They'll both do you odds on just about anything.)
Of course, using these is probably illegal in the US. So feel free to just delete this message and pretend I don't exist.
Disclaimer: I don't get any money from any of these people, am not employed, etc. This is purely for "information" only.
Unfortunately, these notes have a (c) on them. I was going to run off a few thousand myself, but realised I might be giving the open source community a bad name by my copyright violation ;-)
PC aren't going to catch up that fast...
;-)
So, 480 chips in '97. Assume silicon power/density doubles every 18-months, a la Moore's law.
By 2000, it would be 110. And this year it would be 27.
Now, I don't know about you - but PCs seems to be catching up pretty fast
In these days of modern OO programming, variable names have ceased to be a problem.
The solution, call all your variables 'a' and rely on scope to sort everything out. If you're getting confused, you've probably designed your program wrong and need to spend more time in a dark room with a copy of Design Patterns.
The other advantage of using 'a' as your sole variable is that it speeds up programming. 'a' is *much* quicker to type than... well, almost anything.
It's worse than you think!
For a lot of outsourcing contracts, the assets of the company are "sold" to the services firm as part of the contract. Makes perfect sense, right? If you're going to run the infrastructure, you shoudl own the infrastructure?
Except, it's all too often a bribe. We'll charge you more for outsourcing for the next ten years BUT! we'll buy your photocopier of you for twice what it's really worth. So you'll make your quarter! And all the stock analysts will love you!
Hooray!
Ouch!
How right you are. My apologies for my stupidity and ignorance...