"it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out"
Any response to the fact that said fix was in fact "stuck in" 6 months ago? The same day the parent poster noticed the problem, and did nothing about it, others noticed it and did do something about it.
Discussions of why Wikipedia can't possibly work become quickly tiresome when they ignore the fact that it does work and/or fail to identify any standard to compare against. Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!
Yes, Wikipedia is at root a non-democratic institution, and, were it a govenment, would be a dictatorship. Kind of like every privately held company or charitable foundation in the world.
So they own a house that can't be sold for the amount it costs to buy it? Heck, they could sell it to themselves for a dollar. I don't see how "can afford to own but not to buy" is a meaningful concept.
I don't have a number for % of households that could or do own their own home. But reasoning from related numbers, (55% of housing units are owner-occupied, 38% renter, 7% vacant) it seems pretty clear that significantly more than half can, and in fact do, own their own homes.
I emphasize that that 55% rate is third lowest in the country behind Hawaii and the District of Columbia (which are both anomalous), and that 7% vacancy rate is second lowest behind only Conneticut; so it makes sense that housing in California is damn expensive.
In my experience most people who think the average family can't afford a home are themselves well above average, but wouldn't consider living in the home an average family does live in.
Sorry, as a demographics geek, I can't let it go...
"Maybe, but more than half the people in California can not at this time, afford to buy a home in California"
Actually, housing units in California are 55% owner-occupied. The median Californian household makes 52K and owns their home. Mind you, I'm not disputing your basic point: Housing in California is expensive; moreso, on average, than any other state except Hawaii. But my basic point is that the original poster, along with most people in the top 30% income bracket, have no realistic idea of how the vast majority of their neighbors live. Every time I see or hear someone say, "Well, obviously no one could really live on $X", X is somewhere in the 70-90% range.
Addictions interfere with other significant life activities. A drug user is an addict if they want to keep thier job (for example), but can't because they can't/won't control their drug use sufficiently. The reasonable test for whether it is an addiction in this context is not whether you could stop without great pressure, or whether stopping would cause you harm. The reasonable test is, do you continue to do it despite it screwing up your life?
I doubt your use of shoes or toothpaste prevents you from engaging in any significant life activities.
Activities are not inherently addictions or not, regardless of whether those activities are "using computers", "brushing your teeth" or "shooting up heroin". If you can't/won't stop playing WoW long enough to keep your job, and wind up getting evicted because you can't pay the rent, it's an addiction.
"Not really. No one can afford to live in CA on $80k a year, even in a U-Stor-It."
I know you're just trying to be funny, but REALLY, 70% of California households live on less than $80K a year. Half of them live on less than $50K a year.
You can't "own" a chair, even if you do build it yourself. It's not property. You may have legal possesion of the chair, but that's much different. The chair you build (or Aeron builds) belongs to the public at large, it's just that you (or they) as the creator is granted an exclusive and transferable right to it by the government.
If I create something, I'm going to consider it mine, whether it is some code or a chair. If you create something, I'm going to consider it yours.
Legally, your description may be right, though I think the risk of a "financial death sentence" is a bit overstated. Morally, I reject the notion that code is inherently more or less capable of being property than a chair. If you're hacking OS/X in a way that is consistant with the assumption that the code is Apple's and they've sold you the right to use one copy, that's fine with me, and I'd suspect it's fine with Apple. If you're assuming code cannot be owned, and thus justifying hacking it, or rejecting hacking it on that basis, I think your argument is flawed.
295 lb-ft. (82 more from the gas once you're moving) But in any case the question for spinning your tires is how fast you transition from 0 to peak; with electric motors, you can make that transition essentially instantaneously if you like. If you hook up the electric motor in a Prius to a knife switch supplying all the amps they can handle, they'll smoke whatever tires you'd like. This is not what Toyota has done, but it's not because electric is inherently inferior to gas for acceleration; quite the opposite.
Sorry if I went a bit over the top on my last post. You think cars are cool; that's OK, but it's no excuse for not knowing what you're talking about. You "roast" that hybrid off the line because you want to, and he doesn't. It's not your suspension, nor you close-ratio transmission (the Prius has a CVT, hard to get closer than that).
Anyhow, don't take it personally, IMO all cars are for suckers. You'll certainly roast me with my '72 Raleigh Superbe.
At 0, or any low rpm, the electric motors in a hybrid will easily have enough torque that tire traction will be the limiting factor on acceleration (even if you put big sticky race car tires on). Their controllers are programmed for efficiency, because hybrid buyers are gennerally uniterested in pointlessly screaming away to the next stoplight. Gasoline engines just don't function at all at 0 rpm, and don't function efficiently at low revs; so they must rely on slippy clutches to get moving from a stop, and they must be made much larger and less efficient than otherwise to get decent acceleration.
"And for all those others out there reading this, no, I don't think it was an impressive feat"
Yet you did it, and proudly recounted the experience here. Don't be so humble. You did it. You pulled out your wallet, and bought a big inneficient engine, and you pull it out and pay too much for gas. Go ahead man, be proud.
"Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts"
Are you insane? Completely incapable of checking the facts behind your assumptions? Sorry, but lots of people seem to think this, and its just not fact based.
The current administration is out-spending any othe post WWII one by an enormous margin. Before you say it: that's adjusted for inflation; per capita; as a percent of GDP; in relation to revenue; you name it. You pick a reasonable way to compare spending levels, this administration is on top; by a staggering amount. And second and third are Regan and Bush Senior.
I fail to understand how people can continue to support the Republican party on fiscal grounds. They utterly lost control of their financial sphincters 25 years ago.
Yeah, it's off topic, but I agree with you about the civil liberties...
Ending the downward redistribution of wealth would certainly change how wealth was distributed. Without some sort of constant downward redistribution, those with wealth ought to be able to easily aquire ever more of it unless they are incompetent, which they aren't. I'll stipulate that that might be in some sense a more fair society, but I suggest it may not be a more healthy one. Historically, it appears to me that insufficient wealth redistribution mechanisms will screw up your society just as surely as excessive ones.
"Yes, I know that legalese needs to be cleaned up" Which I think you will find impossible. In particular, you need to define "DRM system". To use Linus's example, define what you are restricting in such a way that it rules out any effective DRM, but doesn't include a Linux kernel that will only load modules signed by RedHat (or trusted party of your choice). It can't be done. If I can build a system that will refuse to run stuff I don't want it to, others can build systems that will refuse to run stuff they don't want it to. Which of us is building a secure system, and which is building DRM? It depends entirely which stuff we don't want it to run.
Frankly, saying you can't use GPL3 code as part of a DRM scheme is inherently ridiculous; If I'm writing code for a DRM scheme, I'm not terribly likely to choose any GPL version for my license now am I? If the vast majority of code everywhere was GPL3, it might slow down DRM implementers by a few days while they re-implemented the stuff they needed; but that's not the case, and DRM implementation isn't being held up by lack of software in any case. This will do squat to slow down DRM, and will add another restriction that people will have to worry about.
How about not trying to use the license on your software to solve unrelated social ills?
Legislators passing bad laws for money at the behest of the Entertainment industry certainly happens, and will undoubtably continue. Legislators doing so when the law in question would obviously crash the entire Tech sector, then watching it happen, not so much. DRM locking down your computer and making it useless no matter what you do is not going to happen. Perfect DRM, that lets you play some peice of content, but never copy it, is impossible. Everybody knows this. The entertainment big wigs certainly know this. Hence they will not bother. They will make it take some effort to copy it, and will make it illegal to go to that effort. And I don't care. I don't need their stinking content. I just want to be able to do what I want with my own content. If I can't do what I want with content I make, then neither can the zillion small businesses that make up a vast amount of the economy, and with whose ability to operate legislators will not screw.
"We could have the security of knowing who wrote the software we run OR we can have the freedom to write and run our own software."
Personally, I'm not seeing a lot of threat to my freedom to write and run my own software. All computer makers everywhere are going to stop letting independent developers write software for there hardware? I'm not too woried about that businaess model taking over.
Knowing who wrote the software running on my computer, on the other hand, is a constant concern. It's not sacrificing essential freedom for a little safety, as Franklin was rightly opposed to. It's maintaining the freedom to run my own software instead of getting rooted and locked out by five tons of malware.
Linus gets the heart of the matter: The only difference between DRM and security is intent. The GPL v3 and the DMCA make the same mistake from opposite sides of the issue. They put legal restrictions on technical capabilities to try to force an ethical debate. In either case, the restrictions will cause all manner of headaches for unintended targets, and won't do squat to accomplish their intended goal.
You want to fight DRM? Great! I'm with you. You want people to put confusing restrictions on their software licenses that will prevent using their code for legitmate security purposes? No thanks. You don't think the installed Linux base is sufficient that hardware makers won't just stop making hardware that will run it, but you think the likely adoption rate of GPLv3 is going to do the trick? The DRM restricitons in GPLv3 and DRM itself have two things in common: They won't work, and they'd be a bad idea if they did.
Historically, an average stock market investment should net a return slightly over 10%. This can come from dividends, or from an increase in the stock price. But the only reason the stock price is going to increase is because someone else is buying it who also expects to make money, either from dividends or an increase in the stock price.... So it all comes back to dividends. Companies make money and pay it out to their shareholders. Trying to make money based on anything other than companies eventually paying enough dividends to justify your investments is trying to make money by taking it from less wise or lucky investors. This is entirely possible, but requires losers as well as winners.
At a P/E of 10, the company is a fine buy if they just sit there and keep it up. At 20-25, you wan to expect that they are about to take off; that their current earnings don't really reflect where they'll be at in a few years.
Google (according to the other poster) is at a 70+ P/E ratio. That's serious crazy territory; Google would have to septuple earnings, immediately, to justify that.
Please call up whoever taught you there was no need to know when to use a semicolon or comma instead of a period. Tell them that they were wrong. It will get your point across better if you use correct punctuation. Then tell them that if they think you're really going to worry about it in a slashdot post, they are an idiot; and not in a good way. Or they just like complaining, in which case, happy to help.
SS is slightly broken; it will not be able to pay full benefits as of 2050 or so. Bush put forward a plan that even his administration agreed would do nothing to fix that. It made all kinds of changes and sacrificed various garauntees, in order to not address the problem. It wasn't a solution, it was a partial elimination.
"the American heartland" Is that like, the really American part of America?
"Democrats don't care about the problem" If SS is broken and doesn't get fixed, I'm thinking I'll blame the party in control of both houses of Congress and the Whitehouse. I can only assume those Democrats were aplauding sensible Republicans who helped them stop Bush, since they could not have done so without them. If Republicans had a solution to this, or any problem, they have the numbers to enact their will; For any problems remaining unsolved, I can only conclude they do not have solutions.
"I don't ever remember them heckling a Democrat President." I suggest the fault is with your memory; Clinton got boos. Since when is applause "heckling"?
Yes, congress has a retirement plan that involves more than just Social Security. As does anyone who has a good job, plans to retire, and is not an idiot. Social Security is/was designed to ensure that people don't work until they get too old to do so and then starve to death. Relying on SS alone is stupid if you aspire to do any better than not starving to death. The Democrats applauded because they successfully stopped Bush from "improving" SS in ways that would remove the garauntee you won't starve to death, and wouldn't extend it's solvency at all.
I hate that argument. If it's permisible to make a particular choice, it's wrong to discriminate based on it when it's not relevant.
Besides, I don't feel I decided on my religious and political beleifs. I concluded they were correct. I suppose I could claim to beleive things I think are ludicrous; like "the current deficit spending level is fiscally defensible", but I still wouldn't beleive it.
But, OK, I choose to wear my hair kind of long. Is it more or less OK to advertise a long-hair friendly guild than a gay-friendly one? How about a white-friendly one? In short, what relevance does choice vs not have?
Oh give me a break. I'm not on a jury, or involved in the court system in any way, I don't have to presume squat. If you watch a guy point a gun at a teller, demand money, and run out the door with it, and then someone asks you what happened do you say "That guy robbed the bank!", or "It looked a lot like that guy robbed the bank, but don't call the police, because that would imply a crime was commited, and naturally I assume he is innocent..."
Did Bush ignore the law in authorizing this wiretapping? Sure looks that way to me. Does the President have the authority to do that if he deems it necessary? That's debateable. Damn scary if so. Assuming the President did have such authority, wouldn't remotely reponsible exercise thereof involve seeking to change the law asap? Well, duh.
I do understand how the stock market works; people buy parts of companies, who do things that make money, and pay it those the owners, who thus make money. Since it is not always clear how much money different companies will make, this gets confused by lots of gambling, scheming, and ripping off the less wise or lucky. But that's all inefficiencies. The market as a whole over the long term, and quite a few boring companies as individuals over shorter terms, are good investments because companies do stuff that earns money, and they pay it to their owners as dividends.
"They could have a 10 to 1 split and trade at 40-45"
That's just saying "the price could go up to 400-450 dollars". To which I'll say, yes, it could, and if you bought today and sold then you'd have made a bunch of money. But you've made it at the expense of the later investor you sold to. That's how a pyramid scheme works, early investors make money at the expense of later investors. Think you're still early enough? Maybe you are, but the scheme depends on someone eventually thinking that and being wrong.
To not be a pyramid scheme, a company has to eventually pay dividends sufficient to justify its stock price. In some cases, you may want to pay more than the current earnings justify, because you think future earnings will be bigger by enough to justify it. But it's important to know how much bigger the earnings will need to be. To justify Googles current price, its earnings will need to increase, fairly soon, by roughly ten thousand percent. If you think that's likely, by all means buy Google stock.
"Would you refer to all growth investment stratagies as pyramid schemes?"
No. To the extent that any investment strategy expects to make money based on something other than the companies in question making profits and paying dividends, that strategy is a pyramid scheme. Now, it is perfectly reasonable to buy a stock without expecting a reasonbale return via dividends in the short term if you have reason to beleive you'll get a bigger return, via dividends, in the longer term. If you're hoping the stock price will go up, and you'll sell, and nobody will eventually get a reasonable return via dividends, then it's a pyramid scheme. You're investing early in hopes of leaving some later investor with the short straw. Good growth strategies may ignore P/E, but only to the extent that they are focussed instead on (CurrentP)/(FutureE).
Think through your prediction of how it's all going to work out so that the stock is worth what you paid. It's a pyramid sheme if it doesn't end with "...and then they'll be making enough money to pay big enough dividends that I'll get my money back, plus a reasonable return."
If you are going to buy Google shares today, you should have a story in your head you think is how it will work out that ends this way. And before the "..." should be something explaining why their revenue is going to go up by aproximately TEN THOUSAND PERCENT. More if it's not going to happen soon. If you can't tell yourself that story, there are better investments than Google at it's current price.
I like Google a whole lot, and I'm generally an optimist; But I can't see that story.
It is a good story; he's a really neat guy, and an object lesson in the value of identifying what's important to you and ignoring everything else. But I disagree that everyone can win; certainly not everyone can live my uncles back-to-the-land existence. There isn't enough land.
Supporting the worlds current population requires urban societies dependant on truck drivers, trash collectors, etc. It seems unlikely to me that enough people can be found who have a definition of "winning" that involves being a trash collector. I would hope, for the sake of my fellow man, that we can form a society where being a trash collector can be part of "doing okay". For myself, I want to do great, and that means not being a trash collector.
Slashdot Mirror
"it'll probably be 5 minutes until someone sticks in a quick edit to fix the specific issue you pointed out"
Any response to the fact that said fix was in fact "stuck in" 6 months ago? The same day the parent poster noticed the problem, and did nothing about it, others noticed it and did do something about it.
Discussions of why Wikipedia can't possibly work become quickly tiresome when they ignore the fact that it does work and/or fail to identify any standard to compare against. Please identify this comprehensive, authoritative source of encyclopedic information I should be using instead of Wikipedia, as I would like to know!
Yes, Wikipedia is at root a non-democratic institution, and, were it a govenment, would be a dictatorship. Kind of like every privately held company or charitable foundation in the world.
So they own a house that can't be sold for the amount it costs to buy it? Heck, they could sell it to themselves for a dollar. I don't see how "can afford to own but not to buy" is a meaningful concept.
I don't have a number for % of households that could or do own their own home. But reasoning from related numbers, (55% of housing units are owner-occupied, 38% renter, 7% vacant) it seems pretty clear that significantly more than half can, and in fact do, own their own homes.
I emphasize that that 55% rate is third lowest in the country behind Hawaii and the District of Columbia (which are both anomalous), and that 7% vacancy rate is second lowest behind only Conneticut; so it makes sense that housing in California is damn expensive.
In my experience most people who think the average family can't afford a home are themselves well above average, but wouldn't consider living in the home an average family does live in.
Sorry, as a demographics geek, I can't let it go...
"Maybe, but more than half the people in California can not at this time, afford to buy a home in California"
Actually, housing units in California are 55% owner-occupied. The median Californian household makes 52K and owns their home. Mind you, I'm not disputing your basic point: Housing in California is expensive; moreso, on average, than any other state except Hawaii. But my basic point is that the original poster, along with most people in the top 30% income bracket, have no realistic idea of how the vast majority of their neighbors live. Every time I see or hear someone say, "Well, obviously no one could really live on $X", X is somewhere in the 70-90% range.
Addictions interfere with other significant life activities. A drug user is an addict if they want to keep thier job (for example), but can't because they can't/won't control their drug use sufficiently. The reasonable test for whether it is an addiction in this context is not whether you could stop without great pressure, or whether stopping would cause you harm. The reasonable test is, do you continue to do it despite it screwing up your life?
I doubt your use of shoes or toothpaste prevents you from engaging in any significant life activities.
Activities are not inherently addictions or not, regardless of whether those activities are "using computers", "brushing your teeth" or "shooting up heroin". If you can't/won't stop playing WoW long enough to keep your job, and wind up getting evicted because you can't pay the rent, it's an addiction.
"Not really. No one can afford to live in CA on $80k a year, even in a U-Stor-It."
I know you're just trying to be funny, but REALLY, 70% of California households live on less than $80K a year. Half of them live on less than $50K a year.
You can't "own" a chair, even if you do build it yourself. It's not property. You may have legal possesion of the chair, but that's much different. The chair you build (or Aeron builds) belongs to the public at large, it's just that you (or they) as the creator is granted an exclusive and transferable right to it by the government.
If I create something, I'm going to consider it mine, whether it is some code or a chair. If you create something, I'm going to consider it yours.
Legally, your description may be right, though I think the risk of a "financial death sentence" is a bit overstated. Morally, I reject the notion that code is inherently more or less capable of being property than a chair. If you're hacking OS/X in a way that is consistant with the assumption that the code is Apple's and they've sold you the right to use one copy, that's fine with me, and I'd suspect it's fine with Apple. If you're assuming code cannot be owned, and thus justifying hacking it, or rejecting hacking it on that basis, I think your argument is flawed.
"I dunno the torque specs..."
295 lb-ft. (82 more from the gas once you're moving) But in any case the question for spinning your tires is how fast you transition from 0 to peak; with electric motors, you can make that transition essentially instantaneously if you like. If you hook up the electric motor in a Prius to a knife switch supplying all the amps they can handle, they'll smoke whatever tires you'd like. This is not what Toyota has done, but it's not because electric is inherently inferior to gas for acceleration; quite the opposite.
Sorry if I went a bit over the top on my last post. You think cars are cool; that's OK, but it's no excuse for not knowing what you're talking about. You "roast" that hybrid off the line because you want to, and he doesn't. It's not your suspension, nor you close-ratio transmission (the Prius has a CVT, hard to get closer than that).
Anyhow, don't take it personally, IMO all cars are for suckers. You'll certainly roast me with my '72 Raleigh Superbe.
At 0, or any low rpm, the electric motors in a hybrid will easily have enough torque that tire traction will be the limiting factor on acceleration (even if you put big sticky race car tires on). Their controllers are programmed for efficiency, because hybrid buyers are gennerally uniterested in pointlessly screaming away to the next stoplight. Gasoline engines just don't function at all at 0 rpm, and don't function efficiently at low revs; so they must rely on slippy clutches to get moving from a stop, and they must be made much larger and less efficient than otherwise to get decent acceleration.
"And for all those others out there reading this, no, I don't think it was an impressive feat"
Yet you did it, and proudly recounted the experience here. Don't be so humble. You did it. You pulled out your wallet, and bought a big inneficient engine, and you pull it out and pay too much for gas. Go ahead man, be proud.
"Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts"
Are you insane? Completely incapable of checking the facts behind your assumptions? Sorry, but lots of people seem to think this, and its just not fact based.
The current administration is out-spending any othe post WWII one by an enormous margin. Before you say it: that's adjusted for inflation; per capita; as a percent of GDP; in relation to revenue; you name it. You pick a reasonable way to compare spending levels, this administration is on top; by a staggering amount. And second and third are Regan and Bush Senior.
I fail to understand how people can continue to support the Republican party on fiscal grounds. They utterly lost control of their financial sphincters 25 years ago.
In any case, the lesbian wedding wasn't related to RL issues; in RL they weren't lesbians.
Can you advertise a heterosexual wedding in general chat?
Yeah, it's off topic, but I agree with you about the civil liberties...
Ending the downward redistribution of wealth would certainly change how wealth was distributed. Without some sort of constant downward redistribution, those with wealth ought to be able to easily aquire ever more of it unless they are incompetent, which they aren't. I'll stipulate that that might be in some sense a more fair society, but I suggest it may not be a more healthy one. Historically, it appears to me that insufficient wealth redistribution mechanisms will screw up your society just as surely as excessive ones.
"Yes, I know that legalese needs to be cleaned up"
Which I think you will find impossible. In particular, you need to define "DRM system". To use Linus's example, define what you are restricting in such a way that it rules out any effective DRM, but doesn't include a Linux kernel that will only load modules signed by RedHat (or trusted party of your choice). It can't be done. If I can build a system that will refuse to run stuff I don't want it to, others can build systems that will refuse to run stuff they don't want it to. Which of us is building a secure system, and which is building DRM? It depends entirely which stuff we don't want it to run.
Frankly, saying you can't use GPL3 code as part of a DRM scheme is inherently ridiculous; If I'm writing code for a DRM scheme, I'm not terribly likely to choose any GPL version for my license now am I? If the vast majority of code everywhere was GPL3, it might slow down DRM implementers by a few days while they re-implemented the stuff they needed; but that's not the case, and DRM implementation isn't being held up by lack of software in any case. This will do squat to slow down DRM, and will add another restriction that people will have to worry about.
How about not trying to use the license on your software to solve unrelated social ills?
Legislators passing bad laws for money at the behest of the Entertainment industry certainly happens, and will undoubtably continue. Legislators doing so when the law in question would obviously crash the entire Tech sector, then watching it happen, not so much. DRM locking down your computer and making it useless no matter what you do is not going to happen. Perfect DRM, that lets you play some peice of content, but never copy it, is impossible. Everybody knows this. The entertainment big wigs certainly know this. Hence they will not bother. They will make it take some effort to copy it, and will make it illegal to go to that effort. And I don't care. I don't need their stinking content. I just want to be able to do what I want with my own content. If I can't do what I want with content I make, then neither can the zillion small businesses that make up a vast amount of the economy, and with whose ability to operate legislators will not screw.
"We could have the security of knowing who wrote the software we run OR we can have the freedom to write and run our own software."
Personally, I'm not seeing a lot of threat to my freedom to write and run my own software. All computer makers everywhere are going to stop letting independent developers write software for there hardware? I'm not too woried about that businaess model taking over.
Knowing who wrote the software running on my computer, on the other hand, is a constant concern. It's not sacrificing essential freedom for a little safety, as Franklin was rightly opposed to. It's maintaining the freedom to run my own software instead of getting rooted and locked out by five tons of malware.
Linus gets the heart of the matter: The only difference between DRM and security is intent. The GPL v3 and the DMCA make the same mistake from opposite sides of the issue. They put legal restrictions on technical capabilities to try to force an ethical debate. In either case, the restrictions will cause all manner of headaches for unintended targets, and won't do squat to accomplish their intended goal.
You want to fight DRM? Great! I'm with you. You want people to put confusing restrictions on their software licenses that will prevent using their code for legitmate security purposes? No thanks. You don't think the installed Linux base is sufficient that hardware makers won't just stop making hardware that will run it, but you think the likely adoption rate of GPLv3 is going to do the trick? The DRM restricitons in GPLv3 and DRM itself have two things in common: They won't work, and they'd be a bad idea if they did.
Historically, an average stock market investment should net a return slightly over 10%. This can come from dividends, or from an increase in the stock price. But the only reason the stock price is going to increase is because someone else is buying it who also expects to make money, either from dividends or an increase in the stock price.... So it all comes back to dividends. Companies make money and pay it out to their shareholders. Trying to make money based on anything other than companies eventually paying enough dividends to justify your investments is trying to make money by taking it from less wise or lucky investors. This is entirely possible, but requires losers as well as winners.
At a P/E of 10, the company is a fine buy if they just sit there and keep it up.
At 20-25, you wan to expect that they are about to take off; that their current earnings don't really reflect where they'll be at in a few years.
Google (according to the other poster) is at a 70+ P/E ratio. That's serious crazy territory; Google would have to septuple earnings, immediately, to justify that.
Please call up whoever taught you there was no need to know when to use a semicolon or comma instead of a period. Tell them that they were wrong. It will get your point across better if you use correct punctuation. Then tell them that if they think you're really going to worry about it in a slashdot post, they are an idiot; and not in a good way. Or they just like complaining, in which case, happy to help.
SS is slightly broken; it will not be able to pay full benefits as of 2050 or so. Bush put forward a plan that even his administration agreed would do nothing to fix that. It made all kinds of changes and sacrificed various garauntees, in order to not address the problem. It wasn't a solution, it was a partial elimination.
"the American heartland"
Is that like, the really American part of America?
"Democrats don't care about the problem"
If SS is broken and doesn't get fixed, I'm thinking I'll blame the party in control of both houses of Congress and the Whitehouse. I can only assume those Democrats were aplauding sensible Republicans who helped them stop Bush, since they could not have done so without them. If Republicans had a solution to this, or any problem, they have the numbers to enact their will; For any problems remaining unsolved, I can only conclude they do not have solutions.
"I don't ever remember them heckling a Democrat President."
I suggest the fault is with your memory; Clinton got boos. Since when is applause "heckling"?
Yes, congress has a retirement plan that involves more than just Social Security. As does anyone who has a good job, plans to retire, and is not an idiot. Social Security is/was designed to ensure that people don't work until they get too old to do so and then starve to death. Relying on SS alone is stupid if you aspire to do any better than not starving to death. The Democrats applauded because they successfully stopped Bush from "improving" SS in ways that would remove the garauntee you won't starve to death, and wouldn't extend it's solvency at all.
I hate that argument. If it's permisible to make a particular choice, it's wrong to discriminate based on it when it's not relevant.
Besides, I don't feel I decided on my religious and political beleifs. I concluded they were correct. I suppose I could claim to beleive things I think are ludicrous; like "the current deficit spending level is fiscally defensible", but I still wouldn't beleive it.
But, OK, I choose to wear my hair kind of long. Is it more or less OK to advertise a long-hair friendly guild than a gay-friendly one? How about a white-friendly one? In short, what relevance does choice vs not have?
Been there, done that.
Oh give me a break. I'm not on a jury, or involved in the court system in any way, I don't have to presume squat. If you watch a guy point a gun at a teller, demand money, and run out the door with it, and then someone asks you what happened do you say "That guy robbed the bank!", or "It looked a lot like that guy robbed the bank, but don't call the police, because that would imply a crime was commited, and naturally I assume he is innocent..."
Did Bush ignore the law in authorizing this wiretapping? Sure looks that way to me.
Does the President have the authority to do that if he deems it necessary? That's debateable. Damn scary if so.
Assuming the President did have such authority, wouldn't remotely reponsible exercise thereof involve seeking to change the law asap? Well, duh.
I do understand how the stock market works; people buy parts of companies, who do things that make money, and pay it those the owners, who thus make money. Since it is not always clear how much money different companies will make, this gets confused by lots of gambling, scheming, and ripping off the less wise or lucky. But that's all inefficiencies. The market as a whole over the long term, and quite a few boring companies as individuals over shorter terms, are good investments because companies do stuff that earns money, and they pay it to their owners as dividends.
"They could have a 10 to 1 split and trade at 40-45"
That's just saying "the price could go up to 400-450 dollars". To which I'll say, yes, it could, and if you bought today and sold then you'd have made a bunch of money. But you've made it at the expense of the later investor you sold to. That's how a pyramid scheme works, early investors make money at the expense of later investors. Think you're still early enough? Maybe you are, but the scheme depends on someone eventually thinking that and being wrong.
To not be a pyramid scheme, a company has to eventually pay dividends sufficient to justify its stock price. In some cases, you may want to pay more than the current earnings justify, because you think future earnings will be bigger by enough to justify it. But it's important to know how much bigger the earnings will need to be. To justify Googles current price, its earnings will need to increase, fairly soon, by roughly ten thousand percent. If you think that's likely, by all means buy Google stock.
"Would you refer to all growth investment stratagies as pyramid schemes?"
No. To the extent that any investment strategy expects to make money based on something other than the companies in question making profits and paying dividends, that strategy is a pyramid scheme. Now, it is perfectly reasonable to buy a stock without expecting a reasonbale return via dividends in the short term if you have reason to beleive you'll get a bigger return, via dividends, in the longer term. If you're hoping the stock price will go up, and you'll sell, and nobody will eventually get a reasonable return via dividends, then it's a pyramid scheme. You're investing early in hopes of leaving some later investor with the short straw. Good growth strategies may ignore P/E, but only to the extent that they are focussed instead on (CurrentP)/(FutureE).
Think through your prediction of how it's all going to work out so that the stock is worth what you paid. It's a pyramid sheme if it doesn't end with "...and then they'll be making enough money to pay big enough dividends that I'll get my money back, plus a reasonable return."
If you are going to buy Google shares today, you should have a story in your head you think is how it will work out that ends this way. And before the "..." should be something explaining why their revenue is going to go up by aproximately TEN THOUSAND PERCENT. More if it's not going to happen soon. If you can't tell yourself that story, there are better investments than Google at it's current price.
I like Google a whole lot, and I'm generally an optimist; But I can't see that story.
It is a good story; he's a really neat guy, and an object lesson in the value of identifying what's important to you and ignoring everything else. But I disagree that everyone can win; certainly not everyone can live my uncles back-to-the-land existence. There isn't enough land.
Supporting the worlds current population requires urban societies dependant on truck drivers, trash collectors, etc. It seems unlikely to me that enough people can be found who have a definition of "winning" that involves being a trash collector. I would hope, for the sake of my fellow man, that we can form a society where being a trash collector can be part of "doing okay". For myself, I want to do great, and that means not being a trash collector.