The reason the Union fought a war against the Confederacy was to ensure that the Confederate states remained a part of the Union, sure. So the war was about states' rights to secede.
The issue the Confederacy seceded over, however, was slavery. Sure, you can spin it as "states' rights to allow slavery or not", but still. That was the cause of the secession in the first place.
The war was fought over whether or not to allow the secession. The secession happened over whether or not to allow slavery.
Is this figure for the whole world, or some particular country, and can you point me to where it comes from? Land distribution inequality is one of my most major concerns and I've love to read more actual statistics about it.
Because historically, going to work on the factory has allowed workers to send a huge chunk of their paycheck home (like, 80% or more, sometimes) while living in the company dormitories, work there for a few years, and then effectively retire on the savings.
In which case the worker would probably disagree that they are much worse off, which is sort of what I was getting at. If they're so much worse off, why would they do that? Either something is forcing them -- in which case I'm genuinely curiously what -- or if they're choosing that freely, then they must not think they're worse off.
the third-worlder isn't all that much better off than before, and may actually be much worse off if they went from an agricultural job they had some control over their destiny to a dismal factory job where they have no control at all
Why did they switch from the former to the latter then? (And if it wasn't their own choice, what forced them to do it? Honest question, not rhetorical).
I'm not going to argue that $13/hr is in any way good money objectively, for all the reasons you've already laid out, but the median personal income for the US is in fact just about $26k/year.
Which just means that almost everybody is pretty squarely fucked, but literally half of Americans are even more fucked than someone making $13/hr full time.
I just tested some of those "controversial" words and while "peni" doesn't even get me "penis", "torren" does get me several torrent-related things (but not "torrent" itself), and "bise" gives "bisexual" and a bunch of phrases containing that word right away.
Good advice, and this applies no matter what direction your state votes, and no matter your own political orientation.
If you're conservative and you live in California where all your state's electors will go to Hillary no matter what, you should still vote Libertarian.
If you're liberal and you live in California, you should also vote Green. You're not going to let Trump win, Hillary's getting all your state's electors anyway.
If you're liberal and you live in whatever solid-red state raymorris here is from, you should still vote Green. Hillary's not winning there anyway.
The joke is misreading the "jack off phones" in the headline as discussing some kind of fancy sex-toy phones that you use to masturbate, not talking about masturbating to regular porn on the screen of a regular phone.
Yeah, I agree with the overall notion that IP is not real property and should not last very long (if at all). I just think the idea of setting the cutoff point automatically by the life cycle of the producer and the consumer instead of some arbitrary number seems elegant. If the consumer and producer are both alive when the work is made, then it's protected for so long as they're both alive. If the consumer wasn't even alive yet when it was made, then from their perspective it's always existed, is part of their cultural heritage, and they should be free to use it. And if the producer is dead, well there's nothing left to protect, so it's free for all to use. The products of past (dead) generations are free for anyone of this or future generations, and future (unborn) generations are free to use anything from this or past generations. Where those meet, those who are (still) alive can be allowed to profit from those who are (already) alive.
How about we just make it so that if a copyrighted work already existed when you were born, you have free license to use it and immunity to prosecution for doing so? It's part of your cultural heritage.
I've been waiting for a jack off phone to come around for years, it's about time the sex toy industry capitalized on the market for mobile devices, but if it has no headphones that's a deal-breaker, I can't have everyone in the house hearing what I'm doing; and if it's user-hostile and stupid to boot, I mean, who the hell thought those would make good features?
I'm surprised this kind of bomb is coming from Apple of all people, makers of the famous iBrator.
He wrote "the Constitution specifically allows the people to dissolve the government and setup a new one if the government doesn't meet the needs of the people".
There is nothing in the Constitution about the right of the people to dissolve the government and set up a new one; nor in the Oath of Enlistment. The Declaration of Independence mentions that very prominently early on, however.
You only suffer in an economic crash if you're doing the stupid short-term rapid-house-swapping. If you're staying in one place, you wait until the market recovers and then you're fine. Economic instability only makes moving more risky or expensive; you're never "forced" to suffer. And as for "forced" to take out mortgages and buy houses, you're currently forced to borrow housing already; that's what renting is. You would still be borrowing housing in my system (even if it's still by proxy of borrowing the monetary value of the housing, though there's no reason that has to be the case; the "landlord"-seller could carry the contract himself, and just accept payments from you over time, rather than involving a bank loan in the middle). You wouldn't be "forced" to do anything you're not already doing. What you would get is more options; the option to eventually stop paying for housing. If you want to keep doing what you're doing now and paying the price for that, go right ahead. You don't get to force people who want to do otherwise to have no other option but to do what you want to do.
As for the rich and their McMansions: of course people with more money can buy nicer things. That's not going to change and I'm not proposing it does. But right now, not only does having more money mean that you can spend more money on nicer things, it means you can make more money just by owning things. THAT is what had to be eliminated. Those "other investments", beyond simple equity ownership growth, operate largely by rent on money i.e. interest, which you're probably too slow to note I already covered in my first post.
Go ahead and "rent" that penthouse, and when what you've paid into the penthouse is enough to buy the farm you want to retire in, sell the penthouse and buy the farm. (Double entendre not intended, but run with if you feel like). Or, since the payments on that penthouse under my model would have to be comparable to rental payments on it now (remember, housing prices have to come down to what renters could afford, which is where they would naturally be without rent anyway, otherwise the "landlords" just lose everything), and you're apparently buying that farm at the same time as renting it now, then just keep doing that and when you eventually leave the penthouse for the farm, you have more money, because you can get the money you've been paying for the penthouse out of it when you leave. You don't lose. There is no downside for you here, only for the people currently making something for nothing just because they already have more than others.
Yes, of course you rent out housing for more than the cost of the interest on your mortgage, otherwise nobody would do it as it would cost them money. Rent doesn't have to be more than the full mortgage payment itself for you to turn a profit, because beyond the interest, the money you put into the house is still your money you can get back out later by selling the house, not money lost forever like rent payments are. And yeah, then you can reinvest that profit in (first paying off that house faster and then) buying more houses to rent out ad infinitum. If you've got the kind of cash lying around to buy in cash with no mortgage, the whole process accelerates even faster; being rich makes money like that.
And if people like you want the freedom to move quickly and are willing to lose money long term doing that by throwing it down a rent-hole, then there is a market for providing liquidity in housing, someone always having housing ready to sell and always willing to buy it back from you soon thereafter, managing any hassle involved in that process for you (not that there's any reason that buying or selling a house has to be more hassle than renting one is), all for the price of the difference they're willing to buy and sell for, of course. That market could even be filled by the same people who currently rent out housing.
The effective difference between that kind of pseudo-rental and actual rental we have now would be that people who would buy if they could but currently have no choice but to rent would eventually own the homes they're "renting" and be able to stop paying "rent" then; or, if they did decided to move and took the time to find someone to "take over their lease", they could get back the money they already spent on it and get a head start on paying off their new place; and so people who currently spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on renting over their lifetimes, more than what a house would cost, actually get a house to their name for all that by the end of it. Then they need less to save for retirement (because no rent to pay), and can leave something to their kids too, who maybe won't have to spend their entire lives struggling just to not have to owe money merely to exist somewhere even if they could consume nothing at all.
Meanwhile people like you can bail out after only a few months' payments and accept whatever the "landlord" is offering to take possession of it back (or just take the loss on those payments and be foreclosed on in absentia); the difference between purchase price and sale price should average out to about what rent costs, since that's the value that the convenience of "renting" is supposedly worth to people like you.
I gave you a +1, but I have to undo it because commenting is more important.
Everything you say is true, and beyond that, the rental market in the first place does this same thing to the general housing market as well.
Investors buy rental properties to generate a passive income (i.e. get money in exchange for nothing), by exploiting an advantaged capital position (i.e. just by having more money to begin with).
That ability to benefit financially from housing you don't need for, you know, actually housing yourself, attracts people with money to spare into buying up more investment housing, increasing the demand and thus market price for housing.
That makes it more difficult for people who need housing to actually live in to buy, forcing them into the only other option left, renting, putting them on the receiving end of their landlords' passive income (i.e. they're the ones paying that money in exchange for nothing).
The real estate investors can then reinvest their rental income into buying more housing to rent out, and the renters, throwing all their money down a rent-hole, are inhibited from ever saving enough to buy their way out of that situation.
In this way, those who already have more profit off those who already have less in an ever accelerating vicious cycle; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and while for those around the middle (i.e. those who've got around about just what they need for their own use, and neither can profit from their excess nor have to pay for their deficit) it seems like it would be simple to change from one end to the other with some good old fashioned hard work, in reality there is an invisible pressure away from that center, and for those starting far below it, it's an extraordinary effort to even approach that middle point in their entire lifetimes; and getting to far above it comparatively easy, for someone starting out around the middle already. Because being poor costs you money, and being rich makes you money, and rent is the engine that drives that process.
This whole process is much more visible in places where supply is unable to easily scale up with demand, and where demand is already high; people living in Bumfuck Nowhere where no one wants to live, surrounded by unending undeveloped flat lands to the horizon, might not see this problem as more than noise in their market data, but in places where the market is already crunched this process comes to life and makes it infinitely worse than it already would have been.
In the absence of a rental market, anyone who had more housing than they needed for their own use would have only one option to benefit from it: sell it. But nobody's going to be buying it as an investment property anymore if there's no rental market to profit from, so the only people buying would be those who need it for their own use. Which means if you want to sell it, you have to sell it at a price (and on terms) that people who need it can actually afford; that's how a free market works. Your only alternative is to not sell it and get nothing and have wasted everything you spend buying it. So in the absence of a rental market, the purchase price for housing would have to come down; conversely, the presence of a rental market artificially inflates the purchase price of housing.
And this critique doesn't just apply to housing rental, but to any kind of rental, including the rent on money otherwise known as interest; though, again, the supply and demand curves in a given market will make it more or less visible a problem -- nobody's going to complain about the evils of the DVD rental market (if such a thing still existed). But it's the places that really matter, like housing and other big-ticket items, where the problem really manifests, and those are... well, the places where it really matters.
Rent (including interest) is the problem with capitalism; which, n.b., is not a synonym for a free market. Free markets do not intrinsically lead to runaway concentrati
No it's not, because what those perhaps-irrational investors believe (in speculation) is what sets the market value of the shares and thus what you could buy or sell them for. Pointing out that the market price per share is different from the net asset value per share isn't magically going to make the market (composed mostly of possibly-irrational speculative investors) sell to you or buy from you for that net asset value, and it's not like you can force the company itself to take back your share (or issue you a share) for a share's worth of their net assets either. The only relation between asset value and stock price is whatever relation the market in aggregate believes there should be, and for the most part that is 'not much' (though still some).
Only if all investors followed a value investment strategy, which they don't. A lot of investors may see that profit as a big positive upturn in the company and want to get in on that rising action, and so will pay more than just the $5/share to get in on that. Or that may be a big decrease in profits from last quarter, kill everyone's faith in the company, and cause lots of investors to sell for cheap just to get out now before it gets worse. Stock prices are set by markets, what people are willing to buy and sell for, and not all -- not even most -- investors just look at a company's net assets minus liabilities and divide by number of outstanding shares to decide how much each share is worth.
The chief executive of the company would still have complete control over how the money reinvested in the company is spent, it would just be up to the shareholders collectively to decide how much of the profits to reinvest and how much to pay out to them.
Consider a company with a single investor, a sole proprietor, who is nevertheless not the actual manager of the company; he pays someone else to run the thing. But he gets to decide how much to pay himself out of the company's proceeds, and how much to leave in the company's coffers for the manager to work with. Of course he gets to decide that, he owns the company and if he can't take his money out of it what's the point in that? This is just extending that principle to a company with multiple, possibly myriad, owners.
Of course that sole proprietor would be stupid to take all the money and let the company die with no capital, but there's incentive for the investors in a bigger company not to do that either: by reinvesting their dividends, they grow their share in the company, and thus the size of their dividends, both in the percent of the company's profits they're entitled to, and in the profitability of the company overall. Those who just take their dividends and run get a diminishing share of a diminishing pie over time and are automatically cashed out of the process, leaving only the people with long-term interest in the company owning it.
How about instead we don't tax the corporations at all, per se, and just tax the people who own them instead. If we implemented my other suggestion below, for all corporate profits to be mandatorily paid out as dividends (which can then be automatically reinvested or not at the shareholder's preference), and that would happen automatically, because dividends are taxable income. This would shift the tax burden onto high-income people, especially those who own and control big chunks of the economy, and away from small businesses that might be owned and operated by low-income people, while also not chasing away big businesses that could afford to move overseas, because the corporation per se is not taxed at all.
Every dollar a corporation makes in profits should go to the shareholders as dividends. It's then up to those shareholders to decide where to reinvest in the company, growing their stake in it as they do so and others don't, or to slowly be cashed out as others do so and they don't. Each shareholder should be able to register their preference when they buy into the company; give me my money, or reinvest it, or perhaps even a percentage. The default should probably be to reinvest it, but shareholders are entitled to their cut of those profits if they choose to take them.
This should be a matter of the mandatory legal structure of being a corporation in the first place, not just something that corporations should choose to do.
Advertising is all about finding ways to convince you to buy something on the basis of something other than rational thought and valid information.
Back in college I was doing homework in the cafeteria for my informal logic class, and a friend who was not in that class was also studying next to me. I noticed he had a handout with a list of things like "appeal to authority", "appeal to emotion", "appeal to popularity" and such on it, and I asked what class he had that was studying informal fallacies too, if not the informal logic class I was in. He said that that wasn't a list of fallacies, that was a list of... tactics or approaches or something like that... from a class about marketing or advertising he was taking.
A list of advertising tactics is literally identical to a list of informal logical fallacies.
I, in California, have a friend in Iceland who I knew through an obscure video game back in the mid-90s. I have no Facebook account. He apparently does though, because Facebook's constant "you should join Facebook because all these people you know are on it" somehow knows that I know this guy on the other side of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
The "slavery" thing was a mere sideshow
Hardly.
The reason the Union fought a war against the Confederacy was to ensure that the Confederate states remained a part of the Union, sure. So the war was about states' rights to secede.
The issue the Confederacy seceded over, however, was slavery. Sure, you can spin it as "states' rights to allow slavery or not", but still. That was the cause of the secession in the first place.
The war was fought over whether or not to allow the secession. The secession happened over whether or not to allow slavery.
82% of the land is owned by 0.5% of people
Is this figure for the whole world, or some particular country, and can you point me to where it comes from? Land distribution inequality is one of my most major concerns and I've love to read more actual statistics about it.
Because historically, going to work on the factory has allowed workers to send a huge chunk of their paycheck home (like, 80% or more, sometimes) while living in the company dormitories, work there for a few years, and then effectively retire on the savings.
In which case the worker would probably disagree that they are much worse off, which is sort of what I was getting at. If they're so much worse off, why would they do that? Either something is forcing them -- in which case I'm genuinely curiously what -- or if they're choosing that freely, then they must not think they're worse off.
Wouldn't NI be the Quebec of Britain's Canada?
the third-worlder isn't all that much better off than before, and may actually be much worse off if they went from an agricultural job they had some control over their destiny to a dismal factory job where they have no control at all
Why did they switch from the former to the latter then? (And if it wasn't their own choice, what forced them to do it? Honest question, not rhetorical).
I'm not going to argue that $13/hr is in any way good money objectively, for all the reasons you've already laid out, but the median personal income for the US is in fact just about $26k/year.
Which just means that almost everybody is pretty squarely fucked, but literally half of Americans are even more fucked than someone making $13/hr full time.
I just tested some of those "controversial" words and while "peni" doesn't even get me "penis", "torren" does get me several torrent-related things (but not "torrent" itself), and "bise" gives "bisexual" and a bunch of phrases containing that word right away.
Good advice, and this applies no matter what direction your state votes, and no matter your own political orientation.
If you're conservative and you live in California where all your state's electors will go to Hillary no matter what, you should still vote Libertarian.
If you're liberal and you live in California, you should also vote Green. You're not going to let Trump win, Hillary's getting all your state's electors anyway.
If you're liberal and you live in whatever solid-red state raymorris here is from, you should still vote Green. Hillary's not winning there anyway.
The joke is misreading the "jack off phones" in the headline as discussing some kind of fancy sex-toy phones that you use to masturbate, not talking about masturbating to regular porn on the screen of a regular phone.
Yeah, I agree with the overall notion that IP is not real property and should not last very long (if at all). I just think the idea of setting the cutoff point automatically by the life cycle of the producer and the consumer instead of some arbitrary number seems elegant. If the consumer and producer are both alive when the work is made, then it's protected for so long as they're both alive. If the consumer wasn't even alive yet when it was made, then from their perspective it's always existed, is part of their cultural heritage, and they should be free to use it. And if the producer is dead, well there's nothing left to protect, so it's free for all to use. The products of past (dead) generations are free for anyone of this or future generations, and future (unborn) generations are free to use anything from this or past generations. Where those meet, those who are (still) alive can be allowed to profit from those who are (already) alive.
Just an idea.
I came here to eat dinner and make that comment, and I'm all done with dinner... and you already made that comment.... shit.
How about we just make it so that if a copyrighted work already existed when you were born, you have free license to use it and immunity to prosecution for doing so? It's part of your cultural heritage.
I've been waiting for a jack off phone to come around for years, it's about time the sex toy industry capitalized on the market for mobile devices, but if it has no headphones that's a deal-breaker, I can't have everyone in the house hearing what I'm doing; and if it's user-hostile and stupid to boot, I mean, who the hell thought those would make good features?
I'm surprised this kind of bomb is coming from Apple of all people, makers of the famous iBrator.
He wrote "the Constitution specifically allows the people to dissolve the government and setup a new one if the government doesn't meet the needs of the people".
There is nothing in the Constitution about the right of the people to dissolve the government and set up a new one; nor in the Oath of Enlistment. The Declaration of Independence mentions that very prominently early on, however.
That's the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
You only suffer in an economic crash if you're doing the stupid short-term rapid-house-swapping. If you're staying in one place, you wait until the market recovers and then you're fine. Economic instability only makes moving more risky or expensive; you're never "forced" to suffer. And as for "forced" to take out mortgages and buy houses, you're currently forced to borrow housing already; that's what renting is. You would still be borrowing housing in my system (even if it's still by proxy of borrowing the monetary value of the housing, though there's no reason that has to be the case; the "landlord"-seller could carry the contract himself, and just accept payments from you over time, rather than involving a bank loan in the middle). You wouldn't be "forced" to do anything you're not already doing. What you would get is more options; the option to eventually stop paying for housing. If you want to keep doing what you're doing now and paying the price for that, go right ahead. You don't get to force people who want to do otherwise to have no other option but to do what you want to do.
As for the rich and their McMansions: of course people with more money can buy nicer things. That's not going to change and I'm not proposing it does. But right now, not only does having more money mean that you can spend more money on nicer things, it means you can make more money just by owning things. THAT is what had to be eliminated. Those "other investments", beyond simple equity ownership growth, operate largely by rent on money i.e. interest, which you're probably too slow to note I already covered in my first post.
Go ahead and "rent" that penthouse, and when what you've paid into the penthouse is enough to buy the farm you want to retire in, sell the penthouse and buy the farm. (Double entendre not intended, but run with if you feel like). Or, since the payments on that penthouse under my model would have to be comparable to rental payments on it now (remember, housing prices have to come down to what renters could afford, which is where they would naturally be without rent anyway, otherwise the "landlords" just lose everything), and you're apparently buying that farm at the same time as renting it now, then just keep doing that and when you eventually leave the penthouse for the farm, you have more money, because you can get the money you've been paying for the penthouse out of it when you leave. You don't lose. There is no downside for you here, only for the people currently making something for nothing just because they already have more than others.
Yes, of course you rent out housing for more than the cost of the interest on your mortgage, otherwise nobody would do it as it would cost them money. Rent doesn't have to be more than the full mortgage payment itself for you to turn a profit, because beyond the interest, the money you put into the house is still your money you can get back out later by selling the house, not money lost forever like rent payments are. And yeah, then you can reinvest that profit in (first paying off that house faster and then) buying more houses to rent out ad infinitum. If you've got the kind of cash lying around to buy in cash with no mortgage, the whole process accelerates even faster; being rich makes money like that.
And if people like you want the freedom to move quickly and are willing to lose money long term doing that by throwing it down a rent-hole, then there is a market for providing liquidity in housing, someone always having housing ready to sell and always willing to buy it back from you soon thereafter, managing any hassle involved in that process for you (not that there's any reason that buying or selling a house has to be more hassle than renting one is), all for the price of the difference they're willing to buy and sell for, of course. That market could even be filled by the same people who currently rent out housing.
The effective difference between that kind of pseudo-rental and actual rental we have now would be that people who would buy if they could but currently have no choice but to rent would eventually own the homes they're "renting" and be able to stop paying "rent" then; or, if they did decided to move and took the time to find someone to "take over their lease", they could get back the money they already spent on it and get a head start on paying off their new place; and so people who currently spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on renting over their lifetimes, more than what a house would cost, actually get a house to their name for all that by the end of it. Then they need less to save for retirement (because no rent to pay), and can leave something to their kids too, who maybe won't have to spend their entire lives struggling just to not have to owe money merely to exist somewhere even if they could consume nothing at all.
Meanwhile people like you can bail out after only a few months' payments and accept whatever the "landlord" is offering to take possession of it back (or just take the loss on those payments and be foreclosed on in absentia); the difference between purchase price and sale price should average out to about what rent costs, since that's the value that the convenience of "renting" is supposedly worth to people like you.
I gave you a +1, but I have to undo it because commenting is more important.
Everything you say is true, and beyond that, the rental market in the first place does this same thing to the general housing market as well.
Investors buy rental properties to generate a passive income (i.e. get money in exchange for nothing), by exploiting an advantaged capital position (i.e. just by having more money to begin with).
That ability to benefit financially from housing you don't need for, you know, actually housing yourself, attracts people with money to spare into buying up more investment housing, increasing the demand and thus market price for housing.
That makes it more difficult for people who need housing to actually live in to buy, forcing them into the only other option left, renting, putting them on the receiving end of their landlords' passive income (i.e. they're the ones paying that money in exchange for nothing).
The real estate investors can then reinvest their rental income into buying more housing to rent out, and the renters, throwing all their money down a rent-hole, are inhibited from ever saving enough to buy their way out of that situation.
In this way, those who already have more profit off those who already have less in an ever accelerating vicious cycle; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and while for those around the middle (i.e. those who've got around about just what they need for their own use, and neither can profit from their excess nor have to pay for their deficit) it seems like it would be simple to change from one end to the other with some good old fashioned hard work, in reality there is an invisible pressure away from that center, and for those starting far below it, it's an extraordinary effort to even approach that middle point in their entire lifetimes; and getting to far above it comparatively easy, for someone starting out around the middle already. Because being poor costs you money, and being rich makes you money, and rent is the engine that drives that process.
This whole process is much more visible in places where supply is unable to easily scale up with demand, and where demand is already high; people living in Bumfuck Nowhere where no one wants to live, surrounded by unending undeveloped flat lands to the horizon, might not see this problem as more than noise in their market data, but in places where the market is already crunched this process comes to life and makes it infinitely worse than it already would have been.
In the absence of a rental market, anyone who had more housing than they needed for their own use would have only one option to benefit from it: sell it. But nobody's going to be buying it as an investment property anymore if there's no rental market to profit from, so the only people buying would be those who need it for their own use. Which means if you want to sell it, you have to sell it at a price (and on terms) that people who need it can actually afford; that's how a free market works. Your only alternative is to not sell it and get nothing and have wasted everything you spend buying it. So in the absence of a rental market, the purchase price for housing would have to come down; conversely, the presence of a rental market artificially inflates the purchase price of housing.
And this critique doesn't just apply to housing rental, but to any kind of rental, including the rent on money otherwise known as interest; though, again, the supply and demand curves in a given market will make it more or less visible a problem -- nobody's going to complain about the evils of the DVD rental market (if such a thing still existed). But it's the places that really matter, like housing and other big-ticket items, where the problem really manifests, and those are... well, the places where it really matters.
Rent (including interest) is the problem with capitalism; which, n.b., is not a synonym for a free market. Free markets do not intrinsically lead to runaway concentrati
No it's not, because what those perhaps-irrational investors believe (in speculation) is what sets the market value of the shares and thus what you could buy or sell them for. Pointing out that the market price per share is different from the net asset value per share isn't magically going to make the market (composed mostly of possibly-irrational speculative investors) sell to you or buy from you for that net asset value, and it's not like you can force the company itself to take back your share (or issue you a share) for a share's worth of their net assets either. The only relation between asset value and stock price is whatever relation the market in aggregate believes there should be, and for the most part that is 'not much' (though still some).
Only if all investors followed a value investment strategy, which they don't. A lot of investors may see that profit as a big positive upturn in the company and want to get in on that rising action, and so will pay more than just the $5/share to get in on that. Or that may be a big decrease in profits from last quarter, kill everyone's faith in the company, and cause lots of investors to sell for cheap just to get out now before it gets worse. Stock prices are set by markets, what people are willing to buy and sell for, and not all -- not even most -- investors just look at a company's net assets minus liabilities and divide by number of outstanding shares to decide how much each share is worth.
The chief executive of the company would still have complete control over how the money reinvested in the company is spent, it would just be up to the shareholders collectively to decide how much of the profits to reinvest and how much to pay out to them.
Consider a company with a single investor, a sole proprietor, who is nevertheless not the actual manager of the company; he pays someone else to run the thing. But he gets to decide how much to pay himself out of the company's proceeds, and how much to leave in the company's coffers for the manager to work with. Of course he gets to decide that, he owns the company and if he can't take his money out of it what's the point in that? This is just extending that principle to a company with multiple, possibly myriad, owners.
Of course that sole proprietor would be stupid to take all the money and let the company die with no capital, but there's incentive for the investors in a bigger company not to do that either: by reinvesting their dividends, they grow their share in the company, and thus the size of their dividends, both in the percent of the company's profits they're entitled to, and in the profitability of the company overall. Those who just take their dividends and run get a diminishing share of a diminishing pie over time and are automatically cashed out of the process, leaving only the people with long-term interest in the company owning it.
How about instead we don't tax the corporations at all, per se, and just tax the people who own them instead. If we implemented my other suggestion below, for all corporate profits to be mandatorily paid out as dividends (which can then be automatically reinvested or not at the shareholder's preference), and that would happen automatically, because dividends are taxable income. This would shift the tax burden onto high-income people, especially those who own and control big chunks of the economy, and away from small businesses that might be owned and operated by low-income people, while also not chasing away big businesses that could afford to move overseas, because the corporation per se is not taxed at all.
Every dollar a corporation makes in profits should go to the shareholders as dividends. It's then up to those shareholders to decide where to reinvest in the company, growing their stake in it as they do so and others don't, or to slowly be cashed out as others do so and they don't. Each shareholder should be able to register their preference when they buy into the company; give me my money, or reinvest it, or perhaps even a percentage. The default should probably be to reinvest it, but shareholders are entitled to their cut of those profits if they choose to take them.
This should be a matter of the mandatory legal structure of being a corporation in the first place, not just something that corporations should choose to do.
Advertising is all about finding ways to convince you to buy something on the basis of something other than rational thought and valid information.
Back in college I was doing homework in the cafeteria for my informal logic class, and a friend who was not in that class was also studying next to me. I noticed he had a handout with a list of things like "appeal to authority", "appeal to emotion", "appeal to popularity" and such on it, and I asked what class he had that was studying informal fallacies too, if not the informal logic class I was in. He said that that wasn't a list of fallacies, that was a list of... tactics or approaches or something like that... from a class about marketing or advertising he was taking.
A list of advertising tactics is literally identical to a list of informal logical fallacies.
I, in California, have a friend in Iceland who I knew through an obscure video game back in the mid-90s. I have no Facebook account. He apparently does though, because Facebook's constant "you should join Facebook because all these people you know are on it" somehow knows that I know this guy on the other side of the world.