Bush trounced Gore pretty badly in the 2000 election, too. It seems counter intutive that Republicans would have more popular support, but most hyper wealthy people lean toward the left (Gates, Ellison, actors, lawyers) while more of the moderately wealthy are further to the right (small business people, professional males) who are wealthy enough to give to the "hard money limit". And yes these are very broad generalizations. Dean will pick up more donations if nominated, and he has done well in an early lead, it will be interesting to see if it holds as we get closer to the big primaries (it's very early in the election cycle to begin getting meaningful results by analyzing funds and funding patterns). If the other challengers can get the Clinton's buddy out of the DNC chair role this could become a really interesting race. Working with the median voter theory (basically in a popular vote the guy closest to the middle wins) Dean doesn't stand a chance in the final election but other candidates could give Bush a good run for his money.
Re:they shouldnt have even said it was in the work
on
No Doom 3 This Year?
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· Score: 1
People tend to do funny things when their bosses ask them questions, even if they know others are listening.
From what I understand on the Cubans they really did used to be better, but with the US out of the market the good growers moved to other areas with their seed stock and are now better than what the Cubans are growing. This isn't first hand knowledge. Also, if you don't get a huge ammonia flavor to the cigar you got ripped off it's probably not a cuban.
I've also heard that people get tired of eating just protein and end up eating less too. Also meat and the like take signifcantly longer to digest making you feel full for a longer part of the day. One easy switch is to try to eat some salad with every meal. There are hundreds of different types of salads go find a few that you like and eat those. They are almost all filled with good food and can be quite tasty.
Quite true, companies will always approach a transaction with a monopolist's view point, that's their job. Yes if you can create a system in which there exist many possible choices using a single network you reduce the monopoly problem (the closest I can think of is Visa--effectivly one network with many issuing banks I realize that amex and discover each have their own networks, but costs are much higher for the smaller rivals), but it is still monopoly rents extracted on the network. In Visa's case the banks all charge a relativly competitive interest rate, but merchants (and consumers indirectly) pay steep transaction prices. The payment system would be the monopoly point and it is a good thing to have a single payment structure to reduce total transaction costs, since each user would only have to net their payments over a period of time once rather than once for each network they belong to, and content providers would rather belong to the network with the largest collection of users to maximize their payments. There are many things to reduce how effective the monopoly system is at extracting rents, it can be nationalized like the highway system, fairly low rents there. It can be taxed similar to tobbacco (not a monopoly but they have shown some pretty impressive pricing power) which should benefit all the other taxpayers. It can be regulated (like the local phones or power distribution networks--can lead to wasted effort). What consumers don't want is for a single company to gain control of the system, as MS did with the OS or AT&T did with the phone networks.
You are both recognising the same problem (the small payment network only has a shot at working if it's the only one which reduces the outside the network payments). This is a natural monopoly, the network becomes more valuable as more people use it. Railroads, operating systems, power distribution, and banks all show similar systems. Your solution is one of many remidies for a natural monopoly. Others are high taxes on the monopoly (not perfect but most of the rents flow to the other taxpayers), regulation (again the rents flow to some class of users and really annoys the ones who don't get the benefits), and standardization (the rents flow to interfacing companies). None of these solutions completely alleviates the problem, but all can result in a pretty effective balancing force to the monopoly.
This is actually a pretty tough market to make money in because of all the charge backs. As far as I know that is the reason Paypal got out of the business, the fraud losses were too high. There are a few banks which have done it from the beginning First Data owns one but I don't remember the name.
You get enough money together and you can buy out any public company. You might have more difficultly getting enough MS or Oracle shareholders to sell, but with a high enough price anything is possible.
Thanks for the tip Elite was one of my favorite games, and I was always hoping to add (someday in my dreams) a dynamic trading model that reduced price as you filled orders and raised them as they were unmet would make those trading ships go out and explore a little to find good routes. This is just what I have been looking for it's been an idea in the back of my mind for several years.
The only weird accounting issue that I can think of for game companies has to do with their reserves of unsold product. The retail outlets are allowed to send back unsold products after a certain period of time, and becuse of these agreements, the video game makers are supposed to estimate how much product they expect to have returned, and then reduce their revenue by that amount. Anytime you let managment estimate something, it opens the door for games, managment can under reserve and raise current earnings (at the cost of future earnings) or they can over reserve to lower current earnings, and raise those in a future period. Can anyone else think of some other accounting games that these types of companies can play?
Are they still using largely those.50 cal behemoths. I saw one in the sporting goods store the other day and was amazed by the size of the gun. The rounds are bulky and heavy too. I was the AG (assistant gunner, glorified pack rat and ammo carrier) for an M60 once (in a force on force with the miles gear) and that was an impressive bulk.
It has always amazed me that Canada and Australia are both kind enough to send troops to fight in battles that they really don't have a whole lot to gain from, simply because their Allies (US and UK) ask them to do so.
I think their hope is that even a small set of inkblots would generate a fairly large and diverse number of user responses, go up and look at some of the/.ers views of what same 10 inkblots were. If I see a gorilla in the second picutre, and I think someone else saw a woman in sweats streaching, those are going to generate two very different letter combinations over even the same 10 inkblots. If the inkblots are different (and pseudo-randomly generated at first logon this could be quite secure)
I'll echo that, I was running quake 3 just fine on my old Pentium II 300 with a Radeon 7000 after it became the cheapo card, and the settings turned down a little.
I needed a boot disk to run almost all my games back in the day. It was annoying to make it the first time, but I learned a lot, and was pretty prowd when I learned that I did a better job allocating upper memory than memmaker (hey I was young and foolish).
I think theve only sold 9 million and about 1 million was in Japan. About 2 million in Europe and 6 or so in the US. If you grab the conf. call replay (its on their investor page microsoft.com/msft) you can hear all about it.
Surprisingly few, they have one of the highest attach rates in the business, I think they mentioned that they are selling something like 5 games with each unit. (It's possible that they were counting the two free games in that, but even so that is right up there with Sony, and ahead of Nintendo. Loss is probably less than $100 per box now, given how quickly component prices fall.
Black Scholes is simply the limit of a binomial tree as time approaches 0, then the math is simplified. Rumor has it Microsoft's new equity plan was selected partly because the grantees wanted something that would retain some value even if the stock was flat or down. BTW, its nice to see another finance geek here, but then I keep forgetting about all the Bloomberg techies.
Suckers are you kidding, this is the best way to pay a tax expensed salary that isn't recognised by your current owners' method of calculating earnings. Its mostly a tax dodge for the big companies but it has been quite lucrative for the employees of those large companies that congress will probably close the loophole soon.
Ironically if he had substituted risk free rate for zero interest rate, he would have been surprisingly close to the the black-scholes model. They can be summed as half the stock return (up or down for call or put, respectively)plus an risk free rate (US Gov Bond)loan or investment.
I can't give you anything other than general platitudes about normal size of grants. I'm a finance guy in the public sector, options in the state would probably have negative value, but I can tell you a few things about how to value them and the like. Microsoft is the only one that really reports in any sort of detail about their option plans. From what I have gathered they give options with a grant value of about 30%-50% up to 100% or more for developers of what I'd estimate to be salary expense. That is probably one of the more generous plans available.
More specifically they are valued using a model called Black-Scholes it's a binomial probability tree that maps out the likelyhood of a given option finishing in the money*the payoff of it finishing in the money. It's not perfect but it works pretty well, if your company is publicly traded, you can usually find a quote on options out a year or two from a financial page, those should serve as a check on the B-S estimate of value. Because of the current view by the accounting community you are likely to get options for only a few more years and then stock grants will become more popular (they cause less dilution since you get the entire value of a share rather than the difference between strike and market value). Other than getting hit for an AMT bill (an old loophole closer that never moved up for inflation) they really can't ever be a bad thing for the grantee. Just make sure that you speak with an accountant about tax implications as your excersise dates arrive, and you should be just fine. Finally, don't borrow against their value, or spend the money their worth until after you have sold the stock, and don't keep all your investments tied up in the investments tied to the company that employs you. If you feel the need to hedge your options before they vest you can speak with a good investment counselor (he should know right away how to do this if he doesn't find a different one--short sales or collars would be words you want to hear quickly).
Prime is what banks charge their best customers if they have perfect credit. Interest on cash (required by accounting rules to be in things that mature in less than 1 year) is around 1.0%-1.5%. The idea here is to spur companies in to investing thier cash in something that generates economic returns (new business assets) becuase their cash give them so little or conversely because they can borrow at a very low rate. The scary part is when it doesn't work (see Japan) because everyone is too scared of losing their investment so they keep their money in cash and don't borrow anything new. I'd guess that between that and natural gas prices Mr. Greenspan is waking in a cold sweat regularly.
That is exactly why the record companies are so expensive. Was it the Decca exec who turned down the Beatles because they felt that guitar groups were on the way out? They spend a fortune discovering, recording, and marketing bands that will not sell a record. It's currently impossible to predict what a creative work will be worth before it is marketed, which is why we use royalties to reward the good (popular) works and let those who are less popular know that they might not want to quit their day job yet.
Actually even supermarkets suffer during a downturn (people by cheaper food which sometimes makes them more money, since they usually own the store branded stuff and make more per item on that), they also have less room to fall since you need a certain level of food intake to survive. The stuff that has a pick during downturns are things like collection agencies, bankruptcy attourneys, anything tied to government bonds, and those investors brave enough to buy high yeild bonds as banks and pension funds sell sell sell.
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Bush trounced Gore pretty badly in the 2000 election, too. It seems counter intutive that Republicans would have more popular support, but most hyper wealthy people lean toward the left (Gates, Ellison, actors, lawyers) while more of the moderately wealthy are further to the right (small business people, professional males) who are wealthy enough to give to the "hard money limit". And yes these are very broad generalizations. Dean will pick up more donations if nominated, and he has done well in an early lead, it will be interesting to see if it holds as we get closer to the big primaries (it's very early in the election cycle to begin getting meaningful results by analyzing funds and funding patterns). If the other challengers can get the Clinton's buddy out of the DNC chair role this could become a really interesting race. Working with the median voter theory (basically in a popular vote the guy closest to the middle wins) Dean doesn't stand a chance in the final election but other candidates could give Bush a good run for his money.
People tend to do funny things when their bosses ask them questions, even if they know others are listening.
That's only because you can be fired after the job is done unlike a French citizen, making you cheaper in the long run.
From what I understand on the Cubans they really did used to be better, but with the US out of the market the good growers moved to other areas with their seed stock and are now better than what the Cubans are growing. This isn't first hand knowledge. Also, if you don't get a huge ammonia flavor to the cigar you got ripped off it's probably not a cuban.
I've also heard that people get tired of eating just protein and end up eating less too. Also meat and the like take signifcantly longer to digest making you feel full for a longer part of the day. One easy switch is to try to eat some salad with every meal. There are hundreds of different types of salads go find a few that you like and eat those. They are almost all filled with good food and can be quite tasty.
Quite true, companies will always approach a transaction with a monopolist's view point, that's their job. Yes if you can create a system in which there exist many possible choices using a single network you reduce the monopoly problem (the closest I can think of is Visa--effectivly one network with many issuing banks I realize that amex and discover each have their own networks, but costs are much higher for the smaller rivals), but it is still monopoly rents extracted on the network. In Visa's case the banks all charge a relativly competitive interest rate, but merchants (and consumers indirectly) pay steep transaction prices. The payment system would be the monopoly point and it is a good thing to have a single payment structure to reduce total transaction costs, since each user would only have to net their payments over a period of time once rather than once for each network they belong to, and content providers would rather belong to the network with the largest collection of users to maximize their payments. There are many things to reduce how effective the monopoly system is at extracting rents, it can be nationalized like the highway system, fairly low rents there. It can be taxed similar to tobbacco (not a monopoly but they have shown some pretty impressive pricing power) which should benefit all the other taxpayers. It can be regulated (like the local phones or power distribution networks--can lead to wasted effort). What consumers don't want is for a single company to gain control of the system, as MS did with the OS or AT&T did with the phone networks.
You are both recognising the same problem (the small payment network only has a shot at working if it's the only one which reduces the outside the network payments). This is a natural monopoly, the network becomes more valuable as more people use it. Railroads, operating systems, power distribution, and banks all show similar systems. Your solution is one of many remidies for a natural monopoly. Others are high taxes on the monopoly (not perfect but most of the rents flow to the other taxpayers), regulation (again the rents flow to some class of users and really annoys the ones who don't get the benefits), and standardization (the rents flow to interfacing companies). None of these solutions completely alleviates the problem, but all can result in a pretty effective balancing force to the monopoly.
This is actually a pretty tough market to make money in because of all the charge backs. As far as I know that is the reason Paypal got out of the business, the fraud losses were too high. There are a few banks which have done it from the beginning First Data owns one but I don't remember the name.
You get enough money together and you can buy out any public company. You might have more difficultly getting enough MS or Oracle shareholders to sell, but with a high enough price anything is possible.
Thanks for the tip Elite was one of my favorite games, and I was always hoping to add (someday in my dreams) a dynamic trading model that reduced price as you filled orders and raised them as they were unmet would make those trading ships go out and explore a little to find good routes. This is just what I have been looking for it's been an idea in the back of my mind for several years.
The only weird accounting issue that I can think of for game companies has to do with their reserves of unsold product. The retail outlets are allowed to send back unsold products after a certain period of time, and becuse of these agreements, the video game makers are supposed to estimate how much product they expect to have returned, and then reduce their revenue by that amount. Anytime you let managment estimate something, it opens the door for games, managment can under reserve and raise current earnings (at the cost of future earnings) or they can over reserve to lower current earnings, and raise those in a future period. Can anyone else think of some other accounting games that these types of companies can play?
Are they still using largely those .50 cal behemoths. I saw one in the sporting goods store the other day and was amazed by the size of the gun. The rounds are bulky and heavy too. I was the AG (assistant gunner, glorified pack rat and ammo carrier) for an M60 once (in a force on force with the miles gear) and that was an impressive bulk.
It has always amazed me that Canada and Australia are both kind enough to send troops to fight in battles that they really don't have a whole lot to gain from, simply because their Allies (US and UK) ask them to do so.
I think their hope is that even a small set of inkblots would generate a fairly large and diverse number of user responses, go up and look at some of the /.ers views of what same 10 inkblots were. If I see a gorilla in the second picutre, and I think someone else saw a woman in sweats streaching, those are going to generate two very different letter combinations over even the same 10 inkblots. If the inkblots are different (and pseudo-randomly generated at first logon this could be quite secure)
I'll echo that, I was running quake 3 just fine on my old Pentium II 300 with a Radeon 7000 after it became the cheapo card, and the settings turned down a little.
I needed a boot disk to run almost all my games back in the day. It was annoying to make it the first time, but I learned a lot, and was pretty prowd when I learned that I did a better job allocating upper memory than memmaker (hey I was young and foolish).
I think theve only sold 9 million and about 1 million was in Japan. About 2 million in Europe and 6 or so in the US. If you grab the conf. call replay (its on their investor page microsoft.com/msft) you can hear all about it.
Surprisingly few, they have one of the highest attach rates in the business, I think they mentioned that they are selling something like 5 games with each unit. (It's possible that they were counting the two free games in that, but even so that is right up there with Sony, and ahead of Nintendo. Loss is probably less than $100 per box now, given how quickly component prices fall.
Black Scholes is simply the limit of a binomial tree as time approaches 0, then the math is simplified. Rumor has it Microsoft's new equity plan was selected partly because the grantees wanted something that would retain some value even if the stock was flat or down. BTW, its nice to see another finance geek here, but then I keep forgetting about all the Bloomberg techies.
Suckers are you kidding, this is the best way to pay a tax expensed salary that isn't recognised by your current owners' method of calculating earnings. Its mostly a tax dodge for the big companies but it has been quite lucrative for the employees of those large companies that congress will probably close the loophole soon.
Ironically if he had substituted risk free rate for zero interest rate, he would have been surprisingly close to the the black-scholes model. They can be summed as half the stock return (up or down for call or put, respectively)plus an risk free rate (US Gov Bond)loan or investment.
I can't give you anything other than general platitudes about normal size of grants. I'm a finance guy in the public sector, options in the state would probably have negative value, but I can tell you a few things about how to value them and the like. Microsoft is the only one that really reports in any sort of detail about their option plans. From what I have gathered they give options with a grant value of about 30%-50% up to 100% or more for developers of what I'd estimate to be salary expense. That is probably one of the more generous plans available.
More specifically they are valued using a model called Black-Scholes it's a binomial probability tree that maps out the likelyhood of a given option finishing in the money*the payoff of it finishing in the money. It's not perfect but it works pretty well, if your company is publicly traded, you can usually find a quote on options out a year or two from a financial page, those should serve as a check on the B-S estimate of value. Because of the current view by the accounting community you are likely to get options for only a few more years and then stock grants will become more popular (they cause less dilution since you get the entire value of a share rather than the difference between strike and market value). Other than getting hit for an AMT bill (an old loophole closer that never moved up for inflation) they really can't ever be a bad thing for the grantee. Just make sure that you speak with an accountant about tax implications as your excersise dates arrive, and you should be just fine.
Finally, don't borrow against their value, or spend the money their worth until after you have sold the stock, and don't keep all your investments tied up in the investments tied to the company that employs you. If you feel the need to hedge your options before they vest you can speak with a good investment counselor (he should know right away how to do this if he doesn't find a different one--short sales or collars would be words you want to hear quickly).
Prime is what banks charge their best customers if they have perfect credit. Interest on cash (required by accounting rules to be in things that mature in less than 1 year) is around 1.0%-1.5%. The idea here is to spur companies in to investing thier cash in something that generates economic returns (new business assets) becuase their cash give them so little or conversely because they can borrow at a very low rate. The scary part is when it doesn't work (see Japan) because everyone is too scared of losing their investment so they keep their money in cash and don't borrow anything new. I'd guess that between that and natural gas prices Mr. Greenspan is waking in a cold sweat regularly.
That is exactly why the record companies are so expensive. Was it the Decca exec who turned down the Beatles because they felt that guitar groups were on the way out? They spend a fortune discovering, recording, and marketing bands that will not sell a record. It's currently impossible to predict what a creative work will be worth before it is marketed, which is why we use royalties to reward the good (popular) works and let those who are less popular know that they might not want to quit their day job yet.
Actually even supermarkets suffer during a downturn (people by cheaper food which sometimes makes them more money, since they usually own the store branded stuff and make more per item on that), they also have less room to fall since you need a certain level of food intake to survive. The stuff that has a pick during downturns are things like collection agencies, bankruptcy attourneys, anything tied to government bonds, and those investors brave enough to buy high yeild bonds as banks and pension funds sell sell sell.