Actually American companies do pay tax on earnings when a foreign subsidiary sells something (they get credits for foreign taxes paid, and on earnings reinvested in the foreign country). That's why so many companies were reincorporating in Bermuda a few years ago (they could stop paying American taxes on foreign income). Following Sept 11, congress gave a one year tax break on repatriating foreign earnings and billions were repatriated (which is one of many reasons dividend yields are up in the last few years).
Baccarat is exceedingly simple to understand for the gambler, because you only make one decision. Bank or player (if you are the player you don't even have to make that decision). The rules while complex don't allow for additional input from either side. Both hands are played in the same manner as the dealer's in blackjack. The bank has a very slight edge which is offset by the vig the house takes on bank bets (4-5% in most casinos).
Certainly your skydiver is paying for the cost of his energy, as the charter company wouldn't be around very long otherwise. However, the arguement made by most environmentalists is that the price of gasoline does not include the full social costs of it's use (which is true) and they argue that they are very large (which is subject to further research and debate).
From your examples and tone, I'm guessing you may have read this already, but for others, here's by far the best look at the subject. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/CoaseJLE1960.pdf
I think they mean we can't look several billion years further into the past to identify if the rate was constant and changed once, decaying, changing linearly etc. Say the quasar's light was now 10 billion years old, they mean we would like to see light from 11 billion years ago to see what the observation would have been 11 billion years ago, etc.
Huge difference between weed distribution (you'd have already been "management tracked" it sounds like) and crack slinging. You would have been excersising market power due to your potential customers limited access to the markets and your assymetric information (where to buy cheap weed). Crack dealing is competitive and those at the top of the game make bank (so lots of people are willing to tolerate poor working conditions for the shot at getting to the top). Not really that different than all the associates at an investment bank, law firm, or big 5 accounting firm busting their butt 100/hrs a week for pay that covers expenses and school bills but not a whole lot more, for the shoot at making partner (where you will be set for life).
This grad student spent a ton of time studying a gang in Chicago and the treasurer sent him all the books, the average dealer in their gang was making something like $2.65/hr.
Yeah, but who wants to type a whole romance novel in which the heroine meets a bad boy, sleeps with him until they break up and return to reveal he has both a heart of gold and a boat full of it, too!
Basically, Fastow's partnerships were initially based on some rules that were very lenient (if you had a small outside ownership investment) you could put a business in there and it wouldn't be an Enron investment. Imagine this, a company has been buying stock and some of the shares bought in 1999 (say 100,000 worth of them) have gone down a lot. The rules as they were then would let you create a company with a $9,700 investment, get an outside party to contribute $300, and the new company would borrow another $90,000 from a bank (under a loan guarantee from you). This new company could buy your stock from you at the price you paid for it and then eat the losses. It's debt wouldn't show up on your balance sheet (although you would be paying for it). At that time guarantees didn't have to be booked on the balance sheet.
Fastow then used these structures to enrich himself, via the non independant ownership stakes. He would pay himself and cronys huge management fees for running the companies and similar things.
Lay's biggest flaw was that he was a pushover and either didn't understand or didn't pay enough attention to what the CEO was doing (not that those were the only things) the international businesses made a string of terrible investments as they were compensated for closing a deal (based on the deal size rather than it's return).
In that sense, Lay (and perhaps Skilling) were very responsible for creating (and "nurturing" an environment where that could occur, but was unlikely to have directly participated in fraudulent activities.
I'm not an apoligist stooge for anyone, at best he should have known what his staff was doing when he was CEO-that alone is enough to make him partially culpable. However, prior to the bankruptcy of Enron, the retirement plans were unfrozen and employees were net purchasors of Enron stock not sellers. This is after Skilling became CEO, called an analyst and asshole on a teleconference call, and quit. After the company had announced some very poor accounting results, and after the stock price had begun a severe downturn and lenders and trading partners were beginning to have major concerns about the company's creditworthiness.
Stupidity generally begats its own reward, but nearly every financial document published in the last 30 years has had the same bit of advice don't ever own all of your assets in your employer's stock! If things get bad you are likely to loose both your retirment money and your job! If they couldn't even be bothered to follow the number one rule of investing then I don't feel much pity for them. Neither would I feel a whole lot of pity for someone who parks their convertible Rolls in Compton with the top down while going to the cash machine to grab $10,000 and counts it out loud on the way back to the car!
I was trying to twist it around (could you do that in Elite? I remember doing it in Elite 3. Might have to dust off the ole dosbox and give my Osprey toole about the ole solar system.
As an example take a close look at your hand. I'm sure as a child you stuck a flash light in the web between your thumb and hand and noticed the glow. Your skin color comes from a mix of light reflecting off the melanin in several layers of skin of various stages of life, blood near the surface and if you make a fist skin pulled tight over the bone. In addition, there are creases and hair. To make a good skin model you would need to account for all of these items and humans have unbelievably sophisticated IFF (systems mostly used for sexual selection) to spot any flaw in any of those items (because they might have indicated a less healthy or fertile partner). If we could model all of that, we could probably model virtual voices and Sim0ne will be an A list star.
You do know that it still takes some time to rar up the whole internet and copy it on to CDs even with Moore's law helping computers, "we're giving it all she's got here, Ted."
Now I wonder if Google's entire crawls really are delivered to him daily by staffers?
I agree that they are certainly out there, the issue is that there are too few and this business badly needs more. I agree that risk is never really certain (perhaps not even in hindsight) but your point on the demand for specs, feature sets and timelines is far above what can be reliably done today. It would be my hope (perhaps my idealism is showing) that if liability were undertaken it would result in push back by the vendors on those specs and timelines which would greatly reduce the acceptable failure rate (you are correct that it can't be eliminated). Thank you for the very interesting points!
There have always been lots, innovator, software designer, or software developer came right to the top of my head. I just think engineering is a pretty special profession and the name shouldn't be diluted. Your last sentance sums up why engineering is unique (very high degrees of experience in both theoretic and practical knowledge and respectful distance from the performance limits when possible) and to the extent that one works to further that goal in software creation, they should rightfully be engineers.
It's not my opinion that there could never be software engineers, just that there aren't many yet.
That's an excellent solution, but it sure helps to have a decent amount of accounting knowledge when you are setting that up! Any small business who took the time to get SQL Ledger running would find that they were well prepared for the future.
A good start would be the end of the "nah, nah you can't hold us responsible for this software disclamer in most licenses". I'm not in software development, but I've been tangentially involved in testing of some pretty technical models, and I'd compare the state of software to that of Chemistry c. 1800, the laws are there they just haven't been discovered yet. Just because I've not experienced it first hand, doesn't mean I don't know how hard it would be. Imagine trying to ask Mendeleev how to test any modern chemical engineering process, or Gauss how to test a modern powerplant. Learning is done in exploration mode, but once exploration mode is done, someone has to build upon the new laws how to engineer useful products from the new discoveries. Too much software development recreates original work (which is hard and requires real talent) and is done in crisis mode, and too little is done as the result of a thoughtout plan that undergirds the whole project. Perhaps this is the result of software development being done in an intellectual property framework.
There are lots of very bright mechanical and electrical techs who can build all sorts of things from experience and trial and error, but few who know how or why the item works in every detail. Engineers codify all that trial and error knowledge and apply the codified knowledge to future problems (saving lots of waste, material, and labor).
You have that backwards, finals week is the one week per semester where the marketing/business majors join their engineering bretheren studying thier butt off, the rest of the year your analogy applies. (Some business students are at the bars during finals week, but they are future CEOs because their folks started the companies).
The key factor that most of the PE's are arguing about is that once granted the designation, Professional Engineer, they bear the sole responsibility for the accuracy and correctness of the decisions behind everything they sign off on designing or approving. Meaning that if it breaks and kills some one after completion, they are responsible. When software designers are signed up for that, then they can call themselves engineers.
I dunno if it's so much urban areas getting more people but there is a distinct lack of connections between those from an urban area and those who are new to the area. I can always spot fellow relocators (or tourists) on the DC metro because we are all dying to strike up a conversation with some one. Locals generally dislike talking to a complete stranger on the metro. I'm not sure why cultures are so different between big cities (and their suburbs) and smaller towns but they sure seem to be.
It is the exception because all that time spent teaching means that the profs aren't out there doing ground breaking research (which enhances the image of the university). That also means that your professors are there because they like to teach rather than research. But you're not going to draw the same "names" to come research there, either. I have three guesses as to the gp's educational institution (Mudd, Rose, and Cooper) but most people have never heard of any of them. They are mostly regional institutions but you come out of them with an education that I'd consider to be one of the best in the field.
Thanks nice to see a few other folks get it too. I had the benefit of reading pretty much everything the street put out over the last 5 years and most analysts are really sharp and quite visionary. Some are clueless, but rare was the piece that didn't get me thinking. I'll still miss the guy who turned me on to the whole concept (he would put out a weekly piece that was intended to be silly but thought provoking). Best idea was to measure keg sales to see if most guys were going to bars to watch TV rather than staying home (where they would be measured by rating agencies). Every week he usually got a good chuckle some weeks a belly laugh. Most of the time by the end you were thinking about some media topic in a very new way.
The company that should be fighting for network neutrality tooth and nail is Disney (who's ESPN would be a huge beneficiary of bypassing the cable company for internet delivery). C-Span should be shaking in their boots.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually American companies do pay tax on earnings when a foreign subsidiary sells something (they get credits for foreign taxes paid, and on earnings reinvested in the foreign country). That's why so many companies were reincorporating in Bermuda a few years ago (they could stop paying American taxes on foreign income). Following Sept 11, congress gave a one year tax break on repatriating foreign earnings and billions were repatriated (which is one of many reasons dividend yields are up in the last few years).
Baccarat is exceedingly simple to understand for the gambler, because you only make one decision. Bank or player (if you are the player you don't even have to make that decision). The rules while complex don't allow for additional input from either side. Both hands are played in the same manner as the dealer's in blackjack. The bank has a very slight edge which is offset by the vig the house takes on bank bets (4-5% in most casinos).
Certainly your skydiver is paying for the cost of his energy, as the charter company wouldn't be around very long otherwise. However, the arguement made by most environmentalists is that the price of gasoline does not include the full social costs of it's use (which is true) and they argue that they are very large (which is subject to further research and debate). From your examples and tone, I'm guessing you may have read this already, but for others, here's by far the best look at the subject. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/CoaseJLE1960.pdf
I think they mean we can't look several billion years further into the past to identify if the rate was constant and changed once, decaying, changing linearly etc. Say the quasar's light was now 10 billion years old, they mean we would like to see light from 11 billion years ago to see what the observation would have been 11 billion years ago, etc.
Heritic, the rest of the objects aren't there. The gravity is just there to test your faith.
Huge difference between weed distribution (you'd have already been "management tracked" it sounds like) and crack slinging. You would have been excersising market power due to your potential customers limited access to the markets and your assymetric information (where to buy cheap weed). Crack dealing is competitive and those at the top of the game make bank (so lots of people are willing to tolerate poor working conditions for the shot at getting to the top). Not really that different than all the associates at an investment bank, law firm, or big 5 accounting firm busting their butt 100/hrs a week for pay that covers expenses and school bills but not a whole lot more, for the shoot at making partner (where you will be set for life).
This grad student spent a ton of time studying a gang in Chicago and the treasurer sent him all the books, the average dealer in their gang was making something like $2.65/hr.
Yeah, but who wants to type a whole romance novel in which the heroine meets a bad boy, sleeps with him until they break up and return to reveal he has both a heart of gold and a boat full of it, too!
Basically, Fastow's partnerships were initially based on some rules that were very lenient (if you had a small outside ownership investment) you could put a business in there and it wouldn't be an Enron investment. Imagine this, a company has been buying stock and some of the shares bought in 1999 (say 100,000 worth of them) have gone down a lot. The rules as they were then would let you create a company with a $9,700 investment, get an outside party to contribute $300, and the new company would borrow another $90,000 from a bank (under a loan guarantee from you). This new company could buy your stock from you at the price you paid for it and then eat the losses. It's debt wouldn't show up on your balance sheet (although you would be paying for it). At that time guarantees didn't have to be booked on the balance sheet.
Fastow then used these structures to enrich himself, via the non independant ownership stakes. He would pay himself and cronys huge management fees for running the companies and similar things.
Lay's biggest flaw was that he was a pushover and either didn't understand or didn't pay enough attention to what the CEO was doing (not that those were the only things) the international businesses made a string of terrible investments as they were compensated for closing a deal (based on the deal size rather than it's return).
In that sense, Lay (and perhaps Skilling) were very responsible for creating (and "nurturing" an environment where that could occur, but was unlikely to have directly participated in fraudulent activities.
I'm not an apoligist stooge for anyone, at best he should have known what his staff was doing when he was CEO-that alone is enough to make him partially culpable. However, prior to the bankruptcy of Enron, the retirement plans were unfrozen and employees were net purchasors of Enron stock not sellers. This is after Skilling became CEO, called an analyst and asshole on a teleconference call, and quit. After the company had announced some very poor accounting results, and after the stock price had begun a severe downturn and lenders and trading partners were beginning to have major concerns about the company's creditworthiness.
Stupidity generally begats its own reward, but nearly every financial document published in the last 30 years has had the same bit of advice don't ever own all of your assets in your employer's stock! If things get bad you are likely to loose both your retirment money and your job! If they couldn't even be bothered to follow the number one rule of investing then I don't feel much pity for them. Neither would I feel a whole lot of pity for someone who parks their convertible Rolls in Compton with the top down while going to the cash machine to grab $10,000 and counts it out loud on the way back to the car!
6%, of crafts, but when compared to any other commercial vehicle on a per flight basis it ranks very near the top.
I was trying to twist it around (could you do that in Elite? I remember doing it in Elite 3. Might have to dust off the ole dosbox and give my Osprey toole about the ole solar system.
Nope it's just my planetary golf ball. Yet another black hole in one for me (in a few melinnia).
As an example take a close look at your hand. I'm sure as a child you stuck a flash light in the web between your thumb and hand and noticed the glow. Your skin color comes from a mix of light reflecting off the melanin in several layers of skin of various stages of life, blood near the surface and if you make a fist skin pulled tight over the bone. In addition, there are creases and hair. To make a good skin model you would need to account for all of these items and humans have unbelievably sophisticated IFF (systems mostly used for sexual selection) to spot any flaw in any of those items (because they might have indicated a less healthy or fertile partner). If we could model all of that, we could probably model virtual voices and Sim0ne will be an A list star.
You do know that it still takes some time to rar up the whole internet and copy it on to CDs even with Moore's law helping computers, "we're giving it all she's got here, Ted."
Now I wonder if Google's entire crawls really are delivered to him daily by staffers?
I agree that they are certainly out there, the issue is that there are too few and this business badly needs more. I agree that risk is never really certain (perhaps not even in hindsight) but your point on the demand for specs, feature sets and timelines is far above what can be reliably done today. It would be my hope (perhaps my idealism is showing) that if liability were undertaken it would result in push back by the vendors on those specs and timelines which would greatly reduce the acceptable failure rate (you are correct that it can't be eliminated). Thank you for the very interesting points!
There have always been lots, innovator, software designer, or software developer came right to the top of my head. I just think engineering is a pretty special profession and the name shouldn't be diluted. Your last sentance sums up why engineering is unique (very high degrees of experience in both theoretic and practical knowledge and respectful distance from the performance limits when possible) and to the extent that one works to further that goal in software creation, they should rightfully be engineers.
It's not my opinion that there could never be software engineers, just that there aren't many yet.
That's an excellent solution, but it sure helps to have a decent amount of accounting knowledge when you are setting that up! Any small business who took the time to get SQL Ledger running would find that they were well prepared for the future.
http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenshi p_776.html
It's not just a quick form though you have to sign an oath in front of a diplomat.
A good start would be the end of the "nah, nah you can't hold us responsible for this software disclamer in most licenses". I'm not in software development, but I've been tangentially involved in testing of some pretty technical models, and I'd compare the state of software to that of Chemistry c. 1800, the laws are there they just haven't been discovered yet. Just because I've not experienced it first hand, doesn't mean I don't know how hard it would be. Imagine trying to ask Mendeleev how to test any modern chemical engineering process, or Gauss how to test a modern powerplant. Learning is done in exploration mode, but once exploration mode is done, someone has to build upon the new laws how to engineer useful products from the new discoveries. Too much software development recreates original work (which is hard and requires real talent) and is done in crisis mode, and too little is done as the result of a thoughtout plan that undergirds the whole project. Perhaps this is the result of software development being done in an intellectual property framework.
There are lots of very bright mechanical and electrical techs who can build all sorts of things from experience and trial and error, but few who know how or why the item works in every detail. Engineers codify all that trial and error knowledge and apply the codified knowledge to future problems (saving lots of waste, material, and labor).
You have that backwards, finals week is the one week per semester where the marketing/business majors join their engineering bretheren studying thier butt off, the rest of the year your analogy applies. (Some business students are at the bars during finals week, but they are future CEOs because their folks started the companies).
The key factor that most of the PE's are arguing about is that once granted the designation, Professional Engineer, they bear the sole responsibility for the accuracy and correctness of the decisions behind everything they sign off on designing or approving. Meaning that if it breaks and kills some one after completion, they are responsible. When software designers are signed up for that, then they can call themselves engineers.
I dunno if it's so much urban areas getting more people but there is a distinct lack of connections between those from an urban area and those who are new to the area. I can always spot fellow relocators (or tourists) on the DC metro because we are all dying to strike up a conversation with some one. Locals generally dislike talking to a complete stranger on the metro. I'm not sure why cultures are so different between big cities (and their suburbs) and smaller towns but they sure seem to be.
It is the exception because all that time spent teaching means that the profs aren't out there doing ground breaking research (which enhances the image of the university). That also means that your professors are there because they like to teach rather than research. But you're not going to draw the same "names" to come research there, either. I have three guesses as to the gp's educational institution (Mudd, Rose, and Cooper) but most people have never heard of any of them. They are mostly regional institutions but you come out of them with an education that I'd consider to be one of the best in the field.
In the case of software sales, many will suggest that that was an intentional slip of the fingers.
Thanks nice to see a few other folks get it too. I had the benefit of reading pretty much everything the street put out over the last 5 years and most analysts are really sharp and quite visionary. Some are clueless, but rare was the piece that didn't get me thinking. I'll still miss the guy who turned me on to the whole concept (he would put out a weekly piece that was intended to be silly but thought provoking). Best idea was to measure keg sales to see if most guys were going to bars to watch TV rather than staying home (where they would be measured by rating agencies). Every week he usually got a good chuckle some weeks a belly laugh. Most of the time by the end you were thinking about some media topic in a very new way. The company that should be fighting for network neutrality tooth and nail is Disney (who's ESPN would be a huge beneficiary of bypassing the cable company for internet delivery). C-Span should be shaking in their boots.