> The capital gains/income tax laws also seem to > encourage misreporting earnings. Most investors > would rather own a high growth stock that they > can sell at a higher price later than own a > stock that pays regular divendends. I see a
I agree with your assessment. I think that subjecting all companies to subchapter S might mitigate this somewhat.
One problem is that I really, really hate the capital gains tax conceptually. It locks people into suboptimal investments and it therefore causes inefficient allocation of capital. The problem is that eliminating it without an additional subchapter S sort of regime for corporations will exacerbate the problem you describe.
From a policital standpoint, the unfortunate reality is that, although subchapter S would be great for helping make corporations report earnings honestly, it would be impossible for a politician to stand up and say that corporations shouldn't be taxed. That's a lie, but it is how it would be perceived and spun by his opponents. The level of financial ignorance out there is staggering and such a spin would be quite effective, I imagine.
> huge difference in the way that private > companies behave opposed to how public > companies behave. I think that the tax laws > account for much of this.
Again, I agree. Corporations have on balance, however, been much more affected by financial accounting rules than tax rules. Slight increases in EPS can lead to massive increases in market capitalization while a tax bill is just a tax bill, however unpleasant it may be. The real money is to be made lying to the upside. The bias is remarkably to the upside.
Likewise, I see no value proposition in putting GNU/linux on Apple hardware. One of the primary benefits of GNU/linux is that it runs well on generic (i.e. cheap) hardware. The benefits of OS X are primarily in what Apple brings to the table in terms of interface and software.
This has some geek factor to it, but the benefits I see from apple and the benefits I see from GNU/linux are thrown out and turned exactly around. Expensive Apple hardware running a GNU/linux product with a less-polished interface.
Admittedly, the main post addressed Apple's server product, for which the Apple interface issues are much less pronounced, but the expense of the hardware is still an issue. I just don't get it, I guess.
> and go on laughing up our sleeves about how the > Bush administration loves to suck corporate > cock.
Given that this is Sony, I think I see potential for a new line of bukkake films. I think that Bush may have to be blacked out, though, under Japanese pornography rules. Maybe it'd have to be anime.
I am disgusted that I know enough to have written the above post, btw. It's all second-hand knowledge. Honest.
1. Tax and finacial accounting numbers are different (redundant in this thread, but needs repeating).
2. Many people have advocated eliminating the corporate tax regime altogether as an alternative solution to this practice. Many corporations, such as REITs and subchapter S corporations, pay no corporate tax under most circumstances. This has not led to a dissolution of civil society. Simply expand sub-chapter S to cover all corporations and tax each shareholder on his/her proportionate share of earnings and notify them by sending a form 1099 at the end of the year.
The shareholders would require a distribution to cover the tax bill, requiring the corporation to actually have the money to pay the dividend to do this. There's no better way to make sure the earnings are real than to, essentially, require distribution of hard cash. If the company says it has earnings but can't make a dividend payment to cover investors' tax bills, investors would be aware of shenanigans.
This would also mitigate somewhat the problems that result from corporations hoarding cash, such as Cisco and Microsoft. It may also prevent corporations from hoarding earnings to use as a basis for growing the company without having to go to the credit or equity markets for investment. Regular vetting by lenders would place a further check on corporations, although that argument seems weak in light of Worldcom screwing a pile of institutional lenders who should have known better.
Re:its FAR WORSE! Add 50 billion of fraud "Good Wi
on
WorldCom Fraud Doubles
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· Score: 1
Everyone knows that goodwill from acquisitions is bullshit. It simply shows how much of a premium WCOM paid for assets of companies it acquired. There is some pretend theorization floating around about goodwill and how it should be shown on a balance sheet, but the real core of the business is operations, overhead, and debt. Goodwill is a fantasy and has no appreciable effect on the operation of a business from a financial reporting standpoint, IMHO.
The simple equations is that operations need to throw off more cash than the debt service and the overhead. If that doesn't happen, you will be visiting the federal courthouse for a bankruptcy field trip. That is why the revenue and expense frauds were a problem. I don't think it is a big secret that WCOM used inflated stock to buy the inflated stock of other companies.
After all, that is what WCOM's business was -- selling WCOM stock at inflated prices. They only had to convince the world that the marginal companies they bought would achieve some magical "synergy" resulting in greater enterprise value simply by bringing them under the same corporate umbrella. In the 90's investors were gullible enough to believe in financial philosopher's stones.
My thoughts exactly. The only problem is, what if Sony
requires
the product to be able to communicate with the "server module" at some point in the future? Basically, I fear a movement towards disabling hardware if reporting does not take place. This may be a first step in that direction.
I used to work for a Big Five accounting firm (not Andersen) and I did a variety of work -- tax consulting, mostly, but also some auditing. I am both an accountant and an attorney. I have left the tax world for the general practice of law, and despite all the lawyer jokes to the contrary, I feel "cleaner" about what I do now (mostly chasing ambulances). I would never have guessed that if you asked me about it when I graduated from law school lo those many years ago.
Here is my spin on the Worldcom situation:
1. Auditors will never, I repeat, never, catch outright fraud at companies they audit if the company is actively trying to deceive the auditors. Auditors look at only a fraction of financial records of a company, and if certain transactions are concealed or are outright misrepresented by the audited company's employees, it is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of the situation. Auditing is, reduced to its bare essence, statistical sampling of transactions with the sampling focused on major items and a certain percentage of the "ordinary" transactions. At a large company like Worldcom, it would be relatively simple for the CFO to completely fool the auditors (most CFOs come from the public accounting world and know very well the game that they are trying to cheat at).
2. Audits do not pass on the quality of a business, they simply try to determine if a company has followed "generally accepted" financial accounting practices as promulgated by the financial accounting standards board FASB - located in CT, home to Joe Lieberman who fought vigorously an attempt to reform accounting back in 1995, btw -- it's not just Harvey Pitt and the GOP Enron cronies at work here - the whole system is rotten. Shareholders who expect auditors to let them know a business model sucks will be waiting a long time and they are exhibiting pathological ignorance.
3. Of all the big accounting problems rearing their heads, a disproportionate number are coming out of Andersen audits. KPMG, PWC, E&Y, and C&L are all mostly avoiding the maelstrom. Why? The culture at Andersen? Leadership at Andersen? I honestly do not know, but it is striking that Andersen is auditing most of the problem children of the stock market.
I know people at Andersen at all levels who are smart, diligent, and honest. I have worked with many folks from Andersen. People move from Big Five firm to Big Five firm all the time, so there's no inherent "you are evil if you audit for Andersen" rule. I am at a complete loss to explain why Andersen is in the neighborhood at the time all these arsons are taking place, but it seems peculiar.
4. The changes recently enacted by the Congress and GW prohibiting consulting and auditing to be done by the same firm will do bupkus to stop accounting problems. The biggest source of accounting fraud results from the company misleading auditors. "Aren't the outside auditors professionals? Can't they see through the frauds?" The simple answer is, no, they can't under most circumstances where they are being wilfully mislead by the audited company. Outside audits are simply not as good a method for identifying fraud as the public perception makes them out to be.
5. Something I have seen pushed hard by accounting firms is what is called an accounting "product." Accountants have things they sell to companies and their work involves "deliverables." It is first and foremost a business.
What are the "deliverables" that I am now most vividly recalling? Ways to move debt off of balance sheets by arranging lease purchase agreements. Setting up subsidiaries to hold assets that drag on earnings growth. The thing is that these sorts of strategies complied with FASB rules for GAAP. The Big Five became more and more aggressive at coming up with and pushing these strategies. Nothing was more desirable than going into a company you audited with something that could add a cent or two to EPS while following GAAP and then billing $20 million dollars for it. There were (and are, I am sure) national sales teams pushing the hell out of these things.
What is the significance? The underlying businesses of the companies that purchased these products did not change. The reported earnings appeared to be growing or growing faster with no substantive change in the quality of the audited business. Especially at a time where P/E multiples were at record historical levels, an added cent or two could result in billions (BILLIONS) of added market capitalization. Combine that with the enormous amount of stock options offered to management level folks, and you begin to see why these "accounting products" were so popular -- accounting firms got huge fees, execs got enormous increases in the value of the shares/unexercised options, and the cost to the audited business was a pittance in comparison.
Your average investor knew nothing about this. The average brokerage firm analyst probably knew less than s/he should have. Finance majors know very little about accounting and generally end up on Wall Street sneering at their boring(!) friends who majored in accounting who largely go to the financial accounting world. The result is that the audited companies (and their management) were in the middle knowing pretty much the whole story while trying to mislead investors and analysts (who have their own house to clean, btw).
The fact that all of this took place during one of the biggest bubbles in the history of american financial markets only exacerbated the problem.
For/. readers from other countries, I hope you aren't getting too giddy about this. The simple fact is that many, many studies have been done about transparency of financial reporting and business ethics. The US is always at or near the top of those studies in having transparent accounting/reporting and having a reasonably honest system. In the present, only a tiny, tiny fraction of publically-traded companies have been affected by this, and I think the worst is over. I think overseas investors should wonder about what is being concealed on the books of some of their companies. Japan's banks' problems are widely known, but I throw that out there as an example. I will bet that it is not just the US affected by this -- the US is simply the most prominent place where it is going on. The fact that many people around the world like to watch the US get it in the crotch from time to time doesn't hurt the publicity, either. Especially after so much nationalistic chest-thumping from the US about its place in the world lately. I understand the schaden freude, but I don't necessarily think that the smugness associated with it is really very wise.
Long enough, back to work. So many people to sue, so little time. (that's a joke, people)
> I didn't say they were convicted criminals. I > said they were crooks.
Nice. I guess I buy it. I'm sorry for being so foolish as to fail to understand the clear difference between "crook" and "criminal." It must be my inferior intellect which prevents me from making such subtle distinctions. I am truly sorry for being such a woeful idiot. Please forgive me my ignorance.
> GamePro Magazine has an article in it's latest > issue speculating that these.1 micron chips > IBM is producing will be cell based and will > form the basis of the PlayStation 3.
Sweet! I can finally get me a cellular gaming console! Made out of meat and I can put it in my pocket! w00t!
> This is consistent with the Administration's > policy of having crooks act as policemen. > > Ted Olsen. > Harvey Pitt. > John Ashcroft.
What crimes did the above-referenced gentlemen commit and when were they convicted? Your post is pure and simple defamation.
On the argument side of your post, I think that there is nothing wrong with consumers of products sharing information with other consumers about the reliability, usability of various products and services. If letting people know a product is broken is enough to subject one to civil or criminal penalties, let's be honest about it and ban Consumer Reports, Ralph Nader, and epinions (maybe we should ba epinions anyway).
I've heard this story several times (meaning it has actually happened serveral times, not meaning that it is akin to an urban legend). The one closest to me was where a kid got hit with federal charges in OK for a Frontpage misconfiguration. Long story. Call it Brian's Song.
> My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that > schools used to not have as much fighting or > sex in them!.... Ugh! People must be reminded
My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that churches used to not have as much pedophilia in them!
> that it IS possible to get through schooling > without punching and fucking your way from one > class to the next.:(
Why would anyone want to miss the fucking and the fighting? That was the best part of school! Lewis evidently thought so - just check out the part about the Bloods and the Tarts in "Surprised by Joy." I guess the family values crowd reads, but doesn't read deeply.
I apologize for failing to include the entire world in my diatribe. The fact of the matter is that, by and large, almost everyone today fails to think skeptically and objectively (to the extent the latter is even possible) about things that are fed to them.
It is incredibly hard for the average person to think to himself, "prove it! prove it! prove it!" when the tv or radio or newspaper runs or when the CEO or analyst or stockbroker spits out something. That is what they should do, but at some point, the mind gets numb, the body relaxes, and a feeling of submission washes over you. Then, Big Brother is your friend, at least for a little while, till the carbs quit and you return to full consciousness.
All my paranoid thoughts aside, my initial broadside was unleashed at the media because that is simply where this sort of stuff is disseminated most widely. The whole idea that the Economist was "Shocked! Shocked!" by the incident just aggravated me a bit. The media also have pretentions to being authoritative fact checkers when the the reality is quite different. They're just as braindead and accepting as the rest of us.
Why not combine the crank with an attachment that would make the activity necessary to generate the power to transfer to the cell phone battery a little less annoying and perhaps a little, er, more rewarding? I mean, if you've got to sit there and turn your own crank anyway...
This issue (a dubious statistic repeated infinitely in press) results from the fact that facts are not checked thoroughly before publication. This sort of stuff happened with the stats the women's movement used, environmentalists, conservative groups, etc. The number of women dying from eating disorders was a classic error that was endlessly cycled and never questioned until the misconception was permanently rooted in the public consciousness.
Every interest group pushing an agenda (yes, even profit-seeking corporations seeking to sell more bandwith) seems to come up with some dubious statistic like this. The media gobble up press releases, disguised oftentimes as "studies" which are bought and paid for by the interest group, and they spit them out on in the newspapers and other media outlets, sometimes virtually unchanged.
I am not surprised by the Economist's story -- I am surprised that it took so long for it to make it into print. I wonder how many times the Economist itself published that same "fact" before discovering that the emporer had no clothes.
>... the first post fry, some Gnu Stew beowulf > tiered chocolate cake, Linux Lassi and some > Apple Pie. If you are lucky you may get a > recipe for Microsoftie ice cream;)
It is illegal to share the secret recipe for the Microsoftie ice cream. The recipe will not be in the cookbook. The fact that you do not know what goes into the Microsoftie makes it safer for you to consume.
Spam is not a tactic, it itself a product
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
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· Score: 1
My personal theory about spam involves two different thoughts:
1. Spam works on stupid newbies enough to make it worthwhile.
Alternatively,
2. Spam occurs as the result of people selling spamming tools (often by the use of spam) to people on whom spam is effective (see #1). One of the most-frequent uses of spam is to promote mailing software and the sale of email addresses.
These theories are not mutually exclusive.
I am glad that spam-promotions are actually harmful to the perpetrators. Unfortunately, I do not believe that most spam is legitimate or from legitimate companies. The unsophisticated level of spammers (read some of the messages sometimes - they are barely readable) leads me to believe that this study may have a marginal effect on the occasional "legitimate" company stupid enough to think about spamming.
> That's why you get your own AS and participate > in the global BGP. You then get your own > netblock which is simultaneously visible > through all your redundant connections.
Have you tried getting ARIN to cough up portable address space lately? I own part of a rinky-dink ISP in BFE, and we are simply not large enough to get our own addresses. As a result, we've had to seriously consider the financial viability of the providers we do business with in order to guess/estimate if they will continue to provide service in our area.
We've gone the AS route, but what if your provider goes chapter 11 and then looks at your particular contract and disavows it as is permitted under bankruptcy law and takes back their IPs that they had assigned to you? You are confronted with a highly disruptive problem in that much or all of your network may need to be renumbered. That is not a pleasant task. An AS number does not eliminate that risk.
About the best we have come up with is to get IP numbers from our most financially stable upstream providers, have an AS and do BGP, and keep tabs on the financial conditions of our providers.
As a final thought, even this sometimes is not enough. One of our financially sound providers recently threatened to jack up the price on a T-1 contract we had (upon expiration) by over 60%. Some fancy footwork got us a renewal at the old rate, but the threat was there -- even with a sound company, we were relatively at their mercy because they owned our upstream IP numbers.
The moral(s)? 1. Redundancy 2. Keep tabs on your suppliers 3. Negotiate contract renewals well ahead of time 4. Don't put all your eggs in one basket (use IPs from a variety of upstream providers) 5. Have a plan in place in case you need to suddenly switch from one provider to another
As if DSL wasn't having enough problems, the Baby Bells finally beat the line sharing rules. This is one of those victories that I'm not sure the ILECs really want to have. It's just going to slow broadband adoption (less competition) and allow the Bells to sit on their fat T-1 revenues.
"What do they mean with "excentric" or "irregular" orbits? They also mention "long, elliptical orbits" but that's more the opposite of irregular, isn't it?"
Orbiting in the direction opposite to the rotation of the planet and orbiting at an incline relative to the planet and orbiting elliptically. A typical orbit being (per our local prejudice) being somewhat circular as opposed to more elliptical.
I tend to agree with the conclusions of the researchers that the irregularity of the orbits of some suggests that the objects were trapped by Jupiter's gravity and that they have broken up over time. My initial thought was that Jupiter sucks up an inordinate amount of junk. Asteroids and comets fly by earth with some regularity. It would not surprise me if similar objects flying by Jupiter would get sucked into an orbit on occasion. There has certainly been enough time since the formation of the solar system to have this happen with some degree of regularity.
The similarities with the other gas giants having much larger numbers of moons and irregular moons(Saturn in particular) suggests that this may be a common attribute of gas giants, based on our extensive sample size of four.
I wonder how long it will be until these objects completely degrade into smaller bits of debris or perhaps ring material?
I also wonder how much crap Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune have sucked out of the solar system (asteroids, comets, etc.)? I also wonder how much we should be thankful that there are a number of gas giants in our solar system to clean up some of the Kuiper belt visitors and the closer meteorite bits/asteroids in the inner solar system? It is quite possible that we are here to/. about this because Jupiter has taken a few on the chin for us. On the other hand, maybe there would be another planet between Jupiter and Mars if it weren't for Jupiter, reducing the number of asteroids out there.
Guac-foo, full of speculation and wonder at the cosmos -- billyuns and billyuns of SWAGs this morning.
My one question about this whole theory is what do the alligators do when it rains (other than get wet)? I imagine there must be some sort of way to cut down on the feedback/nerve responses. Also, when they swim, it seems that the pressure receptors would boggle the alligator.
"The dubious argument about interfering with memory is pretty weak, and I would love to hear a good memory expert in psychology comment on that."
One of the things about vision is that it is very passive. Studies have been done about people with false-sight that show that the brain is aware of the visual field even in the absence of conscious awareness of what is being "seen." See "The Astonishing Hypothesis" by Francis Crick (of Crick and Watson of DNA fame) for an interesting discussion of vision and thought.
I am not surprised that a more active means of interaction, such as typing or speaking might interfere with consciousness, as I think that speaking and typing involve "higher" functions that may interfere, or at least compete for resources, with abstract thinking. (I am fairly confident of the accuracy of the above, but not totally sure.)
Efficiency and limitations (economics, technology) are obviously factors. Additional problems are involved when we think about activities that we have become trained in and used to. Because I have been using typing rather than vision to control a computer for 20+ years now, I have habits and experience (muscle memories, etc.) that may minimize the limitations of trying to think abstractly while thinking about typing.
The conflict management has probably become somewhat hard-wired in my brain. If you have a blank slate to draw upon, it is possible that vision may be much more effective for some purposes. This may mean that we have a locked-in way of dealing with computers that will not undergo a paradigm shift.
This is because the marginal gains in efficiency in interaction that may be achieved by completely revamping the status quo may be minimal since many people have trained using the typing (or speaking) method of controlling computers rather than a proposed visual method. This is the old DVORAK QWERTY issue in a sense.
Slashdot Mirror
> The capital gains/income tax laws also seem to
> encourage misreporting earnings. Most investors
> would rather own a high growth stock that they
> can sell at a higher price later than own a
> stock that pays regular divendends. I see a
I agree with your assessment. I think that subjecting all companies to subchapter S might mitigate this somewhat.
One problem is that I really, really hate the capital gains tax conceptually. It locks people into suboptimal investments and it therefore causes inefficient allocation of capital. The problem is that eliminating it without an additional subchapter S sort of regime for corporations will exacerbate the problem you describe.
From a policital standpoint, the unfortunate reality is that, although subchapter S would be great for helping make corporations report earnings honestly, it would be impossible for a politician to stand up and say that corporations shouldn't be taxed. That's a lie, but it is how it would be perceived and spun by his opponents. The level of financial ignorance out there is staggering and such a spin would be quite effective, I imagine.
> huge difference in the way that private
> companies behave opposed to how public
> companies behave. I think that the tax laws
> account for much of this.
Again, I agree. Corporations have on balance, however, been much more affected by financial accounting rules than tax rules. Slight increases in EPS can lead to massive increases in market capitalization while a tax bill is just a tax bill, however unpleasant it may be. The real money is to be made lying to the upside. The bias is remarkably to the upside.
Likewise, I see no value proposition in putting GNU/linux on Apple hardware. One of the primary benefits of GNU/linux is that it runs well on generic (i.e. cheap) hardware. The benefits of OS X are primarily in what Apple brings to the table in terms of interface and software.
This has some geek factor to it, but the benefits I see from apple and the benefits I see from GNU/linux are thrown out and turned exactly around. Expensive Apple hardware running a GNU/linux product with a less-polished interface.
Admittedly, the main post addressed Apple's server product, for which the Apple interface issues are much less pronounced, but the expense of the hardware is still an issue. I just don't get it, I guess.
This post made in compliance with the RMSDMCA.
> and go on laughing up our sleeves about how the
> Bush administration loves to suck corporate
> cock.
Given that this is Sony, I think I see potential for a new line of bukkake films. I think that Bush may have to be blacked out, though, under Japanese pornography rules. Maybe it'd have to be anime.
I am disgusted that I know enough to have written the above post, btw. It's all second-hand knowledge. Honest.
No, really.
1. Tax and finacial accounting numbers are different (redundant in this thread, but needs repeating).
2. Many people have advocated eliminating the corporate tax regime altogether as an alternative solution to this practice. Many corporations, such as REITs and subchapter S corporations, pay no corporate tax under most circumstances. This has not led to a dissolution of civil society. Simply expand sub-chapter S to cover all corporations and tax each shareholder on his/her proportionate share of earnings and notify them by sending a form 1099 at the end of the year.
The shareholders would require a distribution to cover the tax bill, requiring the corporation to actually have the money to pay the dividend to do this. There's no better way to make sure the earnings are real than to, essentially, require distribution of hard cash. If the company says it has earnings but can't make a dividend payment to cover investors' tax bills, investors would be aware of shenanigans.
This would also mitigate somewhat the problems that result from corporations hoarding cash, such as Cisco and Microsoft. It may also prevent corporations from hoarding earnings to use as a basis for growing the company without having to go to the credit or equity markets for investment. Regular vetting by lenders would place a further check on corporations, although that argument seems weak in light of Worldcom screwing a pile of institutional lenders who should have known better.
Everyone knows that goodwill from acquisitions is bullshit. It simply shows how much of a premium WCOM paid for assets of companies it acquired. There is some pretend theorization floating around about goodwill and how it should be shown on a balance sheet, but the real core of the business is operations, overhead, and debt. Goodwill is a fantasy and has no appreciable effect on the operation of a business from a financial reporting standpoint, IMHO.
The simple equations is that operations need to throw off more cash than the debt service and the overhead. If that doesn't happen, you will be visiting the federal courthouse for a bankruptcy field trip. That is why the revenue and expense frauds were a problem. I don't think it is a big secret that WCOM used inflated stock to buy the inflated stock of other companies.
After all, that is what WCOM's business was -- selling WCOM stock at inflated prices. They only had to convince the world that the marginal companies they bought would achieve some magical "synergy" resulting in greater enterprise value simply by bringing them under the same corporate umbrella. In the 90's investors were gullible enough to believe in financial philosopher's stones.
- requires
the product to be able to communicate with the "server module" at some point in the future? Basically, I fear a movement towards disabling hardware if reporting does not take place. This may be a first step in that direction.I used to work for a Big Five accounting firm (not Andersen) and I did a variety of work -- tax consulting, mostly, but also some auditing. I am both an accountant and an attorney. I have left the tax world for the general practice of law, and despite all the lawyer jokes to the contrary, I feel "cleaner" about what I do now (mostly chasing ambulances). I would never have guessed that if you asked me about it when I graduated from law school lo those many years ago.
/. readers from other countries, I hope you aren't getting too giddy about this. The simple fact is that many, many studies have been done about transparency of financial reporting and business ethics. The US is always at or near the top of those studies in having transparent accounting/reporting and having a reasonably honest system. In the present, only a tiny, tiny fraction of publically-traded companies have been affected by this, and I think the worst is over. I think overseas investors should wonder about what is being concealed on the books of some of their companies. Japan's banks' problems are widely known, but I throw that out there as an example. I will bet that it is not just the US affected by this -- the US is simply the most prominent place where it is going on. The fact that many people around the world like to watch the US get it in the crotch from time to time doesn't hurt the publicity, either. Especially after so much nationalistic chest-thumping from the US about its place in the world lately. I understand the schaden freude, but I don't necessarily think that the smugness associated with it is really very wise.
Here is my spin on the Worldcom situation:
1. Auditors will never, I repeat, never, catch outright fraud at companies they audit if the company is actively trying to deceive the auditors. Auditors look at only a fraction of financial records of a company, and if certain transactions are concealed or are outright misrepresented by the audited company's employees, it is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of the situation. Auditing is, reduced to its bare essence, statistical sampling of transactions with the sampling focused on major items and a certain percentage of the "ordinary" transactions. At a large company like Worldcom, it would be relatively simple for the CFO to completely fool the auditors (most CFOs come from the public accounting world and know very well the game that they are trying to cheat at).
2. Audits do not pass on the quality of a business, they simply try to determine if a company has followed "generally accepted" financial accounting practices as promulgated by the financial accounting standards board FASB - located in CT, home to Joe Lieberman who fought vigorously an attempt to reform accounting back in 1995, btw -- it's not just Harvey Pitt and the GOP Enron cronies at work here - the whole system is rotten. Shareholders who expect auditors to let them know a business model sucks will be waiting a long time and they are exhibiting pathological ignorance.
3. Of all the big accounting problems rearing their heads, a disproportionate number are coming out of Andersen audits. KPMG, PWC, E&Y, and C&L are all mostly avoiding the maelstrom. Why? The culture at Andersen? Leadership at Andersen? I honestly do not know, but it is striking that Andersen is auditing most of the problem children of the stock market.
I know people at Andersen at all levels who are smart, diligent, and honest. I have worked with many folks from Andersen. People move from Big Five firm to Big Five firm all the time, so there's no inherent "you are evil if you audit for Andersen" rule. I am at a complete loss to explain why Andersen is in the neighborhood at the time all these arsons are taking place, but it seems peculiar.
4. The changes recently enacted by the Congress and GW prohibiting consulting and auditing to be done by the same firm will do bupkus to stop accounting problems. The biggest source of accounting fraud results from the company misleading auditors. "Aren't the outside auditors professionals? Can't they see through the frauds?" The simple answer is, no, they can't under most circumstances where they are being wilfully mislead by the audited company. Outside audits are simply not as good a method for identifying fraud as the public perception makes them out to be.
5. Something I have seen pushed hard by accounting firms is what is called an accounting "product." Accountants have things they sell to companies and their work involves "deliverables." It is first and foremost a business.
What are the "deliverables" that I am now most vividly recalling? Ways to move debt off of balance sheets by arranging lease purchase agreements. Setting up subsidiaries to hold assets that drag on earnings growth. The thing is that these sorts of strategies complied with FASB rules for GAAP. The Big Five became more and more aggressive at coming up with and pushing these strategies. Nothing was more desirable than going into a company you audited with something that could add a cent or two to EPS while following GAAP and then billing $20 million dollars for it. There were (and are, I am sure) national sales teams pushing the hell out of these things.
What is the significance? The underlying businesses of the companies that purchased these products did not change. The reported earnings appeared to be growing or growing faster with no substantive change in the quality of the audited business. Especially at a time where P/E multiples were at record historical levels, an added cent or two could result in billions (BILLIONS) of added market capitalization. Combine that with the enormous amount of stock options offered to management level folks, and you begin to see why these "accounting products" were so popular -- accounting firms got huge fees, execs got enormous increases in the value of the shares/unexercised options, and the cost to the audited business was a pittance in comparison.
Your average investor knew nothing about this. The average brokerage firm analyst probably knew less than s/he should have. Finance majors know very little about accounting and generally end up on Wall Street sneering at their boring(!) friends who majored in accounting who largely go to the financial accounting world. The result is that the audited companies (and their management) were in the middle knowing pretty much the whole story while trying to mislead investors and analysts (who have their own house to clean, btw).
The fact that all of this took place during one of the biggest bubbles in the history of american financial markets only exacerbated the problem.
For
Long enough, back to work. So many people to sue, so little time. (that's a joke, people)
> I didn't say they were convicted criminals. I
> said they were crooks.
Nice. I guess I buy it. I'm sorry for being so foolish as to fail to understand the clear difference between "crook" and "criminal." It must be my inferior intellect which prevents me from making such subtle distinctions. I am truly sorry for being such a woeful idiot. Please forgive me my ignorance.
> GamePro Magazine has an article in it's latest .1 micron chips
> issue speculating that these
> IBM is producing will be cell based and will
> form the basis of the PlayStation 3.
Sweet! I can finally get me a cellular gaming console! Made out of meat and I can put it in my pocket! w00t!
> This is consistent with the Administration's
> policy of having crooks act as policemen.
>
> Ted Olsen.
> Harvey Pitt.
> John Ashcroft.
What crimes did the above-referenced gentlemen commit and when were they convicted? Your post is pure and simple defamation.
On the argument side of your post, I think that there is nothing wrong with consumers of products sharing information with other consumers about the reliability, usability of various products and services. If letting people know a product is broken is enough to subject one to civil or criminal penalties, let's be honest about it and ban Consumer Reports, Ralph Nader, and epinions (maybe we should ba epinions anyway).
I've heard this story several times (meaning it has actually happened serveral times, not meaning that it is akin to an urban legend). The one closest to me was where a kid got hit with federal charges in OK for a Frontpage misconfiguration. Long story. Call it Brian's Song.
> My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that .... Ugh! People must be reminded
:(
> schools used to not have as much fighting or
> sex in them!
My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that churches used to not have as much pedophilia in them!
> that it IS possible to get through schooling
> without punching and fucking your way from one > class to the next.
Why would anyone want to miss the fucking and the fighting? That was the best part of school! Lewis evidently thought so - just check out the part about the Bloods and the Tarts in "Surprised by Joy." I guess the family values crowd reads, but doesn't read deeply.
I apologize for failing to include the entire world in my diatribe. The fact of the matter is that, by and large, almost everyone today fails to think skeptically and objectively (to the extent the latter is even possible) about things that are fed to them.
It is incredibly hard for the average person to think to himself, "prove it! prove it! prove it!" when the tv or radio or newspaper runs or when the CEO or analyst or stockbroker spits out something. That is what they should do, but at some point, the mind gets numb, the body relaxes, and a feeling of submission washes over you. Then, Big Brother is your friend, at least for a little while, till the carbs quit and you return to full consciousness.
All my paranoid thoughts aside, my initial broadside was unleashed at the media because that is simply where this sort of stuff is disseminated most widely. The whole idea that the Economist was "Shocked! Shocked!" by the incident just aggravated me a bit. The media also have pretentions to being authoritative fact checkers when the the reality is quite different. They're just as braindead and accepting as the rest of us.
Why not combine the crank with an attachment that would make the activity necessary to generate the power to transfer to the cell phone battery a little less annoying and perhaps a little, er, more rewarding? I mean, if you've got to sit there and turn your own crank anyway...
This issue (a dubious statistic repeated infinitely in press) results from the fact that facts are not checked thoroughly before publication. This sort of stuff happened with the stats the women's movement used, environmentalists, conservative groups, etc. The number of women dying from eating disorders was a classic error that was endlessly cycled and never questioned until the misconception was permanently rooted in the public consciousness.
Every interest group pushing an agenda (yes, even profit-seeking corporations seeking to sell more bandwith) seems to come up with some dubious statistic like this. The media gobble up press releases, disguised oftentimes as "studies" which are bought and paid for by the interest group, and they spit them out on in the newspapers and other media outlets, sometimes virtually unchanged.
I am not surprised by the Economist's story -- I am surprised that it took so long for it to make it into print. I wonder how many times the Economist itself published that same "fact" before discovering that the emporer had no clothes.
Now instead of getting into sensitive corporate data, I'll be able to erase someone's saved season of Madden 200X! w00t!
> ... the first post fry, some Gnu Stew beowulf ;)
> tiered chocolate cake, Linux Lassi and some
> Apple Pie. If you are lucky you may get a
> recipe for Microsoftie ice cream
It is illegal to share the secret recipe for the Microsoftie ice cream. The recipe will not be in the cookbook. The fact that you do not know what goes into the Microsoftie makes it safer for you to consume.
My personal theory about spam involves two different thoughts:
1. Spam works on stupid newbies enough to make it worthwhile.
Alternatively,
2. Spam occurs as the result of people selling spamming tools (often by the use of spam) to people on whom spam is effective (see #1). One of the most-frequent uses of spam is to promote mailing software and the sale of email addresses.
These theories are not mutually exclusive.
I am glad that spam-promotions are actually harmful to the perpetrators. Unfortunately, I do not believe that most spam is legitimate or from legitimate companies. The unsophisticated level of spammers (read some of the messages sometimes - they are barely readable) leads me to believe that this study may have a marginal effect on the occasional "legitimate" company stupid enough to think about spamming.
> That's why you get your own AS and participate
> in the global BGP. You then get your own
> netblock which is simultaneously visible
> through all your redundant connections.
Have you tried getting ARIN to cough up portable address space lately? I own part of a rinky-dink ISP in BFE, and we are simply not large enough to get our own addresses. As a result, we've had to seriously consider the financial viability of the providers we do business with in order to guess/estimate if they will continue to provide service in our area.
We've gone the AS route, but what if your provider goes chapter 11 and then looks at your particular contract and disavows it as is permitted under bankruptcy law and takes back their IPs that they had assigned to you? You are confronted with a highly disruptive problem in that much or all of your network may need to be renumbered. That is not a pleasant task. An AS number does not eliminate that risk.
About the best we have come up with is to get IP numbers from our most financially stable upstream providers, have an AS and do BGP, and keep tabs on the financial conditions of our providers.
As a final thought, even this sometimes is not enough. One of our financially sound providers recently threatened to jack up the price on a T-1 contract we had (upon expiration) by over 60%. Some fancy footwork got us a renewal at the old rate, but the threat was there -- even with a sound company, we were relatively at their mercy because they owned our upstream IP numbers.
The moral(s)?
1. Redundancy
2. Keep tabs on your suppliers
3. Negotiate contract renewals well ahead of time
4. Don't put all your eggs in one basket (use IPs from a variety of upstream providers)
5. Have a plan in place in case you need to suddenly switch from one provider to another
As if DSL wasn't having enough problems, the Baby Bells finally beat the line sharing rules. This is one of those victories that I'm not sure the ILECs really want to have. It's just going to slow broadband adoption (less competition) and allow the Bells to sit on their fat T-1 revenues.
Ugh.
I want a holodeck!
"What do they mean with "excentric" or "irregular" orbits? They also mention "long, elliptical orbits" but that's more the opposite of irregular, isn't it?"
/. about this because Jupiter has taken a few on the chin for us. On the other hand, maybe there would be another planet between Jupiter and Mars if it weren't for Jupiter, reducing the number of asteroids out there.
Orbiting in the direction opposite to the rotation of the planet and orbiting at an incline relative to the planet and orbiting elliptically. A typical orbit being (per our local prejudice) being somewhat circular as opposed to more elliptical.
I tend to agree with the conclusions of the researchers that the irregularity of the orbits of some suggests that the objects were trapped by Jupiter's gravity and that they have broken up over time. My initial thought was that Jupiter sucks up an inordinate amount of junk. Asteroids and comets fly by earth with some regularity. It would not surprise me if similar objects flying by Jupiter would get sucked into an orbit on occasion. There has certainly been enough time since the formation of the solar system to have this happen with some degree of regularity.
The similarities with the other gas giants having much larger numbers of moons and irregular moons(Saturn in particular) suggests that this may be a common attribute of gas giants, based on our extensive sample size of four.
I wonder how long it will be until these objects completely degrade into smaller bits of debris or perhaps ring material?
I also wonder how much crap Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune have sucked out of the solar system (asteroids, comets, etc.)? I also wonder how much we should be thankful that there are a number of gas giants in our solar system to clean up some of the Kuiper belt visitors and the closer meteorite bits/asteroids in the inner solar system? It is quite possible that we are here to
Guac-foo, full of speculation and wonder at the cosmos -- billyuns and billyuns of SWAGs this morning.
My one question about this whole theory is what do the alligators do when it rains (other than get wet)? I imagine there must be some sort of way to cut down on the feedback/nerve responses. Also, when they swim, it seems that the pressure receptors would boggle the alligator.
"If one side of this thing gets cooler by removing heat, then the other side gets hotter than the cool side gets cooler. "
The hot side stays hot, the cool side stays cool. Wasn't that the basis for a McDonald's sandwich back in the eighties?
"The dubious argument about interfering with memory is pretty weak, and I would love to hear a good memory expert in psychology comment on that."
One of the things about vision is that it is very passive. Studies have been done about people with false-sight that show that the brain is aware of the visual field even in the absence of conscious awareness of what is being "seen." See "The Astonishing Hypothesis" by Francis Crick (of Crick and Watson of DNA fame) for an interesting discussion of vision and thought.
I am not surprised that a more active means of interaction, such as typing or speaking might interfere with consciousness, as I think that speaking and typing involve "higher" functions that may interfere, or at least compete for resources, with abstract thinking. (I am fairly confident of the accuracy of the above, but not totally sure.)
Efficiency and limitations (economics, technology) are obviously factors. Additional problems are involved when we think about activities that we have become trained in and used to. Because I have been using typing rather than vision to control a computer for 20+ years now, I have habits and experience (muscle memories, etc.) that may minimize the limitations of trying to think abstractly while thinking about typing.
The conflict management has probably become somewhat hard-wired in my brain. If you have a blank slate to draw upon, it is possible that vision may be much more effective for some purposes. This may mean that we have a locked-in way of dealing with computers that will not undergo a paradigm shift.
This is because the marginal gains in efficiency in interaction that may be achieved by completely revamping the status quo may be minimal since many people have trained using the typing (or speaking) method of controlling computers rather than a proposed visual method. This is the old DVORAK QWERTY issue in a sense.
Guac-foo.