It might be interesting, but even with the repurposing, it is hardly novel. The notion of reviewing queue times is not new. Various alternatives exist that are avoiding because they upset customers (Serve last in first), or because they are to damn complicated to implement (most of the rest of them).
I was about to launch on a screed about how innacurate/. headlines and summaries would lead us to believe that a reasonably sophisicated queuing system was instead a simple reward for waiting. How wrong was I.
This is literally a system to reward people based on their time in queue and their position in the queue. Wow. An egg timer could do this. I was expecting something fairly complex and novel like Amazon's patent for prioritizing shipping based on future profit streams per customer (here). Instead I saw a basic, obvious solution that has pretty easy to find prior art: a waiter comping you a dessert because you had to wait a while.
absolutely. It is a metter of time. The industry has seen the light on DRM in music. Eventually we will see zero restirctions from the software point of view. However, it looks like we are doomed to repeat out mistakes in video and HD. Sigh.
The only dangerous ground apple is in is with record companies if they don't aggressively pursue DRM faults/breaks/violations. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that apple has clauses in their contracts with these companies that force them to maintain their DRM updated, track offenders and litigate where necessary.
This is not to say that apple is blameless. They aren't. Apple, at this point, has had the chance to shame record labels (at least them. It appears we are doomed to repeat this nonsense with video) into changing their contracts. They took the opportunity to sound like a white knight in copyleft circles for a few weeks and did nothing. Maybe this was because companies were intransigent in negotiation. Maybe it is because apple's commitment to DRM free media was less than sincere. Probably both.
Part of what is allowing this silliness to happen is the dMCA itself. These folks can be send a CnD because they might be cryptographically breaking DRM, but regular old listening and rerecording is ok. The anti-circumvention clause allows companies to litigate in the absence of real infringement. That is the problem.
I don't. Apple's stance on DRM is twisted and self serving. But....there are forces at work not solely apple. As much as we might like to think that record companies are useless here, apple has a fiduciary duty to protect their revenues. so lets say apple makes itunes, and has DRM, because the studios want it. But apple doesn't really want ir, so they make it easy(easier) to break. And they never update it. Consequently, anyone who wants to break it for personal use, can. What do you think will happen to apple?
I'll tell you. They will lose the contracts or more likely be sued by the companies for lost revenue for failing to aggresivly pursue DRM faults. This is the same issue. Apple wants to (and has to) go after these guys. They want to because itunes sales mean direct revenue. they have to because they are contractually obligated to ensure the DRM stays current. The cease and decist is mostly because the supposed method of cracking is "teh bad" because it might circumvent, rather than just listening and re-recording.
Are you really serious? How the fuck do I have a vested interest even if I do own stocks? What are the odds that you will be converted by me and magically buy MY EXACT STOCKS, causing my wealth to go up?
Show me the point in the macro course curriculum where they point out that stocks are valueless. Or....wait....do they teach the Gordon growth model in macroeconomics still, which values stocks based on the future earnings of dividends? That can't be. You must be right. they must teach that stocks are valueless in every economics class out there.
Look, just because people buy stocks at prices that are too high and markets have multiple equilibira doesn't mean that it is all a ponzi scheme. You have to be willig to accept contradiction and nuance in your life.
And you still haven't proven your point. But whatever. If you think commodities are so great, why don't you invest in some whale oil. I heard that was all the rage. I mean FFS, it's not like after the crash of 29 we never recovered. It isn't like we have yet to get back to that level of wealth and productivity per capita. We passed it again before WWII.
OMG, I KNEW this was going to come back to gold. What heppens to the store of value in precious metals when they mine more out of the ground? Are you prepared to tell me that there are no periods in history where the exogenous (meaning in this case, not done by the government) change in value of a precious medal didn't cause a metal backed currency to panic?
I'm not "failing to wrap my head around this concept". This is lunacy. Do you drive to work in the morning, knowing that at any moment, you could be killed by a semi-trailer crossing the median? Do you fly airplanes, knowing that the risk, however small, exists that you might be killed in a crash? do you ever eat new food? Have you ever bought a house? You know that appraisal you get can be (and probably is) wrong, and the errors don't work in your favor.
It is beyond absurd to suggest that you could read my post and come up with the word "risk" as something that I missed somehow.
Please, please, please stop using the word gamble to talk about investment. It has all sorts of connotations attached that don't apply to investment. the statement "any amount of risk is a gamble" is so unhelpful as to be silly. at the risk of repeating myself, I can tell you there is only one risk free investment strategy, and that is to hold cash (this assumes you don't lost it yourself). the problem with that strategy is it often has a negative return over time. inflation eats away at the value of money. in order to beat inflation you need to take some risks.
Risks doesn't mean gambling. you need to invest in such a manner that a stock downturn doesn't impact you too adversely. If you listened to some dumb-shit MSNBC guy and put all your money in iternet stocks in 1999, that doesn't prove the stock market is a gamble. It proves you made a stupid choice and got burned for it. Every investment portfolio should include some bonds. Some should be government. Some should be corporate (FYI, if a company pays their bonds back, their stock usually doesn't go in the shitter, and if their stock tanks, they are probably going to default on their bonds, just because it is a structured loan doesn't mean anything more in terms of promised return). If you are young, the rest of that portfolio should be stocks. As you get older, less and elss of it should be. They shouldn't be all the same stocks. They should be solid companies in different industries that aren't linked by common fundamentals
If you diversify your portfolio, your losses in an overall downturn will be minimized. You will see a downturn as a hiccup and ten yours later it won't impact your overall average return.
This doesn't mean I think the Yahoo takeover is a good idea. It doens't mean I think direct sharehold control is a good idea (responding to your last few paragraphs). I don't feel that this was a proxy action started by microsoft, simply because it is clear and unambiguous to show a motiv for why a normal Yahoo shareholder would file the same suit.
Take a look at my screen name. Dealing with the russians is a GIGANTIC pain in the ass. Relying on them is a related pain in the ass. Any plan that allows us to deal with the russians less in terms of putting launches up on their hardware is good.
I'm glad we are at the point where we are. I'm glad that companies like SeaLaunch and ILS are there to broker private deals on russian launch vehicles. That doesn't mean that it is an unvarnished 'good thing' to deal with them.
why not? that's how I would want my retirement fund run. Why would I want my fund to make less money when they could be making more with no change in the risk structure?
Gambling doesn't require a house but most of the games we think of do. The reason people aren't usually out there making money on the craps circuit isn't because of the ups and downs. It is because the odds in craps are DESIGNED so that you will never win, on average. The expected value of one dollar played on a craps table over the long run is about 92 cents. In the end, you are losing money. On the contrary, there are games of chance that people do make a living on. Very famously, people have made a living on poker. In this case, the house takes a cut, but it doesn't impact the odds of winning or make it so that the expected value of a dollar in over the long run is less than a dollar out.
I will continue to say that it is ignorant of you to compare gambling to equity finance. Do you understand what portfolio diversification is? It is almost PRECISELY investing in the average stock in order to limit damage to the portfolio due to volatility. You find two investments (or more, really) that will respond differently to a single market change, and you invest a little in both. the ma expected return is lowered, but the variance is lowered even more. It's a fundamental tenet of smart finance and it is nothing like gambling at all.
Are there nonzero risks in the stock market? Sure. If you want to define gambling as taking risks beyond your control with your money than treasury bills are gambling. You said before that the US has never defaulted on its explicit debt and you are correct, but the risk is still there. If you want a risk free investment strategy, take your money and put it in a checking account. It is protected by the FDIC, some even offer a small rate of return, and there is no risk. Of course, you will barely beat inflation and you will forgo 100,000's of dollars worth in lost compounded interest, but it's your money.
Soyuz is a great piece of engineering, and so are most of the other russian rocket systems, and the Airiane 5, and the Titan, etc. They aren't what this is for. OSC does novel, small payload, cheap LEO launch vehicles. This is something that NASA is looking for, a low overhead means to get supplies into LEO without sending an eleventy billion ton, 4 stage behemoth up there.
Oh, and do I have to mention the CONSIDERABLE advantage that comes from not dealing with the russians?
It seems stupid and ignorant to me that people who don't understand something can see fit to pass judgment on it. SO what exactly qualifies you to make this blanket pronouncement that gambling is the same thing as investing in the stock market? It it your feeling that the absence of a sure thing equals 100% risk? that is what it sounds like.
sure. Markets fluctuate. Countries default on debt. Banks fail. shit happens. When you invest in ANY investment it is always prudent to look at the kind of risk you are willing to accept and the timeline you have to invest. If you need the money on hand 10 years, it might be better to not invest in a group of stocks. If you don't need it for a while and you have a medium tolerance for risk, stocks are a GREAT investment. So good that you would be stupid to ignore them.
Look. The only investment with 0 risk offers a negative rate of return. You suffer little to no risk by putting your money in your mattress. It just will lose value due to inflation. If that is your investment strategy because of the undue risk of other investments, I'm glad I'm not your kids or grandkids.
No, I couldn't say the same thing about gambling. for one, In gambling, the house always wins. the games are set up such that your eventual return is always less than 1.00.
Look, the whole problem people have is with volatility. Volatility scares people. People respond more to volatility than they do to actual risk. Ask someone how to determine if a company is a risky investment and they will more than likely point to the 52 wk hi/lo for the stock rather than some more fundamental assessment.
Are stocks riskier than bonds? Of course. Can you see a rate of return on ANY investment that beats the market perpetually? No. All of these specacular crashes we see are coming from people who promised greater than market return and took risks to get it. Those risks will, statistically, bite people in the ass. Some people got rich. Some people lost a bunch of money. On average, wealth grew and will continue to grow at a reasonable rate over time. One of the bid reasons it will grow is through equity finance.
Making the statement that one investment is riskier than another is fine. Making an unsubstantiated claim linking on investment to what is basically a means to throw your money away is ignorant and silly.
How in the WORLD can you justify aruging that stocks are a zero-sum game. Let alone making that argument then in the next sentence say that we should be buying oil company stock.
How in the WORLD does that go through your head?
Please explain to me in great detail how stocks are zero sum. Then explain why I care, assuming that I'm not the person losing the money in the future. THEN explain average stock market growth (including depressions) in the us of about 6-7% for the last 130 years. Then explain how lower risk investments have an obvious return of >0% (bonds, savings accounts).
I can't begin. I think that I have articulated a pretty solid argument against the general notion of socialism as a means to allocate goods. To call it a straw man is silly. You may tell me that you don't think that pricing/allocation is all that important and then explain why. You may tell me that consumption is unimportant and explain why production dominates. But you can hardly tell me that it is a straw man and ignore the rest of the argument.
Ok. Let's assume that multiple government organizations do own corporations. Presumably, competition between the two would only be allowed insofar as the government saw fit, because if we were to have true competition, the same motives that exist running a capitalist business would be in place here. And in this case it is demonstrably worse to have government running these companies. Government is the only agent here that can compel action. It holds a monopoly on force over individuals. To say that government would allow organizations to run in ways that hurt others (say, via competitive action) is silly.
Even if we assume allocative issues don't exist, there is still the issue of ownership. Why does government exist as some privileged owner? Why is wealth concentrated there? How is it evil for profits to be concentrated in the hands of owners of capital but just for them to be concentrated in the hands of the government? More to the point, how does government ownership effectively simulate the profit motive?
And it isn't a straw man. Just like I tried to explain about the sales tax paradox, we can't talk about who controls one sector of the economy without talking about how it impacts all the rest of the chain. If I set government imposed limits on the production of cheese, that will impact the end consumer for cheese. If I set price controls for cheese, that will impact producers. If government goals dictate production then they impact allocation and consumption, period.
Right. I understand your last point. I'm not missing it. Some things have external costs. Private companies only see private costs and so produce more than should be produced, given that external (social) cost. In a socialist society, that external cost is borne by society (lets say it is more lung cancer from pollution) and paid for by the same companies. Whoop-de-fucking-do. People still get lung cancer. We just all pay the same bill.
Dealing with that externality can be done in a capitalist OR a socialist society. Simple control over the means of production by the government does not somehow imply that the government will produce less in order to bring the externality into account. you produce some symbols here but at no point do you give any logic as to how the external cost will change allocation/output. that is the important part. Society already bears the cost, capitalism or socialism. How it deals with the cost is not a function of what kind of government it is. Take a look at the Clean Air Act in the US. This was a market solution to a social externality problem. Pollutors put out too many pollutants. The government created a cap on those pollutants and allowed companies to buy and sell permits to violate that cap. Companies were forced to internalize those social costs and pollute less now. Capitalist solution. Capitalist society.
We can also have price control and government ownership in capitalist societies. The prices of milk and corn are both highly regulated in a truly arcane fashion in the united states. imports of cane sugar are limited in order to keep prices artificially high.
Are you a treasury bond trader? Who qualified you to make all of these remarks? Stocks are perfectly reasonable investments if you understand what your willingness to accept risk is and if you diversify your holdings. If you want safe, don't even get treasury bonds, I hear some checking accounts give interest now.
Treasury bonds offer a rate of return that is on average much, much lower than the stock market or even the corporate bond market. That is partially because they are lower risk investments. they serve a great role (as do corporate and municipal bonds) for medium term investments because they give a relatively known and fixed return for low risk. for a long term investment, they should now be the majority of your portfolio. You just won't break 3% after transactions costs. Compare a fund investing for 30 years at 3% with one investing at 6%. After 30 someodd years, the 3% portfolio will have roughly doubled, but the 6% portfolio will have increased by ~6 times. That's a pretty significant difference.
Just because you lost money on stocks doesn't mean that they are bad for everyone, always. Sheesh.
The stock market isn't legalized gambling FFS. god damn it. why do people keep modding this insightful. just because it doesn't always go up and just because you don't understand it doesn't make it gambling. You want some stock market investments that you won't ever go bankrupt on? Go find large companies with Aaa/AAA bond ratings and buy their stock. Then sit on it for a while. Don't sell when it drops. Just hand on to it. You'll see a growth rate a little below the market on average.
You want a recipe to lose fucking money, in any situation? But shares in companies whose business plans you don't understand, whose revenue streams are unproven and whose entire earnings potential stems from future business that doesn't exist yet. 1/1000 you will pick Microsoft, google, Apple, etc. The rest of the time you will pick companies that are bankrupt now. It is just like investing in your friend's restaurant. It is not written anywhere that you have to make a return on things.
And don't pretend like you understand what is going on. He can't "sell Yahoo and buy Microsoft" at the price that Yahoo stock would have fetched had the deal go through. No one would buy it. that's why people were interested in the deal. It represented a step change in their stock value. Whether or not it was wise in the long run is not what is being discussed.
How is a treasury bond a sure thing? governments default on their debt. How about this. Bonds offer a contracted return that might not happen due to default risk and might be lowered due to inflation and changes in interest rates. Stocks offer no such guaranteed return save the fact that as an owner you are entitled to a share of profits. You are also (in some cases) given some fractional say in how the company is run.
It isn't a gamble. Some investments are riskier than others. No investment is risk free. Some investments are VIRTUALLY risk free, but you pay in terms of your return. Jesus. What do they teach kids these days?
No, and here's why. The idea isn't that the price is a problem, although it might be for some investors. They feel that any takeover bid from microsoft might be worth more than their stock is liable to be in the near future. They also feel that there are two possible outcomes for their suit. If it is a threat, Yahoo will cave to the deal and they will get their desired price. If it isn't a threat, the markets will not regard it as such and their stock price will not go down.
But....
I don't think that is the whole story. It isn't an insider affair, IMO. What it might be is a hedge against volatility. The only thing better than knowing if your stock will suddenly increase in value is knowing WHEN your stock will suddenly increase in value. If you can force the issue via legal action (iffy) then you can justify the purchase of more shares on the notion that your lawsuit will result in a much higher share price ue to a buyout. So. Large firm sees buyout rebuffed. Large firm sees a chance to reap known profits via legal action. Large firm sues.
I am not suggesting that these firms bought Yahoo in order to bring this lawsuit. What I am suggesting was that it seemed to be a convenient way around future price fluctuations--not an insider job.
Yeah, I'm tooling around wikipedia now. I suspected that there wasn't going to be too much coming from this. Like I said in the post above, it might just be the public pressure that influences people (though the number of shareholders 'pledged' is low in percentage terms).
Everyone is greedy, by and large. Get over it. Most of us are. In the long run, both sides are about greed. Yahoo is (presumably) makign the argument that shareholder value will be hurt by the merger and these guys are making the value that it will be hurt by avoiding the takeover. Both sides are greedy, fundamentally.
the managers may feel that they want to take Yahoo in a certain direction not dictated by microsoft, and that is all well and good, but it sounds less noble when you realize that the money they are using to do that is not theirs. It is the money of the tens of thousands of investors in their company that has allowed them to do this. No one is a hero here.
Slashdot Mirror
no it isn't.
It might be interesting, but even with the repurposing, it is hardly novel. The notion of reviewing queue times is not new. Various alternatives exist that are avoiding because they upset customers (Serve last in first), or because they are to damn complicated to implement (most of the rest of them).
This is literally a system to reward people based on their time in queue and their position in the queue. Wow. An egg timer could do this. I was expecting something fairly complex and novel like Amazon's patent for prioritizing shipping based on future profit streams per customer (here). Instead I saw a basic, obvious solution that has pretty easy to find prior art: a waiter comping you a dessert because you had to wait a while.
absolutely. It is a metter of time. The industry has seen the light on DRM in music. Eventually we will see zero restirctions from the software point of view. However, it looks like we are doomed to repeat out mistakes in video and HD. Sigh.
The only dangerous ground apple is in is with record companies if they don't aggressively pursue DRM faults/breaks/violations. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that apple has clauses in their contracts with these companies that force them to maintain their DRM updated, track offenders and litigate where necessary.
This is not to say that apple is blameless. They aren't. Apple, at this point, has had the chance to shame record labels (at least them. It appears we are doomed to repeat this nonsense with video) into changing their contracts. They took the opportunity to sound like a white knight in copyleft circles for a few weeks and did nothing. Maybe this was because companies were intransigent in negotiation. Maybe it is because apple's commitment to DRM free media was less than sincere. Probably both.
Part of what is allowing this silliness to happen is the dMCA itself. These folks can be send a CnD because they might be cryptographically breaking DRM, but regular old listening and rerecording is ok. The anti-circumvention clause allows companies to litigate in the absence of real infringement. That is the problem.
I don't. Apple's stance on DRM is twisted and self serving. But....there are forces at work not solely apple. As much as we might like to think that record companies are useless here, apple has a fiduciary duty to protect their revenues. so lets say apple makes itunes, and has DRM, because the studios want it. But apple doesn't really want ir, so they make it easy(easier) to break. And they never update it. Consequently, anyone who wants to break it for personal use, can. What do you think will happen to apple?
I'll tell you. They will lose the contracts or more likely be sued by the companies for lost revenue for failing to aggresivly pursue DRM faults. This is the same issue. Apple wants to (and has to) go after these guys. They want to because itunes sales mean direct revenue. they have to because they are contractually obligated to ensure the DRM stays current. The cease and decist is mostly because the supposed method of cracking is "teh bad" because it might circumvent, rather than just listening and re-recording.
Are you really serious? How the fuck do I have a vested interest even if I do own stocks? What are the odds that you will be converted by me and magically buy MY EXACT STOCKS, causing my wealth to go up?
Show me the point in the macro course curriculum where they point out that stocks are valueless. Or....wait....do they teach the Gordon growth model in macroeconomics still, which values stocks based on the future earnings of dividends? That can't be. You must be right. they must teach that stocks are valueless in every economics class out there.
Look, just because people buy stocks at prices that are too high and markets have multiple equilibira doesn't mean that it is all a ponzi scheme. You have to be willig to accept contradiction and nuance in your life.
And you still haven't proven your point. But whatever. If you think commodities are so great, why don't you invest in some whale oil. I heard that was all the rage. I mean FFS, it's not like after the crash of 29 we never recovered. It isn't like we have yet to get back to that level of wealth and productivity per capita. We passed it again before WWII.
OMG, I KNEW this was going to come back to gold. What heppens to the store of value in precious metals when they mine more out of the ground? Are you prepared to tell me that there are no periods in history where the exogenous (meaning in this case, not done by the government) change in value of a precious medal didn't cause a metal backed currency to panic?
I'm not "failing to wrap my head around this concept". This is lunacy. Do you drive to work in the morning, knowing that at any moment, you could be killed by a semi-trailer crossing the median? Do you fly airplanes, knowing that the risk, however small, exists that you might be killed in a crash? do you ever eat new food? Have you ever bought a house? You know that appraisal you get can be (and probably is) wrong, and the errors don't work in your favor.
It is beyond absurd to suggest that you could read my post and come up with the word "risk" as something that I missed somehow.
Please, please, please stop using the word gamble to talk about investment. It has all sorts of connotations attached that don't apply to investment. the statement "any amount of risk is a gamble" is so unhelpful as to be silly. at the risk of repeating myself, I can tell you there is only one risk free investment strategy, and that is to hold cash (this assumes you don't lost it yourself). the problem with that strategy is it often has a negative return over time. inflation eats away at the value of money. in order to beat inflation you need to take some risks.
Risks doesn't mean gambling. you need to invest in such a manner that a stock downturn doesn't impact you too adversely. If you listened to some dumb-shit MSNBC guy and put all your money in iternet stocks in 1999, that doesn't prove the stock market is a gamble. It proves you made a stupid choice and got burned for it. Every investment portfolio should include some bonds. Some should be government. Some should be corporate (FYI, if a company pays their bonds back, their stock usually doesn't go in the shitter, and if their stock tanks, they are probably going to default on their bonds, just because it is a structured loan doesn't mean anything more in terms of promised return). If you are young, the rest of that portfolio should be stocks. As you get older, less and elss of it should be. They shouldn't be all the same stocks. They should be solid companies in different industries that aren't linked by common fundamentals
If you diversify your portfolio, your losses in an overall downturn will be minimized. You will see a downturn as a hiccup and ten yours later it won't impact your overall average return.
This doesn't mean I think the Yahoo takeover is a good idea. It doens't mean I think direct sharehold control is a good idea (responding to your last few paragraphs). I don't feel that this was a proxy action started by microsoft, simply because it is clear and unambiguous to show a motiv for why a normal Yahoo shareholder would file the same suit.
Take a look at my screen name. Dealing with the russians is a GIGANTIC pain in the ass. Relying on them is a related pain in the ass. Any plan that allows us to deal with the russians less in terms of putting launches up on their hardware is good.
I'm glad we are at the point where we are. I'm glad that companies like SeaLaunch and ILS are there to broker private deals on russian launch vehicles. That doesn't mean that it is an unvarnished 'good thing' to deal with them.
why not? that's how I would want my retirement fund run. Why would I want my fund to make less money when they could be making more with no change in the risk structure?
FFS.
Gambling doesn't require a house but most of the games we think of do. The reason people aren't usually out there making money on the craps circuit isn't because of the ups and downs. It is because the odds in craps are DESIGNED so that you will never win, on average. The expected value of one dollar played on a craps table over the long run is about 92 cents. In the end, you are losing money. On the contrary, there are games of chance that people do make a living on. Very famously, people have made a living on poker. In this case, the house takes a cut, but it doesn't impact the odds of winning or make it so that the expected value of a dollar in over the long run is less than a dollar out.
I will continue to say that it is ignorant of you to compare gambling to equity finance. Do you understand what portfolio diversification is? It is almost PRECISELY investing in the average stock in order to limit damage to the portfolio due to volatility. You find two investments (or more, really) that will respond differently to a single market change, and you invest a little in both. the ma expected return is lowered, but the variance is lowered even more. It's a fundamental tenet of smart finance and it is nothing like gambling at all.
Are there nonzero risks in the stock market? Sure. If you want to define gambling as taking risks beyond your control with your money than treasury bills are gambling. You said before that the US has never defaulted on its explicit debt and you are correct, but the risk is still there. If you want a risk free investment strategy, take your money and put it in a checking account. It is protected by the FDIC, some even offer a small rate of return, and there is no risk. Of course, you will barely beat inflation and you will forgo 100,000's of dollars worth in lost compounded interest, but it's your money.
Soyuz is a great piece of engineering, and so are most of the other russian rocket systems, and the Airiane 5, and the Titan, etc. They aren't what this is for. OSC does novel, small payload, cheap LEO launch vehicles. This is something that NASA is looking for, a low overhead means to get supplies into LEO without sending an eleventy billion ton, 4 stage behemoth up there.
Oh, and do I have to mention the CONSIDERABLE advantage that comes from not dealing with the russians?
It seems stupid and ignorant to me that people who don't understand something can see fit to pass judgment on it. SO what exactly qualifies you to make this blanket pronouncement that gambling is the same thing as investing in the stock market? It it your feeling that the absence of a sure thing equals 100% risk? that is what it sounds like.
sure. Markets fluctuate. Countries default on debt. Banks fail. shit happens. When you invest in ANY investment it is always prudent to look at the kind of risk you are willing to accept and the timeline you have to invest. If you need the money on hand 10 years, it might be better to not invest in a group of stocks. If you don't need it for a while and you have a medium tolerance for risk, stocks are a GREAT investment. So good that you would be stupid to ignore them.
Look. The only investment with 0 risk offers a negative rate of return. You suffer little to no risk by putting your money in your mattress. It just will lose value due to inflation. If that is your investment strategy because of the undue risk of other investments, I'm glad I'm not your kids or grandkids.
No, I couldn't say the same thing about gambling. for one, In gambling, the house always wins. the games are set up such that your eventual return is always less than 1.00.
Look, the whole problem people have is with volatility. Volatility scares people. People respond more to volatility than they do to actual risk. Ask someone how to determine if a company is a risky investment and they will more than likely point to the 52 wk hi/lo for the stock rather than some more fundamental assessment.
Are stocks riskier than bonds? Of course. Can you see a rate of return on ANY investment that beats the market perpetually? No. All of these specacular crashes we see are coming from people who promised greater than market return and took risks to get it. Those risks will, statistically, bite people in the ass. Some people got rich. Some people lost a bunch of money. On average, wealth grew and will continue to grow at a reasonable rate over time. One of the bid reasons it will grow is through equity finance.
Making the statement that one investment is riskier than another is fine. Making an unsubstantiated claim linking on investment to what is basically a means to throw your money away is ignorant and silly.
How in the WORLD can you justify aruging that stocks are a zero-sum game. Let alone making that argument then in the next sentence say that we should be buying oil company stock.
How in the WORLD does that go through your head?
Please explain to me in great detail how stocks are zero sum. Then explain why I care, assuming that I'm not the person losing the money in the future. THEN explain average stock market growth (including depressions) in the us of about 6-7% for the last 130 years. Then explain how lower risk investments have an obvious return of >0% (bonds, savings accounts).
fucking amaze me.
are you serious. This is modded as a troll? You've got to be fucking kidding me. What a luddite and ignorant mod base.
I can't begin. I think that I have articulated a pretty solid argument against the general notion of socialism as a means to allocate goods. To call it a straw man is silly. You may tell me that you don't think that pricing/allocation is all that important and then explain why. You may tell me that consumption is unimportant and explain why production dominates. But you can hardly tell me that it is a straw man and ignore the rest of the argument.
Ok. Let's assume that multiple government organizations do own corporations. Presumably, competition between the two would only be allowed insofar as the government saw fit, because if we were to have true competition, the same motives that exist running a capitalist business would be in place here. And in this case it is demonstrably worse to have government running these companies. Government is the only agent here that can compel action. It holds a monopoly on force over individuals. To say that government would allow organizations to run in ways that hurt others (say, via competitive action) is silly.
Even if we assume allocative issues don't exist, there is still the issue of ownership. Why does government exist as some privileged owner? Why is wealth concentrated there? How is it evil for profits to be concentrated in the hands of owners of capital but just for them to be concentrated in the hands of the government? More to the point, how does government ownership effectively simulate the profit motive?
And it isn't a straw man. Just like I tried to explain about the sales tax paradox, we can't talk about who controls one sector of the economy without talking about how it impacts all the rest of the chain. If I set government imposed limits on the production of cheese, that will impact the end consumer for cheese. If I set price controls for cheese, that will impact producers. If government goals dictate production then they impact allocation and consumption, period.
Right. I understand your last point. I'm not missing it. Some things have external costs. Private companies only see private costs and so produce more than should be produced, given that external (social) cost. In a socialist society, that external cost is borne by society (lets say it is more lung cancer from pollution) and paid for by the same companies. Whoop-de-fucking-do. People still get lung cancer. We just all pay the same bill.
Dealing with that externality can be done in a capitalist OR a socialist society. Simple control over the means of production by the government does not somehow imply that the government will produce less in order to bring the externality into account. you produce some symbols here but at no point do you give any logic as to how the external cost will change allocation/output. that is the important part. Society already bears the cost, capitalism or socialism. How it deals with the cost is not a function of what kind of government it is. Take a look at the Clean Air Act in the US. This was a market solution to a social externality problem. Pollutors put out too many pollutants. The government created a cap on those pollutants and allowed companies to buy and sell permits to violate that cap. Companies were forced to internalize those social costs and pollute less now. Capitalist solution. Capitalist society.
We can also have price control and government ownership in capitalist societies. The prices of milk and corn are both highly regulated in a truly arcane fashion in the united states. imports of cane sugar are limited in order to keep prices artificially high.
Oh yeah. That might be better. Do they still have legal secretaries or is that term passe?
Are you a treasury bond trader? Who qualified you to make all of these remarks? Stocks are perfectly reasonable investments if you understand what your willingness to accept risk is and if you diversify your holdings. If you want safe, don't even get treasury bonds, I hear some checking accounts give interest now.
Treasury bonds offer a rate of return that is on average much, much lower than the stock market or even the corporate bond market. That is partially because they are lower risk investments. they serve a great role (as do corporate and municipal bonds) for medium term investments because they give a relatively known and fixed return for low risk. for a long term investment, they should now be the majority of your portfolio. You just won't break 3% after transactions costs. Compare a fund investing for 30 years at 3% with one investing at 6%. After 30 someodd years, the 3% portfolio will have roughly doubled, but the 6% portfolio will have increased by ~6 times. That's a pretty significant difference.
Just because you lost money on stocks doesn't mean that they are bad for everyone, always. Sheesh.
The stock market isn't legalized gambling FFS. god damn it. why do people keep modding this insightful. just because it doesn't always go up and just because you don't understand it doesn't make it gambling. You want some stock market investments that you won't ever go bankrupt on? Go find large companies with Aaa/AAA bond ratings and buy their stock. Then sit on it for a while. Don't sell when it drops. Just hand on to it. You'll see a growth rate a little below the market on average.
You want a recipe to lose fucking money, in any situation? But shares in companies whose business plans you don't understand, whose revenue streams are unproven and whose entire earnings potential stems from future business that doesn't exist yet. 1/1000 you will pick Microsoft, google, Apple, etc. The rest of the time you will pick companies that are bankrupt now. It is just like investing in your friend's restaurant. It is not written anywhere that you have to make a return on things.
And don't pretend like you understand what is going on. He can't "sell Yahoo and buy Microsoft" at the price that Yahoo stock would have fetched had the deal go through. No one would buy it. that's why people were interested in the deal. It represented a step change in their stock value. Whether or not it was wise in the long run is not what is being discussed.
How is a treasury bond a sure thing? governments default on their debt. How about this. Bonds offer a contracted return that might not happen due to default risk and might be lowered due to inflation and changes in interest rates. Stocks offer no such guaranteed return save the fact that as an owner you are entitled to a share of profits. You are also (in some cases) given some fractional say in how the company is run.
It isn't a gamble. Some investments are riskier than others. No investment is risk free. Some investments are VIRTUALLY risk free, but you pay in terms of your return. Jesus. What do they teach kids these days?
No, and here's why. The idea isn't that the price is a problem, although it might be for some investors. They feel that any takeover bid from microsoft might be worth more than their stock is liable to be in the near future. They also feel that there are two possible outcomes for their suit. If it is a threat, Yahoo will cave to the deal and they will get their desired price. If it isn't a threat, the markets will not regard it as such and their stock price will not go down.
But....
I don't think that is the whole story. It isn't an insider affair, IMO. What it might be is a hedge against volatility. The only thing better than knowing if your stock will suddenly increase in value is knowing WHEN your stock will suddenly increase in value. If you can force the issue via legal action (iffy) then you can justify the purchase of more shares on the notion that your lawsuit will result in a much higher share price ue to a buyout. So. Large firm sees buyout rebuffed. Large firm sees a chance to reap known profits via legal action. Large firm sues.
I am not suggesting that these firms bought Yahoo in order to bring this lawsuit. What I am suggesting was that it seemed to be a convenient way around future price fluctuations--not an insider job.
IAALS.... I am a legal secretary?
Yeah, I'm tooling around wikipedia now. I suspected that there wasn't going to be too much coming from this. Like I said in the post above, it might just be the public pressure that influences people (though the number of shareholders 'pledged' is low in percentage terms).
Everyone is greedy, by and large. Get over it. Most of us are. In the long run, both sides are about greed. Yahoo is (presumably) makign the argument that shareholder value will be hurt by the merger and these guys are making the value that it will be hurt by avoiding the takeover. Both sides are greedy, fundamentally.
the managers may feel that they want to take Yahoo in a certain direction not dictated by microsoft, and that is all well and good, but it sounds less noble when you realize that the money they are using to do that is not theirs. It is the money of the tens of thousands of investors in their company that has allowed them to do this. No one is a hero here.