I hope you told those "potential investors" to take a hike. People who are real investors don't make such summary judgments that run into the millions. However, bubble investors like VCs do, and bubble investors will try to make your business into a bubble investment... which is to say, they'll try to destroy it ASAP while planning a cash-out plan for themselves.
Truth hurts, doesn't it Charlie? VCs are indeed morons as a class since they strongly tend to invest by following fads, not by sensible analysis that's judged according to individual criteria. They follow fads since their money-only objective is highly susceptible to games of confidence, and they have to jump on bandwagons in order to ensure an ROI. In effect, VCs need other VCs in order to achieve the modern expectation of "in excess of x10" ROI. (Which makes your comment about how "people jumped into the VC game" rather pointless. The investment bubble REQUIRED a lot more players to enable to great con game to run.)
If you know VCs which are different than the majority of the brainless money tossers, then you're a lucky man. But the original poster is completely correct. Chance are, when you show up in a VC's office, you will be conversing with a moron... and that's a terrible step to take with your own business.
I never understood the rush to throw money away in leasing office space. If you've got that kind of money to waste, why not buy an actual home with the consolidation of payments (apartment + office) and then enjoy your home office?
Why? Many "successful venture capitalist[s]" rode their luck in an investment boom... while too many of the resulting companies crashed and burned. That's nothing to emulate.
I would have to argue that holier-than-thou self-richeousness is the least moral religion ever.
Heh, heh. I've gotta admit, you've probably got me there. At least I was able to get a good and ironic laugh from your statement.
And I think that the American uber-wealthy don't adhere to any lower moral standard than any other uber-wealthy.
I only used the term "globalist" once in my rant, but it deserves a wider range in our cannonade. Globalism is a distinct problem that is only accentuated by the starting point of the usual American predatory capitalism. Many of the ubers behind America's collapsing economy are globalists. Even if they were Americans at first, they are definitely "world citizens" now, and the only sovereign nation they swear allegiance to is the international money flow.
I know plenty of Americans who do not love money.
Too bad few of them end up in the positions (like corporate executives and elected officials) to enforce general prosperity. So it doesn't really matter how many of them there are, and how many of them you know; a minority of ultra-aggressive, hyper-vicious elites have taken command from a particularly sleepy populace and THAT is the true character of America. We let them do it. And we continue to let them do it every day.
Americans are giving up control because they lack the moral impetus required to evaluate corporations based on their actions, not on their stock value alone.
Oh gawd, yes. But as soon as you start pointing that out, and actually have the temerity to insist that corporations have other-then-monetary objectives, then people start screaming "Socialist!" and "Communist!"... and your opinion gets dropped into the toilet of the collective unconsciousness, never to emerge into considered public debate again due to the stink it emits... the stench of unapproved philosophy.
What makes you or I so fundamentally different from those who have been so fundamentally corrupted by wealth?
I don't spend every waking minute figuring out how to fuck my fellow man out of another fraction of a percent. THAT is what makes me different.
I read somewhere once that a lifestyle of consumption is the ultimate violence against the developing world. I think that that statement stands on its own merits. I stopped being a consumer a long time ago and I constantly strive to escape the consumerist traps that this society places around for us. I am a citizen, not a consumer.
Firstly, auto-company employees are generally handed good deals for buying new cars from them. Secondly, such employees are probably well paid and can easily afford new cars. And finally: The parking lot expressly for non-Ford cars was in the back, away from the public, where you couldn't see it. (Yes, auto companies generally segregate employee cars in their lots. After all, think about what a Ford exec might have thought, when he drove into a factory parking lot and saw a sea of Toyotas, Nissans, etc. Bam! Policy change.)
Considering the propensity for current IDF soldiers to shoot Palestinian civilians (under the blessing of the same command structure that condemns D&D players), you should be DIS-inclined to believe anything the IDF says.
America isn't the only so-called civilized place with rightwingnuts who feel threatened by seculars and people who treat myths as myths and not as "historical documents". If anyone here is the risk, it's the guy who actually believes in things like demons and angels, as opposed to the player of a fantasy game who treats them as game elements.
I probably keep those towels in the same place you store your facial tissues... which you use for wiping up after when you jerk off to the latest stock quotes, urban zombie. Get some perspective, tool.
It never fails; bad-mouth the world's least moral religion (i.e. money), and all kinds of shitbitches pop out of the woodwork with their dismissive one-liners. My, what clever deconstruction you wield! You're so convincing with the scope of your arguments! {raspberry}
You're only proving what fucking idiots Americans are. Like your brethren, you're one of the best-educated retards that history has ever produced. The best you can rationally expect now is to be the last one to turn out the lights on your shithole of a country, after the last dollar has winged its way overseas with the last globalist executive.
No, YOU put down your latest copy of Barron's and step away from your Bloomberg, you fucking money junkie. When will you learn that in the final analysis, you can't eat paper or electrons?
Speaking of which, didn't AT&T come up with Unix in the first place to have a superior OS that they could use for company processes and customer products? Unix wasn't the product; everything that Unix enabled, was the product.
Actually, the guy you spoke to is exactly correct... inside the happytalk environment of his own mind. Unfortunately, outside, in the Hyper-Republican, Neo-Conservative realm, corporations have uber-rights which completely trump the public good.
I'm sure that he firmly and unquestioningly believed that both purposes (public need and private profit) were being fulfilled. After all, no one in this sick class of person actually goes to work saying "X people will die today from the work I'm doing". Increasing a stock's price is always looked upon as a lifesaver, no matter how many people are killed overseas, and how many people are unemployed domestically, from the action which produced the stock rise.
They always talk about how good everything is from the ideological outlook of the American Capitalist Empire... where if you have to bomb 10 people today to provide 1 other person with cheesburgers tomorrow, you are a Good Person and will go to that Christian Heaven with that strange white guy with the long flowing beard.
Your associate there is stuffed completely full of fecal matter, of course, but too many Westerners believe so desperately in their Hyperactive Capitalism that they'll believe anything is true... until it finally hits them personally -- and then, there are still a few holdouts, who will sing the praises of the same indusrial chemicals that will be busily eating more holes in their brains.
Drowning in temporary affluence, America became the most moronic nation on the face of the Earth. On average, Americans spend most of their lives drowsing away in a waking dream. It was no accident that the fiction capitals of the world are in America (Hollywood and NYC).
There's a book out by some guys who wanted to reform New Hampshire into a shire system from the counties they have now. The intent was to restructure the entire state into a government, sized small enough to be more accessible for the population at the usual level of interaction. I can't find the damned thing on google, but if you can find it I highly recommend it as a sound plan for statewide reform.
If they ban suicidegirls (drool, drool), I'm gonna kill myself. By promoting a method that causes my suicide, my relatives will then charge the government of Australia under its own law.
It's kind of sad, isn't it, that it takes a bunch of agonizingly bad politicians running on the ballot, one election-cycle after another, before we get the common, concerned citizen into the race? We need more guys like Ron Paul, Chenowith-Hage, Ventura, et al to run for office. The people need to see that a political class (politicians) is deadly to a constitutional republic eventually. Like many rights, the right to hold a public office by the common man must be exercised, or it is lost in practical terms.
That all depends on what you value an MBA for. Currently, MBAs are highly valued for their ability to crash companies in the most lucrative way for the executive class they exist in.
As long as "we" continue to reward economic speculators and destroyers, then lethal parasites like MBAs will continue to find a market for their skills in outsourcing, offshoring, alienation, securities and accounting fraud, and all the rest of it.
In short, people may think murder is a bad thing, but when it's time to hire a hitman, they sure do pony up a lot of money to get the job done.
Plumbers? No. Soldiers. That way, we move from blue collar, to white collar, to red collar (red when they get shot). Red, white and blue. Kinda gets your patriotic blood pumpin', eh?
The militarist state the Neo-Cons are creating is producing the red collar class. I theorize that THAT is the next step. Unfortunately for all of us, the red-collar phase will be even shorter than the white collar one was (which was a lot shorter than the blue collar one was).
The Cato Institue rated Taft (OH) and Granholm (MI) the worst governors on their records of spending profilgately and then raising things like "sin" taxes to make up for it.
Taft and Granholm are presiding over the wholesale destruction of the middle classes in their states. So it sounds like you're doing what I'm doing: saving money for when I take the jump out of Ohio for prosperous areas... leaving the land aflame behind me. Too bad that I'll have to leave friends behind who will (quite stupidly) continue to endure the agony of a rising feudal system.
There's only 1 good thing about Taft : he's term-limited and cannot run again. But the Republicans are eyeing Blackwell for the next run, and he's another elitist party stooge, so Ohio's governance is probably not going to change until a Californian catastrophe occurs (as if the 2003 blackout wasn't enough of an indicator).
How reassuring to the individual seller! It's good to know that Ohio is indulging in "statistical enforcement" where it is "VERY unlikely" you will suddenly be charged with avoiding a $200 fee and $50K bond. Heck, I'm gonna get online TONIGHT and roll the dice on those odds, bay-bee!
No law should be passed or obeyed when the legislaturalists have to say "don't worry, we won't target YOU with this...". I shouldn't have to worry: All I have to do is read the law and see CLEARLY where I stand.
Rep. Ron Paul, Texas. Alas, he's quite in the minority. Speaking of which, hooda thunkit that when I was growing up in the 70s and early 80s that I'd become a distinct minority in my own country simply by paying attention to what the Constitution actually said? Rep. Paul probably feels the same way.
I've lost count of how many times I've been told the US Constitution is "too old", "out of date", "no longer applies", and (my favorite) "it was made for a lifestyle we no longer practice". It's no longer a "living document" if people don't believe that it has any application. (In that light, the US Constitution really DOESN'T apply any longer, if few people are willing to obey it. General support of the law of the land has faded, and in its place is support for "fad law" that is fluid with common and current sentiments.)
If you're talking about real astronauts, you wouldn't need stock options or other such shallow motivations. Simply give them a real chance to pilot, navigate, or operate on spacecraft. People like Branson and Rutan might well have the wherewithal to supply the necessary, industrial energy, resulting in a higher need for functional astronautics.
It seems to me that the highest level of studies are being carried out right now on the cellphone-using population itself. The incidences of cancers is something we should naturally be looking at in this day and age.
If we were talking about a population of studies about how severely your car's new paint job will fade and peel over time, I'd say your contempt was warranted. But with something in the life-affecting arena like climate and cancer, I'd say it's particularly foolish to simply ignore the danger signs and to continue acting in the same way.
Generally, where there's smoke, there's fire, and even if it turns out there's no fire, all you did was move, fill water buckets, and make other sensible precautions against fire anyway -- no biggie. Get some perspective.
Let's put it another way. You get your hands on 200 studies of the stability of the office building you work in. 100 of those studies say the structure will catastrophically collapse, likely killing 99% of the people inside. The other 100 say the building is fine. Question: Will you step inside the building without any further investigation?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you told those "potential investors" to take a hike. People who are real investors don't make such summary judgments that run into the millions. However, bubble investors like VCs do, and bubble investors will try to make your business into a bubble investment ... which is to say, they'll try to destroy it ASAP while planning a cash-out plan for themselves.
For example, "VCs are morons" is rather sweeping.
... and that's a terrible step to take with your own business.
Truth hurts, doesn't it Charlie? VCs are indeed morons as a class since they strongly tend to invest by following fads, not by sensible analysis that's judged according to individual criteria. They follow fads since their money-only objective is highly susceptible to games of confidence, and they have to jump on bandwagons in order to ensure an ROI. In effect, VCs need other VCs in order to achieve the modern expectation of "in excess of x10" ROI. (Which makes your comment about how "people jumped into the VC game" rather pointless. The investment bubble REQUIRED a lot more players to enable to great con game to run.)
If you know VCs which are different than the majority of the brainless money tossers, then you're a lucky man. But the original poster is completely correct. Chance are, when you show up in a VC's office, you will be conversing with a moron
Honest people won't be lazy slackers.
I think it's more correct to say: "Honest people who are lazy slackers won't mislead you into thinking they are NOT lazy slackers."
I never understood the rush to throw money away in leasing office space. If you've got that kind of money to waste, why not buy an actual home with the consolidation of payments (apartment + office) and then enjoy your home office?
Why? Many "successful venture capitalist[s]" rode their luck in an investment boom ... while too many of the resulting companies crashed and burned. That's nothing to emulate.
I would have to argue that holier-than-thou self-richeousness is the least moral religion ever.
... and your opinion gets dropped into the toilet of the collective unconsciousness, never to emerge into considered public debate again due to the stink it emits ... the stench of unapproved philosophy.
Heh, heh. I've gotta admit, you've probably got me there. At least I was able to get a good and ironic laugh from your statement.
And I think that the American uber-wealthy don't adhere to any lower moral standard than any other uber-wealthy.
I only used the term "globalist" once in my rant, but it deserves a wider range in our cannonade. Globalism is a distinct problem that is only accentuated by the starting point of the usual American predatory capitalism. Many of the ubers behind America's collapsing economy are globalists. Even if they were Americans at first, they are definitely "world citizens" now, and the only sovereign nation they swear allegiance to is the international money flow.
I know plenty of Americans who do not love money.
Too bad few of them end up in the positions (like corporate executives and elected officials) to enforce general prosperity. So it doesn't really matter how many of them there are, and how many of them you know; a minority of ultra-aggressive, hyper-vicious elites have taken command from a particularly sleepy populace and THAT is the true character of America. We let them do it. And we continue to let them do it every day.
Americans are giving up control because they lack the moral impetus required to evaluate corporations based on their actions, not on their stock value alone.
Oh gawd, yes. But as soon as you start pointing that out, and actually have the temerity to insist that corporations have other-then-monetary objectives, then people start screaming "Socialist!" and "Communist!"
What makes you or I so fundamentally different from those who have been so fundamentally corrupted by wealth?
I don't spend every waking minute figuring out how to fuck my fellow man out of another fraction of a percent. THAT is what makes me different.
I read somewhere once that a lifestyle of consumption is the ultimate violence against the developing world. I think that that statement stands on its own merits. I stopped being a consumer a long time ago and I constantly strive to escape the consumerist traps that this society places around for us. I am a citizen, not a consumer.
Firstly, auto-company employees are generally handed good deals for buying new cars from them. Secondly, such employees are probably well paid and can easily afford new cars. And finally: The parking lot expressly for non-Ford cars was in the back, away from the public, where you couldn't see it. (Yes, auto companies generally segregate employee cars in their lots. After all, think about what a Ford exec might have thought, when he drove into a factory parking lot and saw a sea of Toyotas, Nissans, etc. Bam! Policy change.)
Yeah. Remember those noises it makes? It's diabolical laughter.
Considering the propensity for current IDF soldiers to shoot Palestinian civilians (under the blessing of the same command structure that condemns D&D players), you should be DIS-inclined to believe anything the IDF says.
America isn't the only so-called civilized place with rightwingnuts who feel threatened by seculars and people who treat myths as myths and not as "historical documents". If anyone here is the risk, it's the guy who actually believes in things like demons and angels, as opposed to the player of a fantasy game who treats them as game elements.
I probably keep those towels in the same place you store your facial tissues ... which you use for wiping up after when you jerk off to the latest stock quotes, urban zombie. Get some perspective, tool.
It never fails; bad-mouth the world's least moral religion (i.e. money), and all kinds of shitbitches pop out of the woodwork with their dismissive one-liners. My, what clever deconstruction you wield! You're so convincing with the scope of your arguments! {raspberry}
You're only proving what fucking idiots Americans are. Like your brethren, you're one of the best-educated retards that history has ever produced. The best you can rationally expect now is to be the last one to turn out the lights on your shithole of a country, after the last dollar has winged its way overseas with the last globalist executive.
No, YOU put down your latest copy of Barron's and step away from your Bloomberg, you fucking money junkie. When will you learn that in the final analysis, you can't eat paper or electrons?
Go and do some real work for a change, tool.
Speaking of which, didn't AT&T come up with Unix in the first place to have a superior OS that they could use for company processes and customer products? Unix wasn't the product; everything that Unix enabled, was the product.
Actually, the guy you spoke to is exactly correct ... inside the happytalk environment of his own mind. Unfortunately, outside, in the Hyper-Republican, Neo-Conservative realm, corporations have uber-rights which completely trump the public good.
... where if you have to bomb 10 people today to provide 1 other person with cheesburgers tomorrow, you are a Good Person and will go to that Christian Heaven with that strange white guy with the long flowing beard.
... until it finally hits them personally -- and then, there are still a few holdouts, who will sing the praises of the same indusrial chemicals that will be busily eating more holes in their brains.
I'm sure that he firmly and unquestioningly believed that both purposes (public need and private profit) were being fulfilled. After all, no one in this sick class of person actually goes to work saying "X people will die today from the work I'm doing". Increasing a stock's price is always looked upon as a lifesaver, no matter how many people are killed overseas, and how many people are unemployed domestically, from the action which produced the stock rise.
They always talk about how good everything is from the ideological outlook of the American Capitalist Empire
Your associate there is stuffed completely full of fecal matter, of course, but too many Westerners believe so desperately in their Hyperactive Capitalism that they'll believe anything is true
Drowning in temporary affluence, America became the most moronic nation on the face of the Earth. On average, Americans spend most of their lives drowsing away in a waking dream. It was no accident that the fiction capitals of the world are in America (Hollywood and NYC).
There's a book out by some guys who wanted to reform New Hampshire into a shire system from the counties they have now. The intent was to restructure the entire state into a government, sized small enough to be more accessible for the population at the usual level of interaction. I can't find the damned thing on google, but if you can find it I highly recommend it as a sound plan for statewide reform.
Man: (sob) I'm gonna kill myself!
Police: Stop, or we shoot!
If they ban suicidegirls (drool, drool), I'm gonna kill myself. By promoting a method that causes my suicide, my relatives will then charge the government of Australia under its own law.
It's kind of sad, isn't it, that it takes a bunch of agonizingly bad politicians running on the ballot, one election-cycle after another, before we get the common, concerned citizen into the race? We need more guys like Ron Paul, Chenowith-Hage, Ventura, et al to run for office. The people need to see that a political class (politicians) is deadly to a constitutional republic eventually. Like many rights, the right to hold a public office by the common man must be exercised, or it is lost in practical terms.
That all depends on what you value an MBA for. Currently, MBAs are highly valued for their ability to crash companies in the most lucrative way for the executive class they exist in.
As long as "we" continue to reward economic speculators and destroyers, then lethal parasites like MBAs will continue to find a market for their skills in outsourcing, offshoring, alienation, securities and accounting fraud, and all the rest of it.
In short, people may think murder is a bad thing, but when it's time to hire a hitman, they sure do pony up a lot of money to get the job done.
Plumbers? No. Soldiers. That way, we move from blue collar, to white collar, to red collar (red when they get shot). Red, white and blue. Kinda gets your patriotic blood pumpin', eh?
The militarist state the Neo-Cons are creating is producing the red collar class. I theorize that THAT is the next step. Unfortunately for all of us, the red-collar phase will be even shorter than the white collar one was (which was a lot shorter than the blue collar one was).
The Cato Institue rated Taft (OH) and Granholm (MI) the worst governors on their records of spending profilgately and then raising things like "sin" taxes to make up for it.
... leaving the land aflame behind me. Too bad that I'll have to leave friends behind who will (quite stupidly) continue to endure the agony of a rising feudal system.
Taft and Granholm are presiding over the wholesale destruction of the middle classes in their states. So it sounds like you're doing what I'm doing: saving money for when I take the jump out of Ohio for prosperous areas
There's only 1 good thing about Taft : he's term-limited and cannot run again. But the Republicans are eyeing Blackwell for the next run, and he's another elitist party stooge, so Ohio's governance is probably not going to change until a Californian catastrophe occurs (as if the 2003 blackout wasn't enough of an indicator).
How reassuring to the individual seller! It's good to know that Ohio is indulging in "statistical enforcement" where it is "VERY unlikely" you will suddenly be charged with avoiding a $200 fee and $50K bond. Heck, I'm gonna get online TONIGHT and roll the dice on those odds, bay-bee!
...". I shouldn't have to worry: All I have to do is read the law and see CLEARLY where I stand.
No law should be passed or obeyed when the legislaturalists have to say "don't worry, we won't target YOU with this
Rep. Ron Paul, Texas. Alas, he's quite in the minority. Speaking of which, hooda thunkit that when I was growing up in the 70s and early 80s that I'd become a distinct minority in my own country simply by paying attention to what the Constitution actually said? Rep. Paul probably feels the same way.
I've lost count of how many times I've been told the US Constitution is "too old", "out of date", "no longer applies", and (my favorite) "it was made for a lifestyle we no longer practice". It's no longer a "living document" if people don't believe that it has any application. (In that light, the US Constitution really DOESN'T apply any longer, if few people are willing to obey it. General support of the law of the land has faded, and in its place is support for "fad law" that is fluid with common and current sentiments.)
If you're talking about real astronauts, you wouldn't need stock options or other such shallow motivations. Simply give them a real chance to pilot, navigate, or operate on spacecraft. People like Branson and Rutan might well have the wherewithal to supply the necessary, industrial energy, resulting in a higher need for functional astronautics.
It seems to me that the highest level of studies are being carried out right now on the cellphone-using population itself. The incidences of cancers is something we should naturally be looking at in this day and age.
If we were talking about a population of studies about how severely your car's new paint job will fade and peel over time, I'd say your contempt was warranted. But with something in the life-affecting arena like climate and cancer, I'd say it's particularly foolish to simply ignore the danger signs and to continue acting in the same way.
Generally, where there's smoke, there's fire, and even if it turns out there's no fire, all you did was move, fill water buckets, and make other sensible precautions against fire anyway -- no biggie. Get some perspective.
Let's put it another way. You get your hands on 200 studies of the stability of the office building you work in. 100 of those studies say the structure will catastrophically collapse, likely killing 99% of the people inside. The other 100 say the building is fine. Question: Will you step inside the building without any further investigation?