Atheists show that they don't know what a statistically significant sample is (see original article summary) OR that ID covers everything as a description from Young Earth Creationism to Theistic Evolution, and thus is pretty much a stupid description of anything in particular.
I'm willing to bet more than half the people who claim to believe in ID, really believe in Theistic Evolution, not Young Earth Creationism.
If Purgatory merely requires the pre-consent of the will to be "with God and others" then won't there be those going to Pergatory and those going to Hell that will both experience gut-wrenching? Neither of them can still have such-and-such sentimental "treasures," pets, etc. Those in Pergatory could easily believe they will be reuinited with such-and-such and if true, then "forced to give it *all* away" won't be true for ever. Only those in Hell would be able to come to grips with that. Why then could some of those in Hell not become ready for Pergatory?
Ah, you must have read CS Lewis...The Great Divorce. It's actually Catholic belief that is why Christ went to Hell to begin with during his three days in the grave- to give people that chance. But the point is- if you come to grips with the letting go, it WAS only Purgatory. It's only those who can't let go of their certainty and their arrogance in sin that it becomes Hell.
Doesn't this reduce the Gospel to merely "when you die, choose to be with us and God"?
Yes. In simple form. But that's always what the choice was- Be with God, Christ, the Trinity- or be expelled forever from their presence. But that's a *much* harder choice than one might imagine it to be. Like most simple things, what you practice in this life can lead you astray. For example wealth- it's very desirable here. One can spend one's entire life searching for material wealth. But unless one *also* learns to let go, to give it away- purgatory will be quite the gut-wrenching experience because one will be forced to give it *all* away at that point. It's even concieveable that some with choose to stay with their treasure on earth, instead of moving on- an eternity of torment with love linked to things instead of people. Thus in poetic form- it's easier for a camel to get through The Eye of the Needle than it is for a rich man to get to Heaven.
As for the wailing and gnashing of teeth- why if you choose Hell, being separated from God for eternity is surely enough to cause that kind of pain!
We don't know with ABSOLUTE certainty- but we do know with MORAL certaintiy that it's the wrong choice for those who love the Lord and are called according to His Purposes.
You'd have to look a long way back to the beginning of the 20th century to see more reasonable numbers. Looking at 100+ years of PE ratios is disturbing to say the least. Some have argued that P/E ratios have gone nuts because the risk premium that should be attached to stocks should be smaller. I'm not sure what planet they're living on, though.
I'm looking back to the begining of the 19th century- that's when this mess started. I personally think instead of a stock exchange, the New York City cops should have just cleaned up that section of the city and arrested everybody for fraud. It all changed though in the 1860s when lawyers became citizens again and corporations became immortal (instead of limited to 40 years).
This, combined with the strange expectations Wall street has for growth, is the crux of the problem. It certainly makes sense for business owners to want to increase the value of their assets. In theory, the best way to do that is to provide the best price for goods and services and grow the business. As you point out, though, problems arise when people figure out how to game the system in order to increase asset prices without increasing asset values. Bad news all around.
That's why we really need a corporate death penalty- gaming the system should automatically mean that your C-level executives are put in jail for 100 years or executed to keep them from harming society again. The legal system should NOT put up with crap like this going on; even if it means executing an entire generation of MBAs to make the point.
And that's the whole point of those financial markets: to get capital from those who have it to those who can make good use of it.
But the real question is this- is basing a system on imaginary capital worth the cost?
Sure, Charles Schwab could help a brick laying business by going to work as a brick layer. Certainly, nobody could say that he didn't earn his paycheck at the end of the day. In that situation, yes, that's what it should take to earn a paycheck at all.
He could do a lot more good for the business if he allowed them access to some of his cash at a price, though, even though he'd get paid more for doing less.
IF that price is reasonable, yes. But that price has NEVER been reasonable. Less work should mean less pay in all situations.
As much as I envy the wealthy for their ability to put their wealth to work for them instead of going directly to work every day, I have to appreciate that the economy as a whole would be a lot worse off without their input.
I actually don't believe that the economy as a whole would be worse off. What we'd have instead is a more distributed economy- one that wouldn't be vunrable to planes flying into buildings, one that wouldn't be dependant upon a parasite class and a slave class to get anything done.
I see it as a small price to pay for a piece of infrastructure that allows small, high quality companies to grow at rates faster than they could by borrowing alone.
And I see it as a LARGE price to pay that turns small, high quality companies into large, low quality companies. Only small companies can afford to be high quality- once they start growing at a rate faster than their market grows, they turn into low quality companies. That's why IPOs are ALWAYS a mistake- once a company has an IPO it's effectively ruined, the focus has changed from providing new and innovative products to stock price, destroying the company. I've seen it happen to 5 businesses I worked in now- all of them either ended up bankrupt or bought out and changed away from the original values of the company.
I think though you've hit the nail on the head- it's the organization of the market itself that causes this problem; if people had to meet the workers before they invested in a business, personally, the focus would be where it belongs- on helping the business succeed within the original values of the business.
This decision to be with God which we can make before or when we die in order to avoid an enternity in Hell...what exactly is the decision? Decide to believe what? Some vague notion of being alone in Hell from friends/family and not wanting to go there? Does it entail a minimum belief in a God as opposed to gods, or the non-Trinitarian Allah/God, the Trinitarian God, Trinity + understanding deity of Jesus, the Catholic Chursh, the Pope, and what about Mary? Does it entail belief in anything about the death and resurection of Jesus?
We don't know for certain- at least not absolute certainty (as opposed to moral certainty). But the real decision is an unconditional YES- Yes to all of whatever is the Truth regardless of what is the Truth. St. Mary the Virgin is the ultimate prototype of this. Yes to whatever God wants to do to you and with you, forever and ever. But you do have a choice- you can say no. You may be alone in Hell, you may not- doesn't matter the point is that you'll be without God, because you *wanted* to be without God, you said No to the gift. It's that simple. Say Yes to the truth of the universe, or be stubborn in your sin and reject the ultimate Truth that is God. This is salvation open to everybody- and salvation that does not count on human preconcieved notions or judgement.
Well, given that anything that has value could be used as a medium of exchange, I suppose it's reasonable to call anything with value "money" if you want to play it that way. That does not, however, mean that inflation of a price of a single good is causing "inflation" in the broader sense.
Well, specifically we were talking about PAPER money- that is, certificates printed backed by real or percieved value. In which case, a stock certificate has a heck of a lot more in common with a bearer bond or a dollar bill than with, say, a Tinker's Damn or a Pound of Sterling Silver.
I think I see where you're going here. I agree that there's a fundamental problem with the way the stock markets have been working lately, but I think that we disagree on the cause. You seem to have reached the conclusion that there is no value in a stock market at all. The problem I see is that "investors" seem to have forgotten what drives the value of the things they're investing in. The point you made in another post regarding dividends is extremely relevant here. Google is "worth" zillions of dollars on pure speculation about future payouts as they have no history of paying out any profits to their investors. Looking at the history of stock prices relative to dividends, it's easy to see that people have gone from seeing stock purchases as investment in a business with a stream of profits to something more akin to trading baseball cards in hopes of striking it rich. When the stock market operates that way, I agree that it is nothing more than a pointless wealth redistribution machine.
When I look at history- I have to say I can't find a time that any stock market had prices that were related to dividends paid. Wall Street, originally so named due to a sea wall close by, was originally a place where one gambled on speculative sea voyages for instance. But I wouldn't say it's entirely pointless- it does provide the service of wealth redistribution, which is the whole point from the point of view of a business that is trying to start up. The problem is that it can easily become more of a curse than blessing; stock price ends up the reason of your business rather than making profits, serving customers, or providing a living for your workers.
At the same time, if people could go back to looking more rationally at their investments, stock markets can do their jobs remarkably well. The root of the problem lies in the fact that stock markets are markets and are only as smart as the aggregate intelligence of its demand side.
I'll have to use that some time- it's a good argument for a well-engineered economy in comparison. But I say the primary purpose of the stock market IS wealth redistribution; even dividends reduce the amount of money available for payroll.
I would argue that when a stock market is not operating in a bubble regime or otherwise failing to do its job properly, the industry surrounding it does add value. Its agents can do damage to the market by providing bad advice and encouraging poor investment practices (as they have been doing for some time), but there's no reason to think that if they behave properly they're not earning their money.
To me, one needs to provide a neccessary good to earn money- money should be earned by the creation of goods. The only goods that the financial industry creates are methods for taking profit away from those who actually worked for it and give it to somebody else; either through dividends (stocks) or usury (bonds). The one way they do well is when they enable an entrepreneur to find investment for a startup- but even that can be dangerous, because of the focus on profit.
If you want to look at an industry that shouldn't exist, I suggest looking at the tax preparation industry. The fact that our government makes tax law complicated enough that a huge number of otherwise average people need to hire experts to explain the rules to them clearly indicates that something is wrong and we're experiencing a
Or maybe they think (and many agree)that the price of Google's stock is a little over inflated, and they're expecting a correction. Sell stock at inflated price. Buy at corrected price. Lather, rinse, repeat. I wonder how hard it would be to manipulate the market with carefully crafted press releases....?
Same thing in the long run- you can't build real products while releasing fraud. Fraud is simply too complex to make believeable- it saps the creative process.
Is it just me, or was this a total word salad? Hyperinflationary practices? How?
It is total word salad- but it does relate to reality and the reason that stock markets have a tendency to create downward pressure on real wages. Basically, the stock market is a huge pump that takes money from people who produce goods (Profit is the difference between cost of producing a good + labor to produce that good and the price you can charge for that good, thus profit is just unpaid wages) and gives it to parasites who only consume goods. This means that fewer goods are produced, on the low end, and the ammount of money to purchase those goods is inflated on the high end. From there, simple supply and demand pricing takes over, rasing prices to try to regain profits from the rich, while pricing the workers who do not see the profit of their labor out of the market. This happens in any city which has a stock exchange.
No, stocks are not paper money. Stocks represent a "share" of ownership the companies assets (and a share of the company profits as dividends) - the assets could be something tangible, like machinary, or something intagible, like "marketshare" or "name recognition". People pay money for shares because they percieve they are getting something of value.
And this is different from gold or silver backed, or even fiat currency, exactly how?
But even assuming the value of the stock is "inflated", this has absolutly nothing to do with monetary inflation. They use the same word, "inflated", but they are completly different things. It might be bad to "inflate" the value of stock (meaning, decieving people to the real value of what you are selling), in the same way it would be bad to sell cut glass as diamonds, but this is not what you are talking about.
What I'm talking about is tying up a significant portion of a culture's resources in what is essentially a con artist shell game. This is not compatible with my idea of "making money while doing no evil"- but that might be due to my rather low opinion of people who would rather suffle paper than create.
The "inflation" you are talking about in your first post (cost of goods and services rising, most likely faster than wages) isn't the same thing as a stock being inflated (people thinking a company is more valuable than it really is). It is like saying that a "sweet" 72 Camero is going to raise my blood sugar! We use the word "inflation" to describe different things. "Inflation" simply means "bloated".
True enough- but one leads to the other. Because people are making money off of that con game, that means they have more money to spend- which means prices go up on everything from gasoline to clothing to food to houses. That is why a stock market is hyperinflationary- it invents an "industry" to make money in that contributes no real goods to the general market but sucks in value and spits out money.
The things that cause monetary inflation as you mention it in your post: an increase in the money supply (or lowering of interest rates, which in the U.S. is the same as increasing the money supply), or a decrease in the goods and services in the market. Overpriced stocks don't increase or decrease the money supply at all, they simply reallocate money that is already in the economy. (And, if you are a Marxist: They are reallocating money away from one set of Capitalists to another set of Capitalists, so it wouldn't really have much effect on the workers from a strictly theoretical Marxist perspective).
I'm only partially a Marxist- you might call me a distributist. But what they're really doing is taking money away from PRODUCERS and giving it to INVESTORS- which increases the amount of money in relation to goods and services in the market, both because fewer goods and services are being produced, and because the money is in the hands of people who are largely parasitic consumers on the other end. That means that the people who have the money to buy have more money to buy- and there are fewer goods and services to buy. Simple law of supply and demand causes inflation from there.
Another way to look at it is Plato's Maximum Wage Ideal- because the owners have excess money, that has been taken from that used for strictly production, they have the ability to push prices out of reach of their workers, who cease being consumers.
Dividends would be a good reward. I agree that stock prices can mean pretty much whatever they want. Dividends is where you measure the success of the company.
I don't. I measure success on what people DO not how much they can get out of their customers and avertisers. But then again, I've got a different meaning of the word success than most people.
A company that doesn't WANT to pay dividend should probably not be considered as an investment option. That's my point of view anyways. If I were to buy shares, I'd like to make a profit on how well the company is doing, if I invested because of my faith in their business. I wouldn't want it all to be speculation, which depends on how others think it will do, and is pretty much a matter of fad... but most importantly, stock prices are not directly related (sometimes totally unrelated) to the company's ability to do business well.
Google is all spec, no dividends as of yet- but even then, the real question for me is this. If they're in the stock market, are they still living up to the idea of "make money but do no evil"? I say no- because the stock market is evil in and of itself, it makes businesses short sighted.
High stocks != company success however. Short term success, yes, but with sell offs of this size, it's a sure bet that they don't expect any long term success.
Of which I have not previously been aware. I thought hyperinflationary practices had a tendency to raise the cost of living without raising wages in concert- but this takes the cake.
State-County-Precinct, in a grandparent-parent-child relationship (there are many counties per state, many precincts per county). One of the big gripes about Diebold software is that it doesn't actually save individual votes lower than this- just Precinct Totals.
It sounds like you're defining drinks such as (American) Budweiser (brewed with maize) as "beer" here. I suspect that a lot of people in the UK may disagree with this.
I'm from the land of 50,000 microbreweries (yes American, but Budweiser is considered cheap crap not worth boiling sausages in around here); we consider just about anything in the Lager or Ale categories that is made from grain instead of fruit to be beer (though the line blurs somewhat for some of the beers crafted for female tastebuds- it's amazing how well a Raspberry Stout will sell- a cross between a dark barley malt beer with a raspberry wine).
Slashdot Mirror
Atheists show that they don't know what a statistically significant sample is (see original article summary) OR that ID covers everything as a description from Young Earth Creationism to Theistic Evolution, and thus is pretty much a stupid description of anything in particular.
I'm willing to bet more than half the people who claim to believe in ID, really believe in Theistic Evolution, not Young Earth Creationism.
But global warming sure helps with those home heating bills! :-)
Seriously though, saw on the news this morning that Chevy and Ford both have E85 SUVs in the Portland Auto Show this year.
If Purgatory merely requires the pre-consent of the will to be "with God and others" then won't there be those going to Pergatory and those going to Hell that will both experience gut-wrenching? Neither of them can still have such-and-such sentimental "treasures," pets, etc. Those in Pergatory could easily believe they will be reuinited with such-and-such and if true, then "forced to give it *all* away" won't be true for ever. Only those in Hell would be able to come to grips with that. Why then could some of those in Hell not become ready for Pergatory?
Ah, you must have read CS Lewis...The Great Divorce. It's actually Catholic belief that is why Christ went to Hell to begin with during his three days in the grave- to give people that chance. But the point is- if you come to grips with the letting go, it WAS only Purgatory. It's only those who can't let go of their certainty and their arrogance in sin that it becomes Hell.
Who needs bombs, when you've got deorbitable cargo containers? Just change the trajectory.
Doesn't this reduce the Gospel to merely "when you die, choose to be with us and God"?
Yes. In simple form. But that's always what the choice was- Be with God, Christ, the Trinity- or be expelled forever from their presence. But that's a *much* harder choice than one might imagine it to be. Like most simple things, what you practice in this life can lead you astray. For example wealth- it's very desirable here. One can spend one's entire life searching for material wealth. But unless one *also* learns to let go, to give it away- purgatory will be quite the gut-wrenching experience because one will be forced to give it *all* away at that point. It's even concieveable that some with choose to stay with their treasure on earth, instead of moving on- an eternity of torment with love linked to things instead of people. Thus in poetic form- it's easier for a camel to get through The Eye of the Needle than it is for a rich man to get to Heaven.
As for the wailing and gnashing of teeth- why if you choose Hell, being separated from God for eternity is surely enough to cause that kind of pain!
We don't know with ABSOLUTE certainty- but we do know with MORAL certaintiy that it's the wrong choice for those who love the Lord and are called according to His Purposes.
You'd have to look a long way back to the beginning of the 20th century to see more reasonable numbers. Looking at 100+ years of PE ratios is disturbing to say the least. Some have argued that P/E ratios have gone nuts because the risk premium that should be attached to stocks should be smaller. I'm not sure what planet they're living on, though.
I'm looking back to the begining of the 19th century- that's when this mess started. I personally think instead of a stock exchange, the New York City cops should have just cleaned up that section of the city and arrested everybody for fraud. It all changed though in the 1860s when lawyers became citizens again and corporations became immortal (instead of limited to 40 years).
This, combined with the strange expectations Wall street has for growth, is the crux of the problem. It certainly makes sense for business owners to want to increase the value of their assets. In theory, the best way to do that is to provide the best price for goods and services and grow the business. As you point out, though, problems arise when people figure out how to game the system in order to increase asset prices without increasing asset values. Bad news all around.
That's why we really need a corporate death penalty- gaming the system should automatically mean that your C-level executives are put in jail for 100 years or executed to keep them from harming society again. The legal system should NOT put up with crap like this going on; even if it means executing an entire generation of MBAs to make the point.
And that's the whole point of those financial markets: to get capital from those who have it to those who can make good use of it.
But the real question is this- is basing a system on imaginary capital worth the cost?
Sure, Charles Schwab could help a brick laying business by going to work as a brick layer. Certainly, nobody could say that he didn't earn his paycheck at the end of the day.
In that situation, yes, that's what it should take to earn a paycheck at all.
He could do a lot more good for the business if he allowed them access to some of his cash at a price, though, even though he'd get paid more for doing less.
IF that price is reasonable, yes. But that price has NEVER been reasonable. Less work should mean less pay in all situations.
As much as I envy the wealthy for their ability to put their wealth to work for them instead of going directly to work every day, I have to appreciate that the economy as a whole would be a lot worse off without their input.
I actually don't believe that the economy as a whole would be worse off. What we'd have instead is a more distributed economy- one that wouldn't be vunrable to planes flying into buildings, one that wouldn't be dependant upon a parasite class and a slave class to get anything done.
I see it as a small price to pay for a piece of infrastructure that allows small, high quality companies to grow at rates faster than they could by borrowing alone.
And I see it as a LARGE price to pay that turns small, high quality companies into large, low quality companies. Only small companies can afford to be high quality- once they start growing at a rate faster than their market grows, they turn into low quality companies. That's why IPOs are ALWAYS a mistake- once a company has an IPO it's effectively ruined, the focus has changed from providing new and innovative products to stock price, destroying the company. I've seen it happen to 5 businesses I worked in now- all of them either ended up bankrupt or bought out and changed away from the original values of the company.
I think though you've hit the nail on the head- it's the organization of the market itself that causes this problem; if people had to meet the workers before they invested in a business, personally, the focus would be where it belongs- on helping the business succeed within the original values of the business.
Thank you for this detailed explanation....
This decision to be with God which we can make before or when we die in order to avoid an enternity in Hell...what exactly is the decision? Decide to believe what? Some vague notion of being alone in Hell from friends/family and not wanting to go there? Does it entail a minimum belief in a God as opposed to gods, or the non-Trinitarian Allah/God, the Trinitarian God, Trinity + understanding deity of Jesus, the Catholic Chursh, the Pope, and what about Mary? Does it entail belief in anything about the death and resurection of Jesus?
We don't know for certain- at least not absolute certainty (as opposed to moral certainty). But the real decision is an unconditional YES- Yes to all of whatever is the Truth regardless of what is the Truth. St. Mary the Virgin is the ultimate prototype of this. Yes to whatever God wants to do to you and with you, forever and ever. But you do have a choice- you can say no. You may be alone in Hell, you may not- doesn't matter the point is that you'll be without God, because you *wanted* to be without God, you said No to the gift. It's that simple. Say Yes to the truth of the universe, or be stubborn in your sin and reject the ultimate Truth that is God. This is salvation open to everybody- and salvation that does not count on human preconcieved notions or judgement.
Most likely this is the case, but it's a flimsy excuse at best, easily defeated by printing out the MS Access EULA.
Well, given that anything that has value could be used as a medium of exchange, I suppose it's reasonable to call anything with value "money" if you want to play it that way. That does not, however, mean that inflation of a price of a single good is causing "inflation" in the broader sense.
Well, specifically we were talking about PAPER money- that is, certificates printed backed by real or percieved value. In which case, a stock certificate has a heck of a lot more in common with a bearer bond or a dollar bill than with, say, a Tinker's Damn or a Pound of Sterling Silver.
I think I see where you're going here. I agree that there's a fundamental problem with the way the stock markets have been working lately, but I think that we disagree on the cause. You seem to have reached the conclusion that there is no value in a stock market at all. The problem I see is that "investors" seem to have forgotten what drives the value of the things they're investing in. The point you made in another post regarding dividends is extremely relevant here. Google is "worth" zillions of dollars on pure speculation about future payouts as they have no history of paying out any profits to their investors. Looking at the history of stock prices relative to dividends, it's easy to see that people have gone from seeing stock purchases as investment in a business with a stream of profits to something more akin to trading baseball cards in hopes of striking it rich. When the stock market operates that way, I agree that it is nothing more than a pointless wealth redistribution machine.
When I look at history- I have to say I can't find a time that any stock market had prices that were related to dividends paid. Wall Street, originally so named due to a sea wall close by, was originally a place where one gambled on speculative sea voyages for instance. But I wouldn't say it's entirely pointless- it does provide the service of wealth redistribution, which is the whole point from the point of view of a business that is trying to start up. The problem is that it can easily become more of a curse than blessing; stock price ends up the reason of your business rather than making profits, serving customers, or providing a living for your workers.
At the same time, if people could go back to looking more rationally at their investments, stock markets can do their jobs remarkably well. The root of the problem lies in the fact that stock markets are markets and are only as smart as the aggregate intelligence of its demand side.
I'll have to use that some time- it's a good argument for a well-engineered economy in comparison. But I say the primary purpose of the stock market IS wealth redistribution; even dividends reduce the amount of money available for payroll.
I would argue that when a stock market is not operating in a bubble regime or otherwise failing to do its job properly, the industry surrounding it does add value. Its agents can do damage to the market by providing bad advice and encouraging poor investment practices (as they have been doing for some time), but there's no reason to think that if they behave properly they're not earning their money.
To me, one needs to provide a neccessary good to earn money- money should be earned by the creation of goods. The only goods that the financial industry creates are methods for taking profit away from those who actually worked for it and give it to somebody else; either through dividends (stocks) or usury (bonds). The one way they do well is when they enable an entrepreneur to find investment for a startup- but even that can be dangerous, because of the focus on profit.
If you want to look at an industry that shouldn't exist, I suggest looking at the tax preparation industry. The fact that our government makes tax law complicated enough that a huge number of otherwise average people need to hire experts to explain the rules to them clearly indicates that something is wrong and we're experiencing a
Or maybe they think (and many agree)that the price of Google's stock is a little over inflated, and they're expecting a correction. Sell stock at inflated price. Buy at corrected price. Lather, rinse, repeat. I wonder how hard it would be to manipulate the market with carefully crafted press releases....?
Same thing in the long run- you can't build real products while releasing fraud. Fraud is simply too complex to make believeable- it saps the creative process.
Is it just me, or was this a total word salad? Hyperinflationary practices? How?
It is total word salad- but it does relate to reality and the reason that stock markets have a tendency to create downward pressure on real wages. Basically, the stock market is a huge pump that takes money from people who produce goods (Profit is the difference between cost of producing a good + labor to produce that good and the price you can charge for that good, thus profit is just unpaid wages) and gives it to parasites who only consume goods. This means that fewer goods are produced, on the low end, and the ammount of money to purchase those goods is inflated on the high end. From there, simple supply and demand pricing takes over, rasing prices to try to regain profits from the rich, while pricing the workers who do not see the profit of their labor out of the market. This happens in any city which has a stock exchange.
No, stocks are not paper money. Stocks represent a "share" of ownership the companies assets (and a share of the company profits as dividends) - the assets could be something tangible, like machinary, or something intagible, like "marketshare" or "name recognition". People pay money for shares because they percieve they are getting something of value.
And this is different from gold or silver backed, or even fiat currency, exactly how?
But even assuming the value of the stock is "inflated", this has absolutly nothing to do with monetary inflation. They use the same word, "inflated", but they are completly different things. It might be bad to "inflate" the value of stock (meaning, decieving people to the real value of what you are selling), in the same way it would be bad to sell cut glass as diamonds, but this is not what you are talking about.
What I'm talking about is tying up a significant portion of a culture's resources in what is essentially a con artist shell game. This is not compatible with my idea of "making money while doing no evil"- but that might be due to my rather low opinion of people who would rather suffle paper than create.
The "inflation" you are talking about in your first post (cost of goods and services rising, most likely faster than wages) isn't the same thing as a stock being inflated (people thinking a company is more valuable than it really is). It is like saying that a "sweet" 72 Camero is going to raise my blood sugar! We use the word "inflation" to describe different things. "Inflation" simply means "bloated".
True enough- but one leads to the other. Because people are making money off of that con game, that means they have more money to spend- which means prices go up on everything from gasoline to clothing to food to houses. That is why a stock market is hyperinflationary- it invents an "industry" to make money in that contributes no real goods to the general market but sucks in value and spits out money.
The things that cause monetary inflation as you mention it in your post: an increase in the money supply (or lowering of interest rates, which in the U.S. is the same as increasing the money supply), or a decrease in the goods and services in the market. Overpriced stocks don't increase or decrease the money supply at all, they simply reallocate money that is already in the economy. (And, if you are a Marxist: They are reallocating money away from one set of Capitalists to another set of Capitalists, so it wouldn't really have much effect on the workers from a strictly theoretical Marxist perspective).
I'm only partially a Marxist- you might call me a distributist. But what they're really doing is taking money away from PRODUCERS and giving it to INVESTORS- which increases the amount of money in relation to goods and services in the market, both because fewer goods and services are being produced, and because the money is in the hands of people who are largely parasitic consumers on the other end. That means that the people who have the money to buy have more money to buy- and there are fewer goods and services to buy. Simple law of supply and demand causes inflation from there.
Another way to look at it is Plato's Maximum Wage Ideal- because the owners have excess money, that has been taken from that used for strictly production, they have the ability to push prices out of reach of their workers, who cease being consumers.
Does Google pay Dividends.
No, or at least, not yet.
Dividends would be a good reward. I agree that stock prices can mean pretty much whatever they want. Dividends is where you measure the success of the company.
I don't. I measure success on what people DO not how much they can get out of their customers and avertisers. But then again, I've got a different meaning of the word success than most people.
A company that doesn't WANT to pay dividend should probably not be considered as an investment option. That's my point of view anyways. If I were to buy shares, I'd like to make a profit on how well the company is doing, if I invested because of my faith in their business. I wouldn't want it all to be speculation, which depends on how others think it will do, and is pretty much a matter of fad... but most importantly, stock prices are not directly related (sometimes totally unrelated) to the company's ability to do business well.
Google is all spec, no dividends as of yet- but even then, the real question for me is this. If they're in the stock market, are they still living up to the idea of "make money but do no evil"? I say no- because the stock market is evil in and of itself, it makes businesses short sighted.
What the hell do you think stocks are to begin with? Paper money backed by a company's assets- that's the whole point of the stock market.
High stocks != company success however. Short term success, yes, but with sell offs of this size, it's a sure bet that they don't expect any long term success.
Keeping the stock price high has killed more experimental software projects than anything else I know of....
Of which I have not previously been aware. I thought hyperinflationary practices had a tendency to raise the cost of living without raising wages in concert- but this takes the cake.
Diebold lied- take a look at the MS Access EULA sometime.
State-County-Precinct, in a grandparent-parent-child relationship (there are many counties per state, many precincts per county). One of the big gripes about Diebold software is that it doesn't actually save individual votes lower than this- just Precinct Totals.
About a 3 table schema in MS Access?!?!?!? It's not like competitors would *bother* to duplicate it...
I guess I'm getting old- in my day, the 128k Rom Bios was for things like hard drive setups, memory maps, and clock information.
Photo editing, for the most part, is more memory intensive than CPU intensive.
That's right- maize is whisky, not beer, usually, unless you're drinking the mash....
It sounds like you're defining drinks such as (American) Budweiser (brewed with maize) as "beer" here. I suspect that a lot of people in the UK may disagree with this.
I'm from the land of 50,000 microbreweries (yes American, but Budweiser is considered cheap crap not worth boiling sausages in around here); we consider just about anything in the Lager or Ale categories that is made from grain instead of fruit to be beer (though the line blurs somewhat for some of the beers crafted for female tastebuds- it's amazing how well a Raspberry Stout will sell- a cross between a dark barley malt beer with a raspberry wine).