Well, I'll agree with you this much: whenever you see someone demanding empathy (*), hold on to your wallet. But that's not the demand made by business. It is, however, the demand often made by politicians.
(*)love, compassion, patriotism are in that category, too.
Of course, I can follow my own argument. What kind of a nonsense question is that? I proved that greed didn't lead to the crash. As for the 2nd assertion... it is a taller order. I'll just hand-wave it. Some of the facts of leading to that conclusion have already been alluded to. But the full argument is more intricate. I am just going to give up for now and be content that might dismiss assertion because you don't like it. Yep, I am dropping the ball on this. I am tired of carrying it. I know exactly how complicated a flame war it turn into. We've done this before.
If I see that you are hungry and I sell you food for a profit, you call that empathy ?
No, it's empathy when you don't "sell", but rather put a gun to the head of the store owner who sells food and tell him that he will give the hungry person credit to buy food... whether the store owner trust the hungry or not. Your empathy with that gun wield is what creates a disaster -- the store owner eventually has to close down and people have harder time buying food even if they do have the money.
You want me to prove that greed has always been with us? Or that when one factor remains constant and yet the outcomes change, the other factors must be to blame?
Wow. Way to completely miss the point. Wall street traders are not responsible. They are greedy. They have always been greedy. It's their role in this game. It's not what leads to disasters. It's the other players in this game (who do have the empathy) who only occasionally gain power and who always cause disasters when they do.
Whenever I hear a claim that there are "many" case of something, I get suspicious when the speaker can't provide at least 1 or 2 examples. I am sorry, I am finding it difficult to take the word of an anonymous poster saying "but it happened to me". If this was wide-spread, then I am sure there has to be at least 1 case of it going to trial. That's all I asked for. 1 link to a documented fraud case. It's not that high a bar to set to support such extravagant claims.
Falsifying documents in order to ensure loans for people with low income (as was your original claim)? No, I do not know of any such cases. Do you have a link? I would be genuinely curious to see one.
Approve $300K mortgages for people earning $35K/yr, falsifying documents as needed
Whoah, cowboy! "falsifying documents" is fraud. Fraud is a crime. Making a false accusation a crime in writing is libel. Slashdot's policy is that "all comments are owned by the poster." I do hope you got something to back up the "falsifying" claim. Otherwise, some "bankster" or such just might get annoyed enough to go after you.... cause you know... he might have a case.
Bundle slices of thousands of these mortgages into derivatives along with "insurance" against the mortgages defaulting and "insurance" against the bundles failing,
Why do you put "insurance" in quotes? Options do act as insurance. They can be used for speculation, but so can other insurance products (eg: commodity futures).
Sell these "Triple-A-rated securities" to gullible investors worldwide.
As opposed to what? Keeping trash you don't need on your books? Not seeing a single word about rating agencies giving those AAA ratings. Banks didn't even make false statements. The agencies kept giving those ratings because they knew the higher the ratings they gave the more bonds would get issued to be sold. The system of incentives was broken because pension funds had to take the word of the rating agencies on faith (still do by the way). There is plenty of small rating agencies who laughed at the idea of those bonds being rated AAA, but their opinions weren't legally binding.
Now how's the Black Scholes responsible for anything? All it does is calculate a price of an option based on previous history of the underlying. The whole premise of the article is as valid as blaming car crashes on actuarial tables.
The formula calculates what can be expected based on what is known.... That's all. What's next? Are we gonna start blaming actuarial tables for people dying in car crashes?
No, don't blame greed. Empathy is 100% responsible for the crash. Greed has always been with us. It's nothing new. It's when those with empathy are given power... that's when feel-good-everyone-can-afford-what-they-can't-afford bubbles happen.
Tell you what: you can put your money in their stock if you believe your analysis. And I'll keep thinking they peaked. One of us will look like a fool in about 2 quarters. You can accuse me by putting arguments in mouth which I never made (exactly the same number??? aha. yes, because I say nonsense like that). Do you really think that anyone you ever argue with is so simple minded as to think that "all countries are equal in terms of population that have the money to purchase the iPHone?"
The fact remains that Apple has nothing to offer in this market. Not even in terms of apps. The current paradigm of an app is also exhausted on the iOS platform. So iOS has to either get adopted in a corporate environment, or most iOS developers will migrate to other app markets. With Samsung just passing the mark of becoming the largest phone vendor, it's pretty easy to guess which app market it will be.
You've had a few contradictions in your arguments yourself (no one cares that Apple missed estimates on iPads, but he company is doing great because it beat the estimates on iPhones... hmmm).
There is no point to look at the company as a whole. Without iPhone as the driving platform, iOS is dead. And the computer and iPad sales will die with it.
Compare the difference between Q1'11 through Q2'11 to the difference between Q1'12 through Q2'12. The first one is a rise. The 2nd is a drop. So all this talk of "think of Christmas sales dude" are BS. I am talking about just the iPhone sales (which accounted for 57% of their sales vs 52% in the previous quarter).
So one company with variations of one phone manage to sell more every year with a majority of the profit
They didn't. The rising sales number is because they entered a new market in Q1'11. Within the same markets they have steady declines in sales.
Year to year is the way to do it.
Not if they just entered a new market. The health of the product line is measured by how they fare in the same markets (increased vs decreased market share).
A short look at the numbers shows that their quarter actually sucked. They sold less units in this quarter than they did in the last quarter. The opposite quarter-over-quarter was true for the same period in '11. Their iPad sales dropped significantly quarter-over-quarter. Their absolute numbers are higher than they were last year because they entered new markets. But they are already declining in these new markets after being there for only 2 quarters. They have not gained any market share on Android. Everyone is trying to compare them to last year because it's something to compare to which shows an increase. But a quarter-over-quarter decrease is a very troubling sign. And they haven't quite beat the reduced market estimates. The estimates were that they would sell 13 million iPads. They sold less than 12 million iPads.
Idiot it is, then. Your arguments are such in name only. They are mostly screams of petulant child only this time they are well-formed and eloquently stated. My PhD trumps your masters (since you went there I feel I'll bring my bragging rights to the table). I don't expand on my argument not because I couldn't, but because given how eloquent you were, I knew you were and adult. And any adult who by his adult age still doesn't get that the arguments which you stated steam from basic lack of understanding the concepts you try to manipulate is an adult who is not intelligent enough to grasp the stupidity of your own arguments. In a word, you are an over-educated idiot. Granted, I am being intellectually lazy. But only because putting any more effort would be throwing pearls before swine.
You are proposing to destroy the mechanism through which we advance. And you purport to do it in the name of advancement. Not all change is advancement. The one you propose is destructive.
By the way, you might have found yourself in some circle-jerk in which it is fashionable to reinforce each others' idea that self-destruction is the only moral choice. But I assure you that most sane people don't agree with you. I know people who spew the garbage that you spew in real life. They are either complete lunatics or totally corrupt. I am not sure which of the two you are since I don't know if you are paid to spew this nonsense. Please, do give me a laugh by accusing of ad hominems... since you know... you went ad hominem almost from the beginning. If you find this particular post insulting, it is so by design. Regardless of whether you are a crook or an idiot, I don't respect you. And I certainly wouldn't take any insult from you as anything but a badge of honor.
which is easy to refute: the more money you have therefore, the more voting power you have.
A fool and his money don't stay together very long. Power to make yourself useful... because that is what it means to make more money. When people pay you the money, they direct you to act. If more money flows your way, then more people have directed you to do something they need done.
That's exactly the OPPOSITE of what we need.
Not sure who this "we" is. But I personally would rather have those who try to make themselves useful have every opportunity to do so.
It's exactly the people with the LEAST resources that need societies MOST attention
In some case it does benefit society to act in that way. But adapting that as a rule of thumb is plainly self-destructive. It states that resources must go toward those who make themselves least useful to others.
MORE voiceless than they already were
They are only voiceless in as much as no one wants to "hear" them. The moment they do something that others want done, they gain a voice.
Don't worry. The job recruiting industry is about to collapse. There is more than 40 recruiters for each job created. And yet many jobs still go unfilled. In fact recruiters keep more people out of jobs than get people employed. There is usually some sort of payola going on between recruiters and HR personal. So I am actually finding more and more calls directly from hiring managers who then find that they have to fight with HR to get the paper work done. Obviously HR hates it (no fees for recruiters -- no kickbacks to HR). Within 2-3 years any recruiter who hasn't been in business for 15+ years or who doesn't know how to conduct a full technical interview will be out of a job.
You vote once in 4 years. You make a decision on how to spend money every day. Do you want all your decisions about everything in life to be incorporated in a vote you cast once in 4 years? Do you want to vote for President based on how many models of cars are available or based on their position on abortion rights? or based on their view of whether you should eat healthy or not? Spending money IS voting. You direct other human beings to take some actions every single time you spend money. So how bout voting for business decisions (what kinds of sandwiches should be sold on the corner store) with money and voting for common protection (from criminals, from invaders, etc.) with political votes? Last I checked there is quite a fierce competition among technology solution providers. And it is legal to change your name. If a company won't hire you under the name X because X works for their competition, you can legally change it to Y and get hired. You wouldn't be violating neither the law nor any contracts (remember do-no-hire are agreements between companies and you are not a party to those agreements).
The entire H-1B visa workers scam was manufactured to bash tech employees.
Not to bash -- to force them to compete for salaries and working conditions with indentured servants (people for whom getting fired means getting deported). If it just "bashed" them it wouldn't be nearly as harsh. If someone resides in a country and is allowed to work there, they are not "guest workers". They are resident aliens. And they deserve the appropriate status -- a green card. If foreign IT workers could leave work and not be afraid that firing means getting their family uprooted, that would do wonders to the IT work conditions. It would also create an actual free labor market.
The reason that techies are so easy to stomp, is that techies are not organized. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and so on, are organized, and they can protect themselves (to some extent) against conspiring employers. Techies will never learn.
Well, learning how to make things efficient and then spending ones life applying that knowledge to machines (instead of people) is an indication in itself that someone enjoys solitude. But it hurts more than just IT workers. It hurts society at large. Everyone complains that Americans don't take up engineering and scientific careers. But why would they? Why would natural born citizens want to compete on work conditions with indentured servants? Simply eliminating different tiers of immigration is all that's really needed. If someone is good enough to be allowed to live in the country, they should just get the resident alien status and be done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'll agree with you this much: whenever you see someone demanding empathy (*), hold on to your wallet. But that's not the demand made by business. It is, however, the demand often made by politicians.
(*)love, compassion, patriotism are in that category, too.
Of course, I can follow my own argument. What kind of a nonsense question is that? I proved that greed didn't lead to the crash. As for the 2nd assertion... it is a taller order. I'll just hand-wave it. Some of the facts of leading to that conclusion have already been alluded to. But the full argument is more intricate. I am just going to give up for now and be content that might dismiss assertion because you don't like it. Yep, I am dropping the ball on this. I am tired of carrying it. I know exactly how complicated a flame war it turn into. We've done this before.
If I see that you are hungry and I sell you food for a profit, you call that empathy ?
No, it's empathy when you don't "sell", but rather put a gun to the head of the store owner who sells food and tell him that he will give the hungry person credit to buy food... whether the store owner trust the hungry or not. Your empathy with that gun wield is what creates a disaster -- the store owner eventually has to close down and people have harder time buying food even if they do have the money.
You want me to prove that greed has always been with us? Or that when one factor remains constant and yet the outcomes change, the other factors must be to blame?
Wow. Way to completely miss the point. Wall street traders are not responsible. They are greedy. They have always been greedy. It's their role in this game. It's not what leads to disasters. It's the other players in this game (who do have the empathy) who only occasionally gain power and who always cause disasters when they do.
Whenever I hear a claim that there are "many" case of something, I get suspicious when the speaker can't provide at least 1 or 2 examples. I am sorry, I am finding it difficult to take the word of an anonymous poster saying "but it happened to me". If this was wide-spread, then I am sure there has to be at least 1 case of it going to trial. That's all I asked for. 1 link to a documented fraud case. It's not that high a bar to set to support such extravagant claims.
Umm? Was that a misclick? You posted a story completely unrelated to any your claim that mortgage papers were falsified.
Falsifying documents in order to ensure loans for people with low income (as was your original claim)? No, I do not know of any such cases. Do you have a link? I would be genuinely curious to see one.
Approve $300K mortgages for people earning $35K/yr, falsifying documents as needed
Whoah, cowboy! "falsifying documents" is fraud. Fraud is a crime. Making a false accusation a crime in writing is libel. Slashdot's policy is that "all comments are owned by the poster." I do hope you got something to back up the "falsifying" claim. Otherwise, some "bankster" or such just might get annoyed enough to go after you.... cause you know... he might have a case.
Bundle slices of thousands of these mortgages into derivatives along with "insurance" against the mortgages defaulting and "insurance" against the bundles failing,
Why do you put "insurance" in quotes? Options do act as insurance. They can be used for speculation, but so can other insurance products (eg: commodity futures).
Sell these "Triple-A-rated securities" to gullible investors worldwide.
As opposed to what? Keeping trash you don't need on your books? Not seeing a single word about rating agencies giving those AAA ratings. Banks didn't even make false statements. The agencies kept giving those ratings because they knew the higher the ratings they gave the more bonds would get issued to be sold. The system of incentives was broken because pension funds had to take the word of the rating agencies on faith (still do by the way). There is plenty of small rating agencies who laughed at the idea of those bonds being rated AAA, but their opinions weren't legally binding.
Now how's the Black Scholes responsible for anything? All it does is calculate a price of an option based on previous history of the underlying. The whole premise of the article is as valid as blaming car crashes on actuarial tables.
The formula calculates what can be expected based on what is known.... That's all. What's next? Are we gonna start blaming actuarial tables for people dying in car crashes?
No, don't blame greed. Empathy is 100% responsible for the crash. Greed has always been with us. It's nothing new. It's when those with empathy are given power... that's when feel-good-everyone-can-afford-what-they-can't-afford bubbles happen.
Tell you what: you can put your money in their stock if you believe your analysis. And I'll keep thinking they peaked. One of us will look like a fool in about 2 quarters. You can accuse me by putting arguments in mouth which I never made (exactly the same number??? aha. yes, because I say nonsense like that). Do you really think that anyone you ever argue with is so simple minded as to think that "all countries are equal in terms of population that have the money to purchase the iPHone?"
The fact remains that Apple has nothing to offer in this market. Not even in terms of apps. The current paradigm of an app is also exhausted on the iOS platform. So iOS has to either get adopted in a corporate environment, or most iOS developers will migrate to other app markets. With Samsung just passing the mark of becoming the largest phone vendor, it's pretty easy to guess which app market it will be.
You've had a few contradictions in your arguments yourself (no one cares that Apple missed estimates on iPads, but he company is doing great because it beat the estimates on iPhones... hmmm).
There is no point to look at the company as a whole. Without iPhone as the driving platform, iOS is dead. And the computer and iPad sales will die with it.
Actually, it's worse then I thought. The iPhone 4s was released in China and 21 other countries on Jan 13: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/01/04iPhone-4S-Arrives-in-China-on-January-13.html
This is during Q2'12. So they had a drop in sales despite entering new markets.
So one company with variations of one phone manage to sell more every year with a majority of the profit
They didn't. The rising sales number is because they entered a new market in Q1'11. Within the same markets they have steady declines in sales.
Year to year is the way to do it.
Not if they just entered a new market. The health of the product line is measured by how they fare in the same markets (increased vs decreased market share).
A short look at the numbers shows that their quarter actually sucked. They sold less units in this quarter than they did in the last quarter. The opposite quarter-over-quarter was true for the same period in '11. Their iPad sales dropped significantly quarter-over-quarter. Their absolute numbers are higher than they were last year because they entered new markets. But they are already declining in these new markets after being there for only 2 quarters. They have not gained any market share on Android. Everyone is trying to compare them to last year because it's something to compare to which shows an increase. But a quarter-over-quarter decrease is a very troubling sign. And they haven't quite beat the reduced market estimates. The estimates were that they would sell 13 million iPads. They sold less than 12 million iPads.
Idiot it is, then. Your arguments are such in name only. They are mostly screams of petulant child only this time they are well-formed and eloquently stated. My PhD trumps your masters (since you went there I feel I'll bring my bragging rights to the table). I don't expand on my argument not because I couldn't, but because given how eloquent you were, I knew you were and adult. And any adult who by his adult age still doesn't get that the arguments which you stated steam from basic lack of understanding the concepts you try to manipulate is an adult who is not intelligent enough to grasp the stupidity of your own arguments. In a word, you are an over-educated idiot. Granted, I am being intellectually lazy. But only because putting any more effort would be throwing pearls before swine.
You are proposing to destroy the mechanism through which we advance. And you purport to do it in the name of advancement. Not all change is advancement. The one you propose is destructive.
Oh, and 3rdly... just because I am having fun, I have been where you are when I was a kid. It was not the only way in which I was an idiot.
By the way, you might have found yourself in some circle-jerk in which it is fashionable to reinforce each others' idea that self-destruction is the only moral choice. But I assure you that most sane people don't agree with you. I know people who spew the garbage that you spew in real life. They are either complete lunatics or totally corrupt. I am not sure which of the two you are since I don't know if you are paid to spew this nonsense. Please, do give me a laugh by accusing of ad hominems... since you know... you went ad hominem almost from the beginning. If you find this particular post insulting, it is so by design. Regardless of whether you are a crook or an idiot, I don't respect you. And I certainly wouldn't take any insult from you as anything but a badge of honor.
There is nothing humane about demanding that humanity destroy itself. And that's precisely what you are doing.
A favorite line of conservatives
I think you think that label is a slur.
which is easy to refute: the more money you have therefore, the more voting power you have.
A fool and his money don't stay together very long. Power to make yourself useful... because that is what it means to make more money. When people pay you the money, they direct you to act. If more money flows your way, then more people have directed you to do something they need done.
That's exactly the OPPOSITE of what we need.
Not sure who this "we" is. But I personally would rather have those who try to make themselves useful have every opportunity to do so.
It's exactly the people with the LEAST resources that need societies MOST attention
In some case it does benefit society to act in that way. But adapting that as a rule of thumb is plainly self-destructive. It states that resources must go toward those who make themselves least useful to others.
MORE voiceless than they already were
They are only voiceless in as much as no one wants to "hear" them. The moment they do something that others want done, they gain a voice.
Don't worry. The job recruiting industry is about to collapse. There is more than 40 recruiters for each job created. And yet many jobs still go unfilled. In fact recruiters keep more people out of jobs than get people employed. There is usually some sort of payola going on between recruiters and HR personal. So I am actually finding more and more calls directly from hiring managers who then find that they have to fight with HR to get the paper work done. Obviously HR hates it (no fees for recruiters -- no kickbacks to HR). Within 2-3 years any recruiter who hasn't been in business for 15+ years or who doesn't know how to conduct a full technical interview will be out of a job.
You vote once in 4 years. You make a decision on how to spend money every day. Do you want all your decisions about everything in life to be incorporated in a vote you cast once in 4 years? Do you want to vote for President based on how many models of cars are available or based on their position on abortion rights? or based on their view of whether you should eat healthy or not? Spending money IS voting. You direct other human beings to take some actions every single time you spend money. So how bout voting for business decisions (what kinds of sandwiches should be sold on the corner store) with money and voting for common protection (from criminals, from invaders, etc.) with political votes? Last I checked there is quite a fierce competition among technology solution providers. And it is legal to change your name. If a company won't hire you under the name X because X works for their competition, you can legally change it to Y and get hired. You wouldn't be violating neither the law nor any contracts (remember do-no-hire are agreements between companies and you are not a party to those agreements).
The question is whether the agreement is to not cold call or to simply not hire each others' employees.
The entire H-1B visa workers scam was manufactured to bash tech employees.
Not to bash -- to force them to compete for salaries and working conditions with indentured servants (people for whom getting fired means getting deported). If it just "bashed" them it wouldn't be nearly as harsh. If someone resides in a country and is allowed to work there, they are not "guest workers". They are resident aliens. And they deserve the appropriate status -- a green card. If foreign IT workers could leave work and not be afraid that firing means getting their family uprooted, that would do wonders to the IT work conditions. It would also create an actual free labor market.
The reason that techies are so easy to stomp, is that techies are not organized. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and so on, are organized, and they can protect themselves (to some extent) against conspiring employers. Techies will never learn.
Well, learning how to make things efficient and then spending ones life applying that knowledge to machines (instead of people) is an indication in itself that someone enjoys solitude. But it hurts more than just IT workers. It hurts society at large. Everyone complains that Americans don't take up engineering and scientific careers. But why would they? Why would natural born citizens want to compete on work conditions with indentured servants? Simply eliminating different tiers of immigration is all that's really needed. If someone is good enough to be allowed to live in the country, they should just get the resident alien status and be done with it.