It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast.
This is the part of my life as a reluctant Windows admin which drives me up the wall. Windows fanboy monkeys (yes, they deserve to be called that) believe that Windows administration is some sort of game where one collects obscure secret codes, arcane magical marbles and byzantine "Swords of Brain-dead Cutting" from hidden caches in beetween the lines of some half-assed MSDN article by some MS insider or to be passed word-of-mouth when social networking with their buddies, all of this of course undocumented, because otherwise they wound't be, well, arcane, obscure and secret - would they? Naturally, this is the very anathema of proper operating system design where documentation of all commands (or source code if that is unavailable or ambiguous) is always available on demand to the admin. And this inane attitude of course only entrenches in my mind my personal experience of Windows being an unmanageable, unconrollable, arcane pile of vile secret shit loyal only to its MS master which is bound to turn around and bite you on the ass sooner or later.
Of course many admins, faced with this nonsense, opt for the "commerce" way and buy whole bunch of "add-ons" and "tools" for small fortunes to do but the simplest tasks which are made near impossible without either those tools, spending one's life parsing the MSDN Holy Scriptures line-by line or personally knowing some idiots who spend their lives doing just that.
(And it's definitely a hell of a lot faster than the Unix equivalent SSH+VNC.)
Not really, people just do not understand how to use VNC properly. VNC has a number of compression algorithms (SSH can also compress) which have to be selected for the type of connection you are using. Picking the wrong one (meant for faster links) will slow you down to a crawl. Most common mistake is to use VNC with a SSH redirect to localhost, which then makes VNC pick no compression as it thinks its connecting to... localhost.
Then there are of course things like the NX protocol which offers yet additional level of smart compression for X11 based sessions and can even compress the RDP protocol for further speed boost.
Not exactly the intent behind the system, but it seems to work pretty well. If GIF hadn't been patented, we wouldn't have PNG now.
But any innovation of this kind is not counter-balancing the horrendous expense to consumers resulting from these patents (and other inane laws like copyrights), their attendant litigation and countless vampire hordes (otherwise known as "lawyers") who feed on all of this. Not to mention the ability of certain pigopolists to spread FUD about their supposed "intellectual property" somehow contaminating all the alternatives you mentioned, thus scaring away bewildered consumers back into the herd on its way to the slaughterhouse with the herdsmen cracking their whips made of innuendo of just-around-the-corner lawsuits (and in some cases raids and arrests).
The patent system is wildly abused, but some times it does protect innovators that drive the industry forward.
No it doesn't. Patents have nothing to do with "driving industry forward". Remove patents and the competetive pressures remain unchanged, which is what drives innovation. And you cannot prove otherwise. Progress existed long before patents were even thought of.
Or you mean you are spouting an item of industrialist faith, upon which the utterly misguided idea of patents is based, without any proof whatsoever that it is indeed the case, as it were an established fact.
In fact patents do far more harm to progress then they bring merit to it, and that is before one factors in the current patent system corruption.
1 - real revenue. Yes, they are raking in ad money.
2 - item 1 is due to lots of users that will probably keep coming back for the next few years. Sure, there may come along another platform but facebook will keep a large pool of users for years to come.
If you can find a way to bootstrap these items into your modest proposal, then you have something.
You ask and you shall receive!
Modest proposal addendum
4d. While we trade our "shares" we also include links to our home pages full of ads (and maybe to ads themselves) in our emails. Given that we are Slashdotters, that should qualify as "lots of users". Furthermore, we can spam each others randomly as we all have fancy email servers and what not. To make things manageable, we should kindly include words "LIMITED LIFE-CHANGING OFFER!" in the subject line to facilitate rather easy de-spamming so that we do not annoy each other. Then we should occasionally randomly click on these things when bored. Since (I assume) Slashdot will be around for a while, so will we. Then of course there are links to our "companies" in our sigs here! Sky is the limit!
4e. To facilitate "real" revenue, we sell to each other "subscriptions" and "intellectual property" (consisting of doodles on cocktail napkins) for $1 or some such (we can just include the bills in snail mail - or better yet create our own "paypal"-like system of micropayments to facilitate the thing). Presto: "real", cash revenue!
4f. To ensure that our shares have "real" cash valuation, we could issue 10,000,000,000 shares, and then sell 5 of them to other "enterpreneurs" in our schme for a buck each. Voila: your shares are now "worth" $10,000,000,000 by all of the Wall Street and MSNBC logic.
6) "Gold standard" cultists soapbox on about how the world would be so much better with gold-backed currency, not realizing how capital- and development-strained the world would be if it actually still were that way.
While I agree with you that strict adherence to such currency backing could indeed result in a disaster, on the other hand you can't have governments print money whenever it strikes their fancy (and they will, at the first sign of their getting into financial difficulties). Some compromise is necessary.
Facebook is pointless like email, Google, Amazon and Ebay are pointless, as in it has no point unless people use it. People use it, therefore it has a point.
Well the difference is that Google is an advertising powerhouse which created new unique advertising strategies for its clients, Amazon actually sells crap and Ebay is a gigantic flea-market taking fees off the top of all transactions. Still, Google is in fact very vulnerable and that is why they are desperately trying to diversify in all crazy directions. Amazon is in actuality a brick-and-mortar shop, an equivalent to the old-school mail-order catalogue department store. Ebay is also very vulnerable and that is why they tried to diversify by buying PayPal to have something to fall back on if their core operation is somehow threatened. Of all these, none are really a good investment in a traditional sense, as value of all of their shares is orders of magnitude higher then common-sense value of these companies, primarily due to the fact that 2 out of the three lack any long-term reusable (to a potential buyer) assets, and all have increasing competition. In short their stock market "value" is all a result of gamblers trying to outgamble each other's bets. The companies themselves are just an excuse for the betting, they might as well have been horses or dice rolls.
FaceBook in contrast is the online equivalent of the worst aspects of the high school so-called "social life". Unless they manage to sell something (probably ads - in which case they are by definition a pitiful shadow of Google whose ad systems are far more flexible and target far wider audience) they actually have no product of any kind, never you mind tens-of-millions of dollars of revenue (which is the minimum to justify the purchase price). And no assets to speak of. And so their multi-hundred-million dollar valuation is the height of absurdity and a prime example why the today's stock market has nothing to do with investing.
Facebook is worth 15 billion because investors acknowledge that it is. Money _isn't_ real anymore.
That was the whole point of my silly proposal, but it seems it is making some people rather uncomfortable. Too close to the mark I guess!
A pointless company that can't back up it's existance is not worth 15 billion to Microsoft. So yeah, your idea might work until the second web bubble bursts and the tons of sites following your plan already will experience the pitfall of ebusiness when there is actually no business after all.
I would quip that FaceBook is quite pointless, too.
As to my joke of an idea, it was intended as a satire of your line of thought, where "value" is whatever Microsoft VPs (or some other wacked-out bunch of lunatics with more money then brains) say it is, irrespective of any other objective criteria (and for which they "pay" in vapourous currency of their own inflated stocks).
Also, how is this "bubble" any different then, say, the rush on purchase of piles of sticks, paper and some cement you call "houses" these days in the USA, otherwise known as the "housing bubble"? Face it, the "investment" market is no more, now it is merely a full-of-itself, sanctimonious, glorified casino. Stop pretending otherwise.
Seeing this level of wisdom, after painstaking, conservative estimates of revenues and dividends were calculated to come up with this value of $15 billion, which would in the "quaint, old-fashioned" world of people who actually built companies to feed their families and those of their workers be requiring something like a billion of yearly revenue and something like $10 billion in assets, I came to the conclusion that we Slashdotters too can take advantage of this insanity.
Here is what we should do: Each of us starts a corporation, with names like "IgnoramusMaximus' Megacorp Consolidated on the Internet!" (that last bit is important for the "traditional" investors) and then we "sell" to each other our "stakes" in these wonders of modern enterpreneurship for, say, conservatively, 20 million US dollars (or Euros) a share, with the price being "paid" in our equally valuable shares of the other Slashdotter's corporations. If we all say our stuff is worth beeeeeelions, who is to say otherwise! After all, we got web sites and email for these corps!!!
Next thing you know, our shares can be traded on NASDAQ, NYNEX and who knows where else, as they are far in excess the required share price for those markets and I am sure we Slashdotters can create sufficient trade "volume" trading our super-shares via email 20 times a day.
All that remains is for the turkeys, known as the "institutional investors" so start biting! After all they gamble on equally reasonably "valued" and brain-dead "opportunities" such as the above mentioned FaceBook. Why should they care if we have no product, no sales, no assets? That never stopped them before, did it?! And we are on the Internet!
And so dear Slashdotters, I am hereby giving you your way to beeeeeelions of dollars (or euros) as easy as filling some paperwork and registering the name!
So here it goes:
1. Set up a useless Internet corporation
2. Do a home-made "IPO" (complete with all the "buyer-beware" prospectuses as required by the FTC) and trade its shares for shares of other useless corporations, claiming per-share value in tens of millions (by mutual agreement).
3. Create sufficient volume of trades with many, many Slashdot users thus fullfilling "serious" exchange listing requirements.
4a. Get listed on NASDAQ
4b. Claim your net worth is into billions if you need an actual money loan from a bank for anyting (and you will be right, according to the silly Wall Street definitions)
4c. Wait for gamblers, otherwise known as "investors" to show up and start trading your make-believe corp (and they would not be able to tell a difference from a "real" one anyways). No danger of you getting accused of "inside trading" or "pump and dump" because you, on your corporation's website boldly state that "This company does Dick All, Bupkis and sometimes Didley Squat!" (in small print at the bottom)
Your post criticized libertarians *in general* with little apparent knowledge of what libertarians *in general* believe
Little knowledge? You gotta be kidding me. I have been rather acutely made aware of the whole murky depths of Libertarian thought in hundreds of exchanges on Slashdot alone.
No, it bemoans licensure *aimed at limiting competition with politically-powerful groups*.
Of which doctors are prime example.
You responded with a long spiel about libertarians in general, only tangentially related to the issues I raised.
No, I merely took the "regulation is evil" line of thought to its logical conclusions, to demonstrate, rather forcefully (and I hoped comically) the actual results which are being advocated.
Remember, it's the *interested* citizens *who are voting for these bad policies* in the first place.
Well, as I said, you get the government you deserve. If the voters are so easily bamboozled, which they apparently are in a lot of places, then they deserve their Kings and Feudal Lords disguised as Presidents and CEOs. There is really nothing one can do about this other then support education and hope that future generations turn out better.
It's like saying, "You don't like pollution? Quit burning fuel." My individual pollution doesn't make a difference! Well, asking that voters reduce their "political pollution" is flawed for the same reason. People can afford to "vote with their hearts" rather than their minds, because it is costless to them to do so, just as my individual pollution is costless to me.
These things are examples of delayed costs. Both industrial and political "pollution" eventually comes around to bite the ignorant in the ass. And again, unless people are educated enough to understand these things, they (or their children) will pay dearly for all the stupidity.
Are there systems that avoid these "problems of governance"? Yes. But they don't give each person a vote on how the law treats doctors;-)
I never suggested such a thing. I merely pointed out that the true focus should be on improving the mechanisms of governance (and also improving the citizens upon whom these mechanisms depend) not by focusing on a specific facet of malfunctioning governance and making it (possibly unintentionally in your case) appear as it was the root of all evil.
... and ignorance of your opponents' actual positions....
My response was to my opponent's actual position, as he/she wrote it. I am under no obligation to figure out his/her unwritten positions, which he/she might hold, which somehow temper or put in another light their message. As it was written, the message bemoans all regulation without exception. To which I responded.
But then, that wouldn't artficially prop up a politically-powerful group's income, now, would it?
True, these things occur. And that is a failure of governance, to address which is the responsibility of the citizenry in a functioning, sane, modern state. I will not argue with you that, as it stands, the US government for example, is not being essentially subverted by the same very jerks it is supposed to protect the US citizens against. But this failure stemms from the general apathy and dis-interest of the general populace of their own goverment and their unwillingess to do anything to improve its operation. As some wise man once said: "You get exactly the government you deserve". How true.
... and get a license for all activities that compete with politically-powerful groups.
Such as, oh I don't know, license to practice neurosurgery....
Let Invisible Hand of the Free Market figure this out! I mean after a few dead, disfigured and crippled patients, the customers will get it and vote with their wallets! Then of course the "surgeon" moves to the next city/state and... lather, rinse, repeat! But no pain, no gain! Sure there is this wee problem with the fact that the "customers" could be unconscious and thus rather unable to make an "informed consumer choice", based on all available information, who should do their emergency heart bypass surgery, but we simply Cannot Have the Evil Government being involved in this! The same applies to food processing, city water supply (with 25 companies running pipes competetively under your pay-per-use toll-booth equipped driveway)! Etc and so on. But what is a few tens of millions dead and crippled (a lot of children included) against the Freedom of Free Markets To Bloom in Your Pocket! What do you care about this society thing!? Its for the Socialist Commies to do! All you have to worry about is glorious, shiny coins!
On a serious note, everything in life is some form of compromise between two or more choices, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Governments are, in any modern society, thanks to centuries of history full of countless sociopathic asshats bent on becoming warlords and kings, pretty much unavoidable as a protection (sometimes feeble) against the said assholes. And business regulation is, thanks to countless avarice blinded sociopathic asshats, pretty much a necessary evil. The trick is not to abolish them or to get them to stop regulating and controlling things, but to ensure that they regulate and control things which make sense and that the power of the government is kept in check by the citizenry. Libertarians are radical utopists in the same class as such government abolishionists as anarcho-communists, whose proposed system of society is so laughably ripe for abuse, with pretty much similar outcomes as that of the commies, that it makes me wonder if their cognitive abilities are being surpressed by their hatred of all things that interfere with their greed.
I never once said I won't invest in a company that will ever, in it's history pay dividends(though that payment is in no way required to earn a return I feel I deserve).
Again, you contradict yourself, probably because you have a serious cognitive difficulty in sparating the modern dominant casino element of the stock market from its original and only purpose: to create a vehicle for sane people to realize returns on investments, who would have not done so if there was no actual return offered by the companies they ivested in. If the dividends are in "no way required", then you are merely gambling on a sports team or a horse with a funny name, like SCOX or YHOO, which are no way itself even related to the bets being made on them. Gamblers do not care for such trifles as logic or common sense, all they care for is if their bet was a winning one.
As usual, you are pretty narrow minded as to the life a company can have.
I never dismissed buyouts as a possibility, but again, sane buyouts are made based on an expected return the company can bring from its revenues to the buyer, in a form of dividends, not from a series of bets on the prospective "value" of pieces of paper with its name on it. If one has no relationship to the other, as is the case with most stocks today, then the whole pretense of logic is blown away. All that remains is a glorified gambling house and its patrons who try to bristle with indignation at being exposed for what they are.
I have invested in companies that never once pay me a single dividend and it was still a good investment.
You mean you've made gambling bets and won. That is not an investment.
I don't invest in a company with is pay dividends now because that does mean there is little to no growth opportunities left for the company, not what you assume.
You mean the stocks of these kinds of companies are harder to run up into stratosphere because their CEOs do not play ball with gamblers?
At that point, I can probably sell it to someone like you and move on(I guess this is that pump and dump scheme... you sure you know what that is?).
Yes it is pump-and-dump as you've bought something, you and your fellow crooks spread rumours about your "investment", got the price to go up by fooling some naive turkeys with your fast-talk about "investments", "value", "economics", Buffet, Greenspan and other mumbo-jumbo and then you dump it when you think the time is ripe and the victims are starting to catch on.
Nowhere in this process the actual company or its products (or lack of thereof) was of any importance, no were any dividends, but as you keep pointing out such trivia is of no concern to your kind of gamblers and con-men.
Though you are right, I assumed incorrectly that you knew at least something about investment theory and I shouldn't have replied once it became clear you didn't.
You mean you have, too late, discovered that I am not one of the deluded gamblers and that you can't push the usual voodoo crap on me?
Just so you know, your bullshit about me "not knowing anything" is one of the most idiotic (and oldest) tricks on the books! You are in no position to render any judgment on my understanding of the workings of the stock market after all of your arguments having been so plainly shown as illogical mumbo jumbo, sprinkled with a few choice logical fallacies. You've so far offered no coherent defense of any of your positions! None whatsoever!
You must have had experience with some people who would take your sanctimonious babbling at its face value, specially if you casually pepper it with "references" to your kinds of "luminaries" (I am surprised that Milton Friedman hasn't made it into this yet) and walk away thinking you actually know something. I've been around far too long and
guess what? it's what most major industries do. It's actually a standard case study in why payment of dividends is (risk neutral wise) the same as reinvestment if you believe you have a competent management in place and growth opportunities. Yeah, this is basic, basic, finance. It's why apple is a good investment even when they don't pay out dividends now, growth will allow them to pay much higher dividends when they run low on good investment opportunities(see MS). Whether you own 100% of the company or only a small part is irrelevant with good corporate governance in place(for failures, see the scandals of 5 years ago). But that you don't understand how to grow a business to earn far more in the future does not mean that everyone else is a "pump and dump" scheme in the making.
But all of this assumes that dividends are eventually paid, and that their amount is, thanks to that "competent management", far greater then it would be without the reinvestment and the delay. But that is not what you were insinuating just two posts ago, where you claimed that investing in stock "has absolutely nothing to do with dividends existing or not". That does not qualify any time-frames, it simply means that dividends and other forms of return to investors are wholly irrelevant. You further go on saying that "if you are paying out dividends, it means you have no better thing to do with the cash you already have", which means that dividends should never be paid out. You emphasise that point by saing that an "authority" of your choice, Warren Buffet, has a "long standing opposition to both share buybacks and dividends for similar reasons".
All of this is in direct contradiction to your later statements in this last post.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you know. Either actual physical, monetary, realized within reasonable time-frame reasons exist for stock valuation, or the stocks are merely tickets to an elaborate gambling operation where rewards are paid based on wholly imaginary, make-believe rules, no different than those of "fantasy sports" or horse races.
Greenspan in his book quoted several macro economists that pointed out the severe deflation that the fed allowed in 1929 was a major cause for the extension of the depression(40% drop increases you're real debt load by a massive amount, 1.7x).
Deflation increasing the debt load?! If I owe you $100 today and tommorow that $100 buys me twice the food it bought me today, how does this affect my debt load if my income remains the same? You mean by being sick about the things I could have bought with the extra value of the money I am now "losing"? Or are you insinuating that the wages get rolled back due to the deflation?! Or maybe, just maybe the increasing debt load is brought by the lack of jobs and as a result of the real wages being rolled back, which in conditions of unchanging amount of cash in the economy (which is rare as usually the governments panic in such circumstances and start printing money like mad) in turn results in the downward pressure on prices and thus results in deflation?! Greenspan, the complete poseur idiot that he is (and who he always was), has the thing backwards, as usual. And no I did not read his book, as I wouldn't subject myself to his whiney neuron-destroying nonsense if someone paid me do to it, never you mind actually wasting my time on that mental diarrhea out of my free will.
I see you didn't get that reference last time, but I'm guessing you also don't read much about finance or economics to honestly analyze the thought process of those in the business.
As I am not exactly in awe of your religion, nor the likes of His Holiness Greenspan, I did not read his screed and so I did not catch your cleverly hidden "reference" to one of its passages. Perheaps you could kindly assume that not everyone is a member of your cult, and thus not privvy to all the Arcane Holy Writtings of its Annointed Priesthood, when having conversations on an open public forum in the future.
Except that you are wrong about this. The MS has (again) taken a perfectly good wheel and "reinvented" and "improved" it to be square.
The Vista security model, although vastly more secure (in theory at least) then that of previous Windows, does idiotic things like having the Administrator not being granted sufficient priviledges to do basic things without performing a number of arcane steps. MS is like a cook who was notorious for serving his creations near raw, now overcompensating by overcooking his spaghetti until it turns into a sludge.
Security is in large degree an art and Microsoft is demonstrating once again that it has no clue how to do it.
so in other words, you have no reply to any point I made but still felt like copying adn pasting my words in
Fruitcake with nuts, are you?
Not only did I answer your inane, timeframe-shifting, goal-post-moving ramblings, I refuted them completely as they were, well... timeframe-shifting, goal-post-moving inane ramblings with no backing whatsoever, save a fine specimen of a logical fallcy of argumentum ad verecundiam (look it up) with Mr Buffet and Greenspan in the starring roles.
but, if you think dividends are a basic part of the value of a company, go back and study basic, basic, finance and then come talk.
You mean basic bullshit? Since when "economy" or "finance" are sciences? Dividends (and other things like them) have simply a direct link to the way ethical people value things. This has nothing to do with science of any kind but with respecting society-building behaviours and frowning on socipathic ones. That is probably why you are having such a hard time grasping the concept.
Sure, after these basics were found to be insufficiently "adjustable" for the purposes of con-artistry by thieves, crooks and other Wall Street "professionals", they had to be simply abandoned in favour of something more suitable to run a con-job on the unsuspecting public. Enter "fundamentals-free valuations"... and pump-and-dump schemes.
If you want to win this argument, you have to do one simple thing: demonstrate that a substantive difference between a "make-believe" stock valuation (completely unrelated to any actual tangible fundamentals like dividends) and a pump-and-dump scheme run by "analysts" and "institutional brokers" (not to mention Internet spammers) exists. Just try not to implode from congnitive dissonance.
First, The Energia has not been launched since the days of the Soviet Union. It is in the same boat as the Saturn V. That is, it is DEAD. Russia has openly come out and said that it will not launch again. But if you are going to do sad comparisons, then please compare the Engeria to the Saturn.
True, I had Energia mixed up in my mind with the Protons and the like. This does not matter however since what I was talking about is the practical concept and the costs of disposable boosters versus the cost-plus subcontractor's wet dream, the white elephant of a Shuttle.
Also unlike the Energia, the Saturn is not even possible to be built again as the NASA bureaucrats decided that its core technologies were not worth preserving. The Russians are still designing all sorts of new boosters, some of them comparable to Energia in capabilities.
Maybe in the 90's during the Soviets, but not today.
Energia was nothing but 2 Protons stuck to a larger core, none of which had any revolutionary departures from the present designs. The costs were simply linear progression in labour and materials.
Finally, trying to compare the costs of 2 soyuz (developed in the 60's and holds 3 guys, and little else), to the shuttle has to be the true joke. Based on that, then you should compare the apollo capsule costs against the soyuz. Worse, you play games with comparing the original costs vs. a launch costs.
No, I compared both, because the "original" cost of a Soyuz includes its launch cost. It is not a reusable vehicle.
Also, we are comparing the "bang for the buck" results, not the lengths of dicks of the nationals of the respective nations. Space Shuttle is only good at one thing: delivering pork barrel to contractors. At everything else it is a sub-standard vehicle for its expense, by all objective measures.
The US had the technology (as you yourself point out) to base their inexpensive vehicle designs on, but it chose instead to put greed and politics ahead of technical merits. And so the death-trap, completely uneconomical Shuttle is the result. The Russians are in no way responsible for American screwups, they merely chose to follow the proven path (and they have abandoned "pissing contest" impractical projects such as the Buran).
Which still doesn't explain why you chose to discuss the Energia instead of one of the other rockets that are actually being used.
Because I find all the Russian names hard to keep track of and Energia and its costs somehow stuck in my mind from some article. It was just an example.
And it was scrapped as not worth the expense, just after a few tests and one launch. Otherwise they would be in the same boat as the US, with an impractical and insanely expensive vehicle. All the new reusable vehicle proposals are based on traditional, top of the launch stack mounted designs.
Why are you blathering on about the technical qualities of a rocket that was discontinued?
Because it is not the particular model (of which there are many, like Zenit, Proton, the new Angara) but the concept of cheap, disposable boosters which is important. The cost differences between the two programs for comparable results are simply staggering.
And the Russians do not have some sort of universal panacea on space travel, simply common sense. On the US side, the technical difficulties (growing with age) of the horribly designed (by cost-plus subcontractor committee) Space Shuttle are the reason for all of the insane costs incurred. It the US did not use its "space" program as pork barrel for contractors and if it spent all that money on improving its launch vehicles derrived from their 1960s technologies, Saturn included, they would have been far, far ahead of the Russians. As it is, the Russians, barely recovering from their financial disasters are still managing to beat the US in launches and the payload delivered to the ISS.
Not to mention that Saturn technology is at this point completely lost because the NASA bureaucrats did not see it fit to be preserved. And so now the US is doomed to re-invent the wheel again, at some more astronomical costs.
I don't invest in companies that believe dividends are somehow 'good'. if you are paying out dividends, it means you have no better thing to do with the cash you already have. If you aren't capable of putting money to good use in a productive manner, I might as well just say screw the stock and go find a company with real growth opportunities.
This isn't a new view at all. Warren Buffet has a long standing opposition to both share buybacks and dividends for similar reasons. investing my the fundamentals has absolutely nothing to do with dividends existing or not.
In other words you advocate complete separation between the company performance and stock price (and thus the return on the so-called "investment") and replacing it with an entirely imaginary one. You are not one of those pump-and-dump spammers by any chance, are you?
And yes Buffet and others like him are merely successful gamblers, not investors. I would take advice from him on playing craps, but not on the material well-being of the society.
Whether or not income disparity had ANYTHING to do with the depression or the crash is an unsettled question and many people currently think it had more to do with over extended credit (in which, you can only blame the central bank in those times). In fact, Greenspan argued that in order to avoid the painful cycle of deflation that made the depression much worse, he was willing to take short term interest rates to lower levels than they had been in decades.
Is it me, or Greenspan was not around to mismanage things back in 1929? (and then to whine in his tell-all book that he was "misunderstood")
of course, if you have a piece of research to support your position I'd like to read it but somehow I think you are just drawing spurious relationships. Granted, many politicians blamed big business and the rich and whoever else they could point to that wasn't a constituency. But just like believing WMDs were in Iraq doesn't really mean they are, Roosevelt's opinion has little to do with what was really going on.
Yes it was the assembly line workers and the farmers who messed up the stock market in the 1920s. By the fact that they did not participate in it... bastards! All their fault! If they had put all of their family savings into it to lose, the ex-millionaires would not have had to jump out from Wall Street windows!
Yes, that is why something like 80% of ISS supplies did not arrive there by the Progress launch, no?
And the major Russian modules had to be lifted by the Shuttle, certainly?
Or perheaps the Russians use separate payload carriers which can range up to the Energia class of rockets which make the Space Shuttle look like a wimp at 4 times its payload to LEO and equal to the Shuttle's payload to.. Mars.
So one should really compare 2 Soyuz capsules (6 people) + payload launch = 1 Space Shuttle launch. Still its something like $25 mil x 2 for the Soyuzes + $60 mil for the Energia (at the expensive, all frills added end - the technology is not radically different from the Soyuz boosters) = $110 mil per launch. Which is 1/4th of a relaunch of a Shuttle, never you mind the up-front $1.7 billion cost. And the Shuttle, unlike the Energia payload, is rather unlikely to make it to Mars or Venus.
Not to mention that the thing is a death trap which killed 14 astronauts in the last two decades and is unlikely to stop there.
Actually, it is pretty much a misnomer to call the modern breed of stockholders 'Investors'. They just want to buy it, run it up and sell it. They are not interested in 'investing' in the company at all.
Precisely. One truly major factor behind the wholesale deterioration of business environment is the morphing of the "investor" class into the "gambler" class. Sure there have always been gamblers on the stock market. The thing is that they were a small minority, whilst the majority sought returns via dividends and not gambling on stock price based on no fundamentals whatsoever. All that has changed, now nearly all are gamblers, including massive hedge funds and other so-called "professionals".
This is precisely one of the major causes of the 1929 crash. Amnongst others was astronomical concentration of wealth and income and thus reduction of diversity - also already accomplished.
So fasten your seat belts! Rough turbulence ahead!
Oh and did I mention that having the corporations control the user's computer and being the only ones being able to detect intrusions, while the user cannot, is the ideal scenario for police. The police can then simply require a megacorp to selectively ignore the police trojans and the user gets the worst of both worlds: the only people who are able to trust "his" computer are the corporations and the police.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the part of my life as a reluctant Windows admin which drives me up the wall. Windows fanboy monkeys (yes, they deserve to be called that) believe that Windows administration is some sort of game where one collects obscure secret codes, arcane magical marbles and byzantine "Swords of Brain-dead Cutting" from hidden caches in beetween the lines of some half-assed MSDN article by some MS insider or to be passed word-of-mouth when social networking with their buddies, all of this of course undocumented, because otherwise they wound't be, well, arcane, obscure and secret - would they? Naturally, this is the very anathema of proper operating system design where documentation of all commands (or source code if that is unavailable or ambiguous) is always available on demand to the admin. And this inane attitude of course only entrenches in my mind my personal experience of Windows being an unmanageable, unconrollable, arcane pile of vile secret shit loyal only to its MS master which is bound to turn around and bite you on the ass sooner or later.
Of course many admins, faced with this nonsense, opt for the "commerce" way and buy whole bunch of "add-ons" and "tools" for small fortunes to do but the simplest tasks which are made near impossible without either those tools, spending one's life parsing the MSDN Holy Scriptures line-by line or personally knowing some idiots who spend their lives doing just that.
Its maddening.
Not really, people just do not understand how to use VNC properly. VNC has a number of compression algorithms (SSH can also compress) which have to be selected for the type of connection you are using. Picking the wrong one (meant for faster links) will slow you down to a crawl. Most common mistake is to use VNC with a SSH redirect to localhost, which then makes VNC pick no compression as it thinks its connecting to ... localhost.
Then there are of course things like the NX protocol which offers yet additional level of smart compression for X11 based sessions and can even compress the RDP protocol for further speed boost.
But any innovation of this kind is not counter-balancing the horrendous expense to consumers resulting from these patents (and other inane laws like copyrights), their attendant litigation and countless vampire hordes (otherwise known as "lawyers") who feed on all of this. Not to mention the ability of certain pigopolists to spread FUD about their supposed "intellectual property" somehow contaminating all the alternatives you mentioned, thus scaring away bewildered consumers back into the herd on its way to the slaughterhouse with the herdsmen cracking their whips made of innuendo of just-around-the-corner lawsuits (and in some cases raids and arrests).
No it doesn't. Patents have nothing to do with "driving industry forward". Remove patents and the competetive pressures remain unchanged, which is what drives innovation. And you cannot prove otherwise. Progress existed long before patents were even thought of.
Or you mean you are spouting an item of industrialist faith, upon which the utterly misguided idea of patents is based, without any proof whatsoever that it is indeed the case, as it were an established fact.
In fact patents do far more harm to progress then they bring merit to it, and that is before one factors in the current patent system corruption.
You ask and you shall receive!
Modest proposal addendum
There you go.
While I agree with you that strict adherence to such currency backing could indeed result in a disaster, on the other hand you can't have governments print money whenever it strikes their fancy (and they will, at the first sign of their getting into financial difficulties). Some compromise is necessary.
Well the difference is that Google is an advertising powerhouse which created new unique advertising strategies for its clients, Amazon actually sells crap and Ebay is a gigantic flea-market taking fees off the top of all transactions. Still, Google is in fact very vulnerable and that is why they are desperately trying to diversify in all crazy directions. Amazon is in actuality a brick-and-mortar shop, an equivalent to the old-school mail-order catalogue department store. Ebay is also very vulnerable and that is why they tried to diversify by buying PayPal to have something to fall back on if their core operation is somehow threatened. Of all these, none are really a good investment in a traditional sense, as value of all of their shares is orders of magnitude higher then common-sense value of these companies, primarily due to the fact that 2 out of the three lack any long-term reusable (to a potential buyer) assets, and all have increasing competition. In short their stock market "value" is all a result of gamblers trying to outgamble each other's bets. The companies themselves are just an excuse for the betting, they might as well have been horses or dice rolls.
FaceBook in contrast is the online equivalent of the worst aspects of the high school so-called "social life". Unless they manage to sell something (probably ads - in which case they are by definition a pitiful shadow of Google whose ad systems are far more flexible and target far wider audience) they actually have no product of any kind, never you mind tens-of-millions of dollars of revenue (which is the minimum to justify the purchase price). And no assets to speak of. And so their multi-hundred-million dollar valuation is the height of absurdity and a prime example why the today's stock market has nothing to do with investing.
That was the whole point of my silly proposal, but it seems it is making some people rather uncomfortable. Too close to the mark I guess!
I would quip that FaceBook is quite pointless, too.
As to my joke of an idea, it was intended as a satire of your line of thought, where "value" is whatever Microsoft VPs (or some other wacked-out bunch of lunatics with more money then brains) say it is, irrespective of any other objective criteria (and for which they "pay" in vapourous currency of their own inflated stocks).
Also, how is this "bubble" any different then, say, the rush on purchase of piles of sticks, paper and some cement you call "houses" these days in the USA, otherwise known as the "housing bubble"? Face it, the "investment" market is no more, now it is merely a full-of-itself, sanctimonious, glorified casino. Stop pretending otherwise.
I have a plan.
Seeing this level of wisdom, after painstaking, conservative estimates of revenues and dividends were calculated to come up with this value of $15 billion, which would in the "quaint, old-fashioned" world of people who actually built companies to feed their families and those of their workers be requiring something like a billion of yearly revenue and something like $10 billion in assets, I came to the conclusion that we Slashdotters too can take advantage of this insanity.
Here is what we should do: Each of us starts a corporation, with names like "IgnoramusMaximus' Megacorp Consolidated on the Internet!" (that last bit is important for the "traditional" investors) and then we "sell" to each other our "stakes" in these wonders of modern enterpreneurship for, say, conservatively, 20 million US dollars (or Euros) a share, with the price being "paid" in our equally valuable shares of the other Slashdotter's corporations. If we all say our stuff is worth beeeeeelions, who is to say otherwise! After all, we got web sites and email for these corps!!!
Next thing you know, our shares can be traded on NASDAQ, NYNEX and who knows where else, as they are far in excess the required share price for those markets and I am sure we Slashdotters can create sufficient trade "volume" trading our super-shares via email 20 times a day.
All that remains is for the turkeys, known as the "institutional investors" so start biting! After all they gamble on equally reasonably "valued" and brain-dead "opportunities" such as the above mentioned FaceBook. Why should they care if we have no product, no sales, no assets? That never stopped them before, did it?! And we are on the Internet!
And so dear Slashdotters, I am hereby giving you your way to beeeeeelions of dollars (or euros) as easy as filling some paperwork and registering the name!
So here it goes:
Little knowledge? You gotta be kidding me. I have been rather acutely made aware of the whole murky depths of Libertarian thought in hundreds of exchanges on Slashdot alone.
Of which doctors are prime example.
No, I merely took the "regulation is evil" line of thought to its logical conclusions, to demonstrate, rather forcefully (and I hoped comically) the actual results which are being advocated.
Well, as I said, you get the government you deserve. If the voters are so easily bamboozled, which they apparently are in a lot of places, then they deserve their Kings and Feudal Lords disguised as Presidents and CEOs. There is really nothing one can do about this other then support education and hope that future generations turn out better.
These things are examples of delayed costs. Both industrial and political "pollution" eventually comes around to bite the ignorant in the ass. And again, unless people are educated enough to understand these things, they (or their children) will pay dearly for all the stupidity.
I never suggested such a thing. I merely pointed out that the true focus should be on improving the mechanisms of governance (and also improving the citizens upon whom these mechanisms depend) not by focusing on a specific facet of malfunctioning governance and making it (possibly unintentionally in your case) appear as it was the root of all evil.
My response was to my opponent's actual position, as he/she wrote it. I am under no obligation to figure out his/her unwritten positions, which he/she might hold, which somehow temper or put in another light their message. As it was written, the message bemoans all regulation without exception. To which I responded.
True, these things occur. And that is a failure of governance, to address which is the responsibility of the citizenry in a functioning, sane, modern state. I will not argue with you that, as it stands, the US government for example, is not being essentially subverted by the same very jerks it is supposed to protect the US citizens against. But this failure stemms from the general apathy and dis-interest of the general populace of their own goverment and their unwillingess to do anything to improve its operation. As some wise man once said: "You get exactly the government you deserve". How true.
Such as, oh I don't know, license to practice neurosurgery ....
Let Invisible Hand of the Free Market figure this out! I mean after a few dead, disfigured and crippled patients, the customers will get it and vote with their wallets! Then of course the "surgeon" moves to the next city/state and ... lather, rinse, repeat! But no pain, no gain! Sure there is this wee problem with the fact that the "customers" could be unconscious and thus rather unable to make an "informed consumer choice", based on all available information, who should do their emergency heart bypass surgery, but we simply Cannot Have the Evil Government being involved in this! The same applies to food processing, city water supply (with 25 companies running pipes competetively under your pay-per-use toll-booth equipped driveway)! Etc and so on. But what is a few tens of millions dead and crippled (a lot of children included) against the Freedom of Free Markets To Bloom in Your Pocket! What do you care about this society thing!? Its for the Socialist Commies to do! All you have to worry about is glorious, shiny coins!
On a serious note, everything in life is some form of compromise between two or more choices, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Governments are, in any modern society, thanks to centuries of history full of countless sociopathic asshats bent on becoming warlords and kings, pretty much unavoidable as a protection (sometimes feeble) against the said assholes. And business regulation is, thanks to countless avarice blinded sociopathic asshats, pretty much a necessary evil. The trick is not to abolish them or to get them to stop regulating and controlling things, but to ensure that they regulate and control things which make sense and that the power of the government is kept in check by the citizenry. Libertarians are radical utopists in the same class as such government abolishionists as anarcho-communists, whose proposed system of society is so laughably ripe for abuse, with pretty much similar outcomes as that of the commies, that it makes me wonder if their cognitive abilities are being surpressed by their hatred of all things that interfere with their greed.
Again, you contradict yourself, probably because you have a serious cognitive difficulty in sparating the modern dominant casino element of the stock market from its original and only purpose: to create a vehicle for sane people to realize returns on investments, who would have not done so if there was no actual return offered by the companies they ivested in. If the dividends are in "no way required", then you are merely gambling on a sports team or a horse with a funny name, like SCOX or YHOO, which are no way itself even related to the bets being made on them. Gamblers do not care for such trifles as logic or common sense, all they care for is if their bet was a winning one.
I never dismissed buyouts as a possibility, but again, sane buyouts are made based on an expected return the company can bring from its revenues to the buyer, in a form of dividends, not from a series of bets on the prospective "value" of pieces of paper with its name on it. If one has no relationship to the other, as is the case with most stocks today, then the whole pretense of logic is blown away. All that remains is a glorified gambling house and its patrons who try to bristle with indignation at being exposed for what they are.
You mean you've made gambling bets and won. That is not an investment.
You mean the stocks of these kinds of companies are harder to run up into stratosphere because their CEOs do not play ball with gamblers?
Yes it is pump-and-dump as you've bought something, you and your fellow crooks spread rumours about your "investment", got the price to go up by fooling some naive turkeys with your fast-talk about "investments", "value", "economics", Buffet, Greenspan and other mumbo-jumbo and then you dump it when you think the time is ripe and the victims are starting to catch on.
Nowhere in this process the actual company or its products (or lack of thereof) was of any importance, no were any dividends, but as you keep pointing out such trivia is of no concern to your kind of gamblers and con-men.
You mean you have, too late, discovered that I am not one of the deluded gamblers and that you can't push the usual voodoo crap on me?
Just so you know, your bullshit about me "not knowing anything" is one of the most idiotic (and oldest) tricks on the books! You are in no position to render any judgment on my understanding of the workings of the stock market after all of your arguments having been so plainly shown as illogical mumbo jumbo, sprinkled with a few choice logical fallacies. You've so far offered no coherent defense of any of your positions! None whatsoever!
You must have had experience with some people who would take your sanctimonious babbling at its face value, specially if you casually pepper it with "references" to your kinds of "luminaries" (I am surprised that Milton Friedman hasn't made it into this yet) and walk away thinking you actually know something. I've been around far too long and
But all of this assumes that dividends are eventually paid, and that their amount is, thanks to that "competent management", far greater then it would be without the reinvestment and the delay. But that is not what you were insinuating just two posts ago, where you claimed that investing in stock "has absolutely nothing to do with dividends existing or not". That does not qualify any time-frames, it simply means that dividends and other forms of return to investors are wholly irrelevant. You further go on saying that "if you are paying out dividends, it means you have no better thing to do with the cash you already have", which means that dividends should never be paid out. You emphasise that point by saing that an "authority" of your choice, Warren Buffet, has a "long standing opposition to both share buybacks and dividends for similar reasons".
All of this is in direct contradiction to your later statements in this last post.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you know. Either actual physical, monetary, realized within reasonable time-frame reasons exist for stock valuation, or the stocks are merely tickets to an elaborate gambling operation where rewards are paid based on wholly imaginary, make-believe rules, no different than those of "fantasy sports" or horse races.
Deflation increasing the debt load?! If I owe you $100 today and tommorow that $100 buys me twice the food it bought me today, how does this affect my debt load if my income remains the same? You mean by being sick about the things I could have bought with the extra value of the money I am now "losing"? Or are you insinuating that the wages get rolled back due to the deflation?! Or maybe, just maybe the increasing debt load is brought by the lack of jobs and as a result of the real wages being rolled back, which in conditions of unchanging amount of cash in the economy (which is rare as usually the governments panic in such circumstances and start printing money like mad) in turn results in the downward pressure on prices and thus results in deflation?! Greenspan, the complete poseur idiot that he is (and who he always was), has the thing backwards, as usual. And no I did not read his book, as I wouldn't subject myself to his whiney neuron-destroying nonsense if someone paid me do to it, never you mind actually wasting my time on that mental diarrhea out of my free will.
As I am not exactly in awe of your religion, nor the likes of His Holiness Greenspan, I did not read his screed and so I did not catch your cleverly hidden "reference" to one of its passages. Perheaps you could kindly assume that not everyone is a member of your cult, and thus not privvy to all the Arcane Holy Writtings of its Annointed Priesthood, when having conversations on an open public forum in the future.
Except that you are wrong about this. The MS has (again) taken a perfectly good wheel and "reinvented" and "improved" it to be square.
The Vista security model, although vastly more secure (in theory at least) then that of previous Windows, does idiotic things like having the Administrator not being granted sufficient priviledges to do basic things without performing a number of arcane steps. MS is like a cook who was notorious for serving his creations near raw, now overcompensating by overcooking his spaghetti until it turns into a sludge.
Security is in large degree an art and Microsoft is demonstrating once again that it has no clue how to do it.
Fruitcake with nuts, are you?
Not only did I answer your inane, timeframe-shifting, goal-post-moving ramblings, I refuted them completely as they were, well ... timeframe-shifting, goal-post-moving inane ramblings with no backing whatsoever, save a fine specimen of a logical fallcy of argumentum ad verecundiam (look it up) with Mr Buffet and Greenspan in the starring roles.
You mean basic bullshit? Since when "economy" or "finance" are sciences? Dividends (and other things like them) have simply a direct link to the way ethical people value things. This has nothing to do with science of any kind but with respecting society-building behaviours and frowning on socipathic ones. That is probably why you are having such a hard time grasping the concept.
Sure, after these basics were found to be insufficiently "adjustable" for the purposes of con-artistry by thieves, crooks and other Wall Street "professionals", they had to be simply abandoned in favour of something more suitable to run a con-job on the unsuspecting public. Enter "fundamentals-free valuations" ... and pump-and-dump schemes.
If you want to win this argument, you have to do one simple thing: demonstrate that a substantive difference between a "make-believe" stock valuation (completely unrelated to any actual tangible fundamentals like dividends) and a pump-and-dump scheme run by "analysts" and "institutional brokers" (not to mention Internet spammers) exists. Just try not to implode from congnitive dissonance.
It is statistically the deadliest space vehicle ever produced (to its crew).
Am sure the final crews of Challenger and Columbia thought so too!
True, I had Energia mixed up in my mind with the Protons and the like. This does not matter however since what I was talking about is the practical concept and the costs of disposable boosters versus the cost-plus subcontractor's wet dream, the white elephant of a Shuttle.
Also unlike the Energia, the Saturn is not even possible to be built again as the NASA bureaucrats decided that its core technologies were not worth preserving. The Russians are still designing all sorts of new boosters, some of them comparable to Energia in capabilities.
Energia was nothing but 2 Protons stuck to a larger core, none of which had any revolutionary departures from the present designs. The costs were simply linear progression in labour and materials.
No, I compared both, because the "original" cost of a Soyuz includes its launch cost. It is not a reusable vehicle.
Also, we are comparing the "bang for the buck" results, not the lengths of dicks of the nationals of the respective nations. Space Shuttle is only good at one thing: delivering pork barrel to contractors. At everything else it is a sub-standard vehicle for its expense, by all objective measures.
The US had the technology (as you yourself point out) to base their inexpensive vehicle designs on, but it chose instead to put greed and politics ahead of technical merits. And so the death-trap, completely uneconomical Shuttle is the result. The Russians are in no way responsible for American screwups, they merely chose to follow the proven path (and they have abandoned "pissing contest" impractical projects such as the Buran).
Because I find all the Russian names hard to keep track of and Energia and its costs somehow stuck in my mind from some article. It was just an example.
And it was scrapped as not worth the expense, just after a few tests and one launch. Otherwise they would be in the same boat as the US, with an impractical and insanely expensive vehicle. All the new reusable vehicle proposals are based on traditional, top of the launch stack mounted designs.
Because it is not the particular model (of which there are many, like Zenit, Proton, the new Angara) but the concept of cheap, disposable boosters which is important. The cost differences between the two programs for comparable results are simply staggering.
And the Russians do not have some sort of universal panacea on space travel, simply common sense. On the US side, the technical difficulties (growing with age) of the horribly designed (by cost-plus subcontractor committee) Space Shuttle are the reason for all of the insane costs incurred. It the US did not use its "space" program as pork barrel for contractors and if it spent all that money on improving its launch vehicles derrived from their 1960s technologies, Saturn included, they would have been far, far ahead of the Russians. As it is, the Russians, barely recovering from their financial disasters are still managing to beat the US in launches and the payload delivered to the ISS.
Not to mention that Saturn technology is at this point completely lost because the NASA bureaucrats did not see it fit to be preserved. And so now the US is doomed to re-invent the wheel again, at some more astronomical costs.
In other words you advocate complete separation between the company performance and stock price (and thus the return on the so-called "investment") and replacing it with an entirely imaginary one. You are not one of those pump-and-dump spammers by any chance, are you?
And yes Buffet and others like him are merely successful gamblers, not investors. I would take advice from him on playing craps, but not on the material well-being of the society.
Is it me, or Greenspan was not around to mismanage things back in 1929? (and then to whine in his tell-all book that he was "misunderstood")
Yes it was the assembly line workers and the farmers who messed up the stock market in the 1920s. By the fact that they did not participate in it ... bastards! All their fault! If they had put all of their family savings into it to lose, the ex-millionaires would not have had to jump out from Wall Street windows!
Yes, that is why something like 80% of ISS supplies did not arrive there by the Progress launch, no?
And the major Russian modules had to be lifted by the Shuttle, certainly?
Or perheaps the Russians use separate payload carriers which can range up to the Energia class of rockets which make the Space Shuttle look like a wimp at 4 times its payload to LEO and equal to the Shuttle's payload to .. Mars.
So one should really compare 2 Soyuz capsules (6 people) + payload launch = 1 Space Shuttle launch. Still its something like $25 mil x 2 for the Soyuzes + $60 mil for the Energia (at the expensive, all frills added end - the technology is not radically different from the Soyuz boosters) = $110 mil per launch. Which is 1/4th of a relaunch of a Shuttle, never you mind the up-front $1.7 billion cost. And the Shuttle, unlike the Energia payload, is rather unlikely to make it to Mars or Venus.
Not to mention that the thing is a death trap which killed 14 astronauts in the last two decades and is unlikely to stop there.
Precisely. One truly major factor behind the wholesale deterioration of business environment is the morphing of the "investor" class into the "gambler" class. Sure there have always been gamblers on the stock market. The thing is that they were a small minority, whilst the majority sought returns via dividends and not gambling on stock price based on no fundamentals whatsoever. All that has changed, now nearly all are gamblers, including massive hedge funds and other so-called "professionals".
This is precisely one of the major causes of the 1929 crash. Amnongst others was astronomical concentration of wealth and income and thus reduction of diversity - also already accomplished.
So fasten your seat belts! Rough turbulence ahead!
Oh and did I mention that having the corporations control the user's computer and being the only ones being able to detect intrusions, while the user cannot, is the ideal scenario for police. The police can then simply require a megacorp to selectively ignore the police trojans and the user gets the worst of both worlds: the only people who are able to trust "his" computer are the corporations and the police.