Your argument is logically flawed -- who knows if the light causes thieves to leave your van alone? I mean, your van also hasn't been crushed by stampeding elephants, but it's not because the red light scared them away.
My car (a '99 BMW 323i in excellent condition with 118k miles, if anyone's looking to buy) is parked overnight in NYC every day with no red light. It has yet to pick up so much as a scratch, let alone a robbery attempt. Of course, I use The Club for the same reason you use the blinkenlight--hey, you never know if it might help--but I wouldn't make grand claims on its behalf.
Fortunately, someone else has pointed out that this is not at all about thinking machines, only a repository of word concepts.
However, the problem remains the same as that with most failed-and-doomed-to-failure AI research: the researchers have an excellent grasp of technology, but are usually operating on a fundamentally flawed model of how consciousness works.
Essentially, we think about abstract things by repurposing the connections used for understanding the physical world (see Philosophy in the Flesh and the works of Lakoff & Johnson generally). To accomplish human-like intelligence, we would need to replicate that.
Ok, Ill make one last attempt at you, but I doubt it will work. Make as many attempts as you like. Your original statements will remain wrong, and your subsequent ones will converge on mine. (And you'll probably continue the ad hominem, while I've at worst been supercilious with you without being directly insulting; whatev').
By undervalued or overvalued you are talking about what you think the price will be in the future relative to the price today. Absolutely. Finally we're getting somewhere. Everybody is making economic decisions based on what they think the future value of a particular holding will be. Buffett does it based on fundamentals of the underlying investment; others do it based on general market conditions, or based on technical criteria, or generic trend predictions.
Which would you rather invest in? Investment A: will give you 10% interest after 24 hours. Investment B:will give you 10% interest 10 years from now. I don't know about you but I'll take investment A. Obviously. But you're arguing a straw man here; I certainly never proposed this comparison.
MS is offering an immediate and guaranteed double digit return to Yahoo shareholders. What is Yahoo offering: "well maybe at some time in the future, we dont know when, we think the price will possibly be worth more than what Microsoft is guaranteeing." Yeah, I'm a real "speculator" for wanting the guaranteed and immediate double digit return on investment. But you are a smart "investor" who is gambling that at some point in the future a company that continuously finds new ways to lose market share will eventually give a great return. As I said in the last post, I make no claims about the quality of this particular deal. I haven't researched Yahoo! and don't have any valuation in mind for them. I'm just saying that your original response was blind to how fundamentals-based value investing works. It remains so, although if you'd originally intended to argue that MS's deal was generous to Yahoo! shareholders based on the fundamentals, you might well be right about that. That doesn't preclude the original post's comment that the board might disagree, without having abrogated their responsibility. (After all, they stand to gain a whole lot of money for selling all their stock for less than it's really worth.) I've no idea if this is a good deal or not, and never claimed to. I just grant that the Board is obliged to take the long view -- that "Shareholder value is not equal to stock value, its about what the company does in the longer run" -- and that it's legitimate (though potentially incorrect) for the board to think that continuing the company will be more profitable for all investors long-term than cashing out right now would be. I'd also point out that in describing the management of the company as incompetent, you're thinking like an investor, who looks at the content of what he's buying. You're coming around to the argument that Yahoo shareholders should take Microsoft's offer because it's above the correct valuation of the stock. I have no opinion about that, but it seems a plausible argument to me (as opposed to what you originally said, which was that Yahoo shareholders should take Microsoft's offer because it's above the current market price).
It's also humorous that you think that investing in the stock market isn't speculative. I agree with you that stocks are risky. I'm using "speculative" in a narrower sense here -- that of buying an investment based on technical features while treating its content as a black box, without thorough research into the underlying fundamentals, that "I don't care what the company does" attitude you expressed a couple posts ago. It's a speculator who buys tulips because he sees everybody else doing it and expects past price trends to continue just because that's the trend.
They are offering investors a PREMIUM over the price of the shares in order to make the deal more likely. Yes, that's fair. There may be a sound strategic reason for them to be paying a premium; they may be motivated buyers, not bad valuators. Consider that argument withdrawn.
If you don't do your own research, sure, you could trust the share price for your valuation, but that's likely to be incorrect in any timeframe longer than a couple weeks. That's the thinking of a speculator, not an investor.
That's so wrong its scary. Find me a person that is willing to buy or sell a stock (or anything) at a price different than the market price and you have created a money pump.
His name is Steve Ballmer, and he's looking to pay a premium on some Yahoo shares.
I'm saying that the market price may not actually reflect something's real worth. Things can be over- or under-valued, yes? And we wouldn't want to sell them if we think they're undervalued, yes? Not even for a higher-but-still-undervalued price?
How about you give the full quote, where the guy said that the value of a company to an investor isn't the value of the share but what a company does in the long run. As an investor I could care less if the company invests in solar energy or decides to go into the edible underwear business. The return on my investment (dividend + stock price) is ALL I CARE ABOUT. You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
Umm... I didn't repeat the full quote, because I'd given it earlier. Anyway, the problem here is that you're a speculator who thinks he's an investor, so you don't get the distinction. The value of the company to an investor is very much what it does. Thinking of the kind you describe here is exactly what gave us the tech bubble of the 90s -- "Who cares what they do, the stock prices are moving in a direction I like!" That's not investment, it's speculation, and it applies equally to commodities (like, say, real estate, or tulips) and to stocks. An actual investor will look at a company's fundamentals, including the quality and effectiveness of its management (like Buffett does), to see what's an undervalued gem and what's overvalued hype. That point is something Buffett stresses: what a company does has a direct bearing on what it is worth, because if it sells generic athletic shoes, well, somebody else can beat it at that game; but if it sells NIKE XTREEM SNEEKERS that kids kill each other over, it can command a price premium (because of the value of its brand) and can thus be expected to yield better-than-average profits over the long term (it has pricing discretion and can set its own profit margins, because it's not selling a commodity).
ROI is important, but it's something that happens in the future. As a speculator, you make bets about the future; as an investor, you make educated bets of a kind that acknowledge that companies, etc. are not interchangeable, even though they can be bought and sold with the same dollars.
You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
No. I (and Warren Buffett) measure the quality of an investment in a different way than short-term RoI based on fluctuations in the security price. The quality of an investment has to take into account whether returns can be sustained, or if they're the result of herd behavior.
Listening to you talk, you'd think a person was about to declare bankruptcy if he is getting a 20% return on investment and it's coming from a dividend.
I don't know where you got that impression. I was just saying that Buffett isn't big on dividends, a fact of which you had seemed innocent in your earlier statement. When did I say dividends were bad? What Buffett has said is that dividends are justified if there's no better use for the money, but that a strong company would want to invest in itself, and if a company can get more value for its money by investing in something other than its own business, why not cut out the middleman?
Let's check what you just wrote (I'll add some variables to make things easier.)
Ahh, yes, the time-honored first-order-logic practice of pretending that language has no nuance or subtlety. I
You're rewriting history. You originally said:
Shareholder value is not equal to stock value, its about what the company does in the longer run. NO! Who the hell invests their money for anything other than a nice stock price and/or dividend? If I am a Yahoo investor, and Microsoft offers to buy my shares at a nice premium over the market price, then yes I would like to sell them the shares. This strongly suggests that what you're looking for is a stock that will rise enough that you can sell it short-term -- stock-flipping, essentially. If you're a Yahoo investor (and not a securities speculator) then your real question is whether Microsoft is offering to buy these shares for more than your real valuation of the company. If you don't do your own research, sure, you could trust the share price for your valuation, but that's likely to be incorrect in any timeframe longer than a couple weeks. That's the thinking of a speculator, not an investor. (After all, if you didn't think the stock was undervalued, why'd you buy it in the first place?)
An investor -- like the person you vehemently disagreed with at the start of this thread -- is concerned with "what the company does in the longer run." Your counterargument essentially endorsed stock price speculation, rather than doing your own evaluation based on a company's fundamentals.
However, once that had been pointed out to you, you turn around and claim that you were actually saying something else that agreed with the point you'd shouted down:
Warren Buffet invests in companies that pay a nice dividend or that he believes will grow their stock price. How is that any different than what I said? That's right, it isn't. Warren Buffett invests in companies whose stock may be purchased for less than (his estimation of) their real value -- "undervalued" stocks. He establishes valuation primarily in terms of present assets, present income and income potential (especially ability to raise prices above competitors because of unique branding/product characteristics, like Coca-Cola or See's Candies -- a commodity business is a chump's game), and quality of management. He's not especially focused on "nice dividends;" he believes that companies should be a sufficiently high-quality investment that they're willing to invest their surpluses in themselves, through stock buyback or debt reduction. He thinks, if the company believes some other company is a better investment than itself, then he should take it at its word, and find that better investment. (You'll notice that many of the companies for which Buffett is a large shareholder have placed him on their boards, and that in those positions he's frequently encouraged debt reduction and outstanding-shares-buyback programs). Of course, he also believes in buying something only if it's sold at or below the correct valuation, so he'll be happy to take a dividend if the stock price is overvalued or there aren't good opportunities to grow the business. (Which in turn means, if Buffett is willing to sell you a stock, you're probably paying more than it's worth). Berkshire Hathaway itself has paid dividends maybe once in its existence, the one time Buffett couldn't find something worthwhile to invest in.
Buffett does not invest in stocks that "will grow their stock price" -- that's thinking like a high-trade-volume speculator. He invests in companies that he epxects will grow their profitability, with a rising stock price as a happy result. It's a seemingly trivial distinction that points to a significant difference in focus: he's not chasing numbers and shuffling paper like a hedge fund, he's buying part of a business, which he intends to hold long-term, because it's a successful, profitable business, available at a favorable price. In short it's what you originally disagreed with.
So, basically, you're trying to transition your previous statements into agreeing with what Buffett thinks, but you still haven't moved over all the way, because it isn't actually what you originally meant. Keep redefining your position and I'm sure you'll agree with him eventually, but the context makes it pretty clear that that is not what you were originally saying.
Who the hell invests their money for anything other than a nice stock price and/or dividend? There's this Warren Buffett guy... maybe you've heard of him? He's supposed to be doing okay, though it sounds like you probably have a better handle on the stock market than he does.
FTA:
Each group develops their own UI widgets in their own style and they simply don't care that it's a total mess. They don't care that I have to learn new ways of doing the same task just because they couldn't be bothered to do things the same way as other applications. You know what? I don't care either!
I've never encountered a Windows app whose UI confused me at all. They're easy. You explore a bit, you figure it out. I was generally persuaded by this article; it started off strong and had some specific, pointed criticisms to make from the perspective of someone who cares about programming and dealing with a consistent environment.
Then the last page degenerated into fussy UI-wank. Look folks -- look-and-feel is nice, and MS absolutely should've done more to enable consistency. But I don't use software for the pretty eye candy (certain gaming titles aside -- which, surprise!, have no expectation of consistency with the rest of the OS).
About the only place I do care is that the default Swing look-and-feel is just plain hideous. But whatever; I can cope with that even so.
Re:History of Gaming?
on
Second Person
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain used this in places -- the narrative voice shifts a good bit between chapters. Was a pretty good book really (won a Nobel and everything). I believe Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, others) uses it from time to time -- maybe in Coming Through Slaughter?
I am also told that Bright Lights, Big City uses the second-person exclusively. You might find that a bit tedious, but you never know.
Otherwise, mostly a Gee Whiz! tech, though I suppose it could have useful applications for the disabled. But I wonder if we won't see wrist-based Repetitive Motion problems transferred to increased eyestrain...
I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the push for middle aged women and people of random ethnic backrounds to become police officers. Apparently the police force should reflect society. If that means a 45 year old, 5 foot tall woman needs a taser when she confronts a fight at a bar, then that's ok. You're talking nonsense. The point of having the police force reflect society is that communities are much more likely to have cooperative relationships with police officers that look like them. It lowers the total number of confrontations and reduces the crime rate by making the law seem more respectable, because it has friendlier-looking representatives.
I don't know how they do things in Australia, but in the US, while I have seen 5-foot-tall cops, they're always in groups of three or four. Nobody reasonable expects the police to be Iron Man, busting up riots single-handedly. If NYPD is called to a bar fight, they bring lots of back-up. Cops don't go for fair odds when subduing violent suspects (nor should they).
Ugh, you're one of those jerks that messes with the smoke detectors in airplane lavatories, aren't you?
Seriously, though, you're absolutely right; leaving a known automatic monitoring device around is just asking for somebody to figure out a way to spoof it or turn it off without being detected. Countries that are willing to sell off their reactor fuel must need money even more than they need energy*, and that's precisely the spur to push some good old-fashioned brainpower into action.
*or have their reactors overseen by greedy functionaries who want money more than they want a reputation for success and political advancement; same effect.
The trick is to work help desk somewhere that the help desk is meaningful, where you get to do lots more than just answer a phone and read a tree. For instance, I spent two years under "help desk" hacking Perl every day.
Any job is a dead end if you take it as an excuse to stagnate and never learn anything beyond what's needed for competent performance.
The trouble with help desk is the reputation as help desk -- you have to be able to convince people that you know something beyond the job title. Of course, file that under "resume-cold-calling is hard." You would be well-advised to take on as much responsibility outside your limited official purview as you can handle. If you don't know how to do it yet, know that you'll learn it, and offer to do so at every opportunity. Make sure that you have specific, quantifiable achievements that you can point to, and make sure that someone with some clout at the company -- maybe your manager, maybe the manager of someone you're helping, who knows, but someone worth listening to -- is aware of what you've accomplished and can vouch for it when you apply for your next job.
Help desk, approached smartly, can be a great place to start building diverse skills and making connections for future recommendations. Just don't let yourself get pigeonholed and don't get trapped in bad politics.
Oh, and I'm assuming you mean help desk somewhere you can talk with people who aren't. If you can't, you can't do much other than show off for the other drones.
Perhaps you haven't noticed that the price of wheat, rice, corn, and other ag products has double in a very short time. I am all too aware of this. It is a temporary trend. However, you are absolutely right that now is a great time to own massive corporate farms.
Maybe you also missed that stocks of fertilizer, farm equipment, and other ag companies have surged. I assume you mean securities, since rising inventories are not a sign of boom times. This is a natural consequence of your first point. Again, it's a temporary thing.
You're advising him to pick a future career based on the last six months, which happen to have bucked a thirty-year-long trend, and he'd be a fool to listen to that.
You also overlooked the fact that states who have agriculture as the primary industry enjoy unemployment rates under 3%. Show me the source, and I'll give you the explanation. Most likely it will have to do with the temporary changes in the price of staples -- which are due to a number of factors, including recent fad-interest in biofuels, bad weather in non-American breadbaskets, and increasing costs of inputs (since practically all fertilizer in use in modern farming, not to mention plenty of the pesticides, comes from petrol).
And again, even if these trends are sustained, none of this is in any way helpful for an individual who might want to become a small farmer. Profits are mainly going to the likes of ADM; even to the extent that the few remaining small-holders are benefiting, the current agricultural boom would be factored into the purchase/lease price of any land that the questioner wanted to get to set up his own farm.
This is really interesting -- reminds me of when I was working helpdesk for a law services software company. Since it was a small, crappy company, and because I was young and exploitable, they decided that I got to have the pager and do 24/7 support for months on end.
My friend who'd got me the job (before leaving to do something else) came for a visit and saw me at that time -- she described how my shoulders slumped and my entire body collapsed when I heard the phone ring. It got to the point that I couldn't see a phone ring on a movie screen without being surprised that the person picking it up didn't answer "Application Support, may I help you?"
There are plenty of jobs for undocumented immigrants getting paid a quarter of minimum wage to pick tomatoes. Nearly everybody else who is in agriculture is operating a loss center.
Also, I don't know of anybody who ever got into education to get rich. And I understand now's not a great time to be in IT, what with new developments shipping a lot of development offshore, but this may be blown out of proportion.
Health care is recession-proof. It's about to implode for other reasons (sez the medical publisher), but it is certainly hiring at the moment.
"It is wrong to enter another man's household." Because, what's a man? What's a household? What's entering? What's it mean if something is wrong? And is it always wrong at the same level? (I rather like the idea that it's less wrong to hop a fence to retrieve a baseball than to break through a window to kill a family).
The other issue is that we're a common-law society -- legal precedents have meaning, but aren't written up as laws. (They tend to answer the kinds of questions above). But unless someone's going to come out with the footnoted version of all the laws out there (which, admittedly, companies like Westlaw try to do, for other lawyers), just reading simple laws won't give the answers. The law isn't what Congress says -- it's what a judge says. (That's what I learned working in the Senate).
We can't blame the voting-machine companies entirely -- they aren't behaving out of character; they're doing exactly what they've been bred to do by our competitive marketplace. We live in a society in which to admit error is seen as a fatal weakness rather than a mark of strength. In the American corporate world, you only apologize when you've done something greivously wrong, and even then only under extreme duress, and without admitting fault. You never admit fault, because you never make mistakes. Fault is fatal.
So of course if anything bad happens, that defense mechanism kicks in--"Surely you're wrong, because it would be impossible for us to have committed an error!" A company without that instinct, led by people with a more reasonable approach to the world, would have been torn apart in the marketplace long before winning a major government contract, because there's selective pressure for trumped-up perfection.
Obviously we need to seriously rethink this whole electronic-voting concept and its current implementation. But we also need to rethink a society that kills the stock price of any corporation, or the reputation of any person, that admits a mistake. And yet I think I heard somewhere that before you can correct a mistake you have to admit it?
To err is human; so to claim inerrancy must be monstrous.
(Of course, none of this goes into the possibility of wilful tampering, which is a separate point. I don't discount the possibility, but I think what I've said still stands.)
All respect, Bruce, but I think you're talking through your hat on this one.
Those third world countries don't have the budget to spend on textbooks, whether they're DRM-encumbered e-books or not. So either way, they won't be buying them--because they can't. OLPC being built on Linux doesn't mean that publishers are going to start giving away their content. If they can't publish in a way that will prevent copies being made without them getting compensated, then they just won't publish to that market, full stop. They're on a narrow enough margin already, they're not going to start giving away all that effort, especially all translation work. So don't expect ebooks to be any cheaper than the real thing, unless we intentionally make them free ourselves. (Note how little any of this has to do with laptops).
If the goal is to get un-DRM'd textbooks to kids, then we'd be better off giving our time and money to Wikibooks than to OLPC, to make sure those decent-quality un-copyrighted books actually exist.
Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument. Format wars are irrelevant to this.
As I understand your argument, drm-free ebooks will be cheaper than regular books or drm'd ebooks, because ??????. The only sensible ?????? I can think of is "you can wantonly infringe them"--but if infringing were the chosen strategy, schools don't need OpenDocument; they can just make PDFs. Or have some of the kids type the books up in keyboarding class, or something.
If we want free textbooks to exist, which is the more sensible option: arguing about operating systems, or writing some free textbooks?
And while we dick around about operating systems on the poor kids' e-surfboards or whatever it is that laptops are supposed to be, poor children remain malnourished. OLPC continues not to respond to the most pressing needs of the developing world. About the only thing it's a good platform for is grandstanding.
There are two axes to this change. On the one hand there's the active-vs-passive (or interactive-vs-passive), and on the other there's the trivial-vs-deep. A change from passive-trivial to active-trivial doesn't make much difference to society. What would, would be people shifting from passive-trivial activities to passive-deep activities (don't watch Survivor, read a physics textbook); after that's done, then the passive-to-active shift will mean something good for society.
Failing that change, we have the present: people yammering on without a point. It's great for a lot of people-hours to be spent interactively instead of watching TV; and for this to produce permanent content. But (as the Wikipedia example so elegantly demonstrates) all that junk from the enthusiastic amateurs easily tends to drown out the truly good contributions.
I'm all for people not watching TV and instead learning something and applying it. But what if instead we all just decided to give each other IANAL legal advice on Slashdot? Suddenly it's impossible to find the really good content, and the reader doesn't know who or what to trust (ProTip: Probably not legal advice on slashdot). I think this is exactly what's happening in the spheres of production outlined by the Internet; people are contributing but aren't yet in a position to do so effectively. Hopefully that will change as time goes on, but the real paradigm change is yet to come.
Although I am given to understand it's revolutionized the way we find people to sleep with.
In my view, it's not a distribution problem, it's an economic problem.
Right -- an economy is a system for allocating/distributing scarce resources. A "distribution problem" is an economic problem. (It's not that we couldn't handle the logistics).
(although, honestly, i think the attribution of moral relativism to the original post in this thread was somewhat confused). Absolutely. Because...
the speaker doesn't really understand the difference and implications since most such speakers have been trained into believing that any level of tolerance is "moral relativism," while in reality most people who hold those ideas are liberal moral universalists who use descriptive moral relativism as a self-corrective and to negotiate with foreign moralities. Whence my comments that "moral relativism," or what gets labeled as such in American political discourse, is usually just descriptive. This is especially maddening because
descriptive moral relativism is a "trivial truism" and yet those people inclined to harp on it are doing so precisely because they don't understand the difference at all. (or, I would be more cynically inclined to suggest, the talking heads that harp on it understand the difference quite well but are blurring the edges for political purposes, while those who repeat the argument don't realize they've been duped).
but there you're explicitly restricting your definition to the descriptive variety, without any acknowledgment of the (in practice, more common) alternative. I'm content to agree to disagree with you here, but to me, the real test of moral relativism is whether a (non-fundamentalist-Muslim) American is willing to endorse Saudi condemnation of a Saudi woman who refuses to wear the veil, as the local morality demands. Someone who won't agree with that judgment, but thinks it shouldn't be interfered with, is not a moral relativist; that person is just a non-interventionist (for motives pure or stained) -- saying "Who are we to judge?" to my ear hearkens more to 'who will cast the first stone' than to a belief that an authentic morality exists which is decided by local custom. There are plenty of people who think that Westerners should generally not interfere in the domestic affairs of non-Western nations, but that isn't relativism so much as having a moral maxim that says "mind your own business." Maybe you're thinking of the folks who say (of e.g. the Israel-Palestine conflict) that "the violence of the oppressed cannot be compared with the violence of the oppressor," but those people aren't establishing moral relativism either -- they're describing a specific rule under which different circumstances require different moral judgments, which is no more relativist than saying it's more moral for a starving man to steal a loaf of bread from a rich man than the other way around. Maybe you're thinking of something else entirely, though; our experiences with the people we've met are no doubt different.
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent. moral relativism is really irrelevant here. Agreed -- I'd meant it as just a "here are the logical alternatives, x or not x" sort of thing -- since it's my perception that those who espouse tolerance ("live and let live") are being improperly tarred with the moral relativism brush.
as an aside, i have this debate with linguistics folks frequently, too. a surprising number of folks who i'd expect to know better don't have a grasp of the difference between grammar as prescriptive vs. descriptive, for example. Oh my yes. These are usually the same humorless people who point to 19th-century grammar rules and rant about the ignorance of people who don't follow them. Personally I love asking them why they don't seem to decline their nouns properly, like in Old English, or use "thou" for an informal singular second-person... but then I'm kind of a dick like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have some novels that are only 15 years old and they are pretty much unreadable, with pages cracking apart and the cheap binding losing pages.
Yeah, but it isn't illegal to repair a book.
Your argument is logically flawed -- who knows if the light causes thieves to leave your van alone? I mean, your van also hasn't been crushed by stampeding elephants, but it's not because the red light scared them away.
My car (a '99 BMW 323i in excellent condition with 118k miles, if anyone's looking to buy) is parked overnight in NYC every day with no red light. It has yet to pick up so much as a scratch, let alone a robbery attempt. Of course, I use The Club for the same reason you use the blinkenlight--hey, you never know if it might help--but I wouldn't make grand claims on its behalf.
Fortunately, someone else has pointed out that this is not at all about thinking machines, only a repository of word concepts.
However, the problem remains the same as that with most failed-and-doomed-to-failure AI research: the researchers have an excellent grasp of technology, but are usually operating on a fundamentally flawed model of how consciousness works.
Essentially, we think about abstract things by repurposing the connections used for understanding the physical world (see Philosophy in the Flesh and the works of Lakoff & Johnson generally). To accomplish human-like intelligence, we would need to replicate that.
...is about education...
Sounds like a great educational opportunity, indeed!
On the other hand, if you're excited about the job you're about to go to... maybe it's not so terrible to leave your buffer intact?
Agreed --
but more to the point, why do I suspect that none of the draconian security rules are going to get revoked in the face of this new development?
Investment A: will give you 10% interest after 24 hours.
Investment B:will give you 10% interest 10 years from now.
I don't know about you but I'll take investment A. Obviously. But you're arguing a straw man here; I certainly never proposed this comparison. MS is offering an immediate and guaranteed double digit return to Yahoo shareholders. What is Yahoo offering: "well maybe at some time in the future, we dont know when, we think the price will possibly be worth more than what Microsoft is guaranteeing." Yeah, I'm a real "speculator" for wanting the guaranteed and immediate double digit return on investment. But you are a smart "investor" who is gambling that at some point in the future a company that continuously finds new ways to lose market share will eventually give a great return. As I said in the last post, I make no claims about the quality of this particular deal. I haven't researched Yahoo! and don't have any valuation in mind for them. I'm just saying that your original response was blind to how fundamentals-based value investing works. It remains so, although if you'd originally intended to argue that MS's deal was generous to Yahoo! shareholders based on the fundamentals, you might well be right about that. That doesn't preclude the original post's comment that the board might disagree, without having abrogated their responsibility. (After all, they stand to gain a whole lot of money for selling all their stock for less than it's really worth.)
I've no idea if this is a good deal or not, and never claimed to. I just grant that the Board is obliged to take the long view -- that "Shareholder value is not equal to stock value, its about what the company does in the longer run" -- and that it's legitimate (though potentially incorrect) for the board to think that continuing the company will be more profitable for all investors long-term than cashing out right now would be.
I'd also point out that in describing the management of the company as incompetent, you're thinking like an investor, who looks at the content of what he's buying. You're coming around to the argument that Yahoo shareholders should take Microsoft's offer because it's above the correct valuation of the stock. I have no opinion about that, but it seems a plausible argument to me (as opposed to what you originally said, which was that Yahoo shareholders should take Microsoft's offer because it's above the current market price). It's also humorous that you think that investing in the stock market isn't speculative. I agree with you that stocks are risky. I'm using "speculative" in a narrower sense here -- that of buying an investment based on technical features while treating its content as a black box, without thorough research into the underlying fundamentals, that "I don't care what the company does" attitude you expressed a couple posts ago. It's a speculator who buys tulips because he sees everybody else doing it and expects past price trends to continue just because that's the trend. They are offering investors a PREMIUM over the price of the shares in order to make the deal more likely. Yes, that's fair. There may be a sound strategic reason for them to be paying a premium; they may be motivated buyers, not bad valuators. Consider that argument withdrawn.
If you don't do your own research, sure, you could trust the share price for your valuation, but that's likely to be incorrect in any timeframe longer than a couple weeks. That's the thinking of a speculator, not an investor.
That's so wrong its scary. Find me a person that is willing to buy or sell a stock (or anything) at a price different than the market price and you have created a money pump.
His name is Steve Ballmer, and he's looking to pay a premium on some Yahoo shares.
I'm saying that the market price may not actually reflect something's real worth. Things can be over- or under-valued, yes? And we wouldn't want to sell them if we think they're undervalued, yes? Not even for a higher-but-still-undervalued price?
How about you give the full quote, where the guy said that the value of a company to an investor isn't the value of the share but what a company does in the long run. As an investor I could care less if the company invests in solar energy or decides to go into the edible underwear business. The return on my investment (dividend + stock price) is ALL I CARE ABOUT. You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
Umm... I didn't repeat the full quote, because I'd given it earlier.
Anyway, the problem here is that you're a speculator who thinks he's an investor, so you don't get the distinction.
The value of the company to an investor is very much what it does. Thinking of the kind you describe here is exactly what gave us the tech bubble of the 90s -- "Who cares what they do, the stock prices are moving in a direction I like!" That's not investment, it's speculation, and it applies equally to commodities (like, say, real estate, or tulips) and to stocks. An actual investor will look at a company's fundamentals, including the quality and effectiveness of its management (like Buffett does), to see what's an undervalued gem and what's overvalued hype. That point is something Buffett stresses: what a company does has a direct bearing on what it is worth, because if it sells generic athletic shoes, well, somebody else can beat it at that game; but if it sells NIKE XTREEM SNEEKERS that kids kill each other over, it can command a price premium (because of the value of its brand) and can thus be expected to yield better-than-average profits over the long term (it has pricing discretion and can set its own profit margins, because it's not selling a commodity).
ROI is important, but it's something that happens in the future. As a speculator, you make bets about the future; as an investor, you make educated bets of a kind that acknowledge that companies, etc. are not interchangeable, even though they can be bought and sold with the same dollars.
You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
No. I (and Warren Buffett) measure the quality of an investment in a different way than short-term RoI based on fluctuations in the security price. The quality of an investment has to take into account whether returns can be sustained, or if they're the result of herd behavior.
Listening to you talk, you'd think a person was about to declare bankruptcy if he is getting a 20% return on investment and it's coming from a dividend.
I don't know where you got that impression. I was just saying that Buffett isn't big on dividends, a fact of which you had seemed innocent in your earlier statement. When did I say dividends were bad? What Buffett has said is that dividends are justified if there's no better use for the money, but that a strong company would want to invest in itself, and if a company can get more value for its money by investing in something other than its own business, why not cut out the middleman?
Let's check what you just wrote (I'll add some variables to make things easier.)
Ahh, yes, the time-honored first-order-logic practice of pretending that language has no nuance or subtlety. I
An investor -- like the person you vehemently disagreed with at the start of this thread -- is concerned with "what the company does in the longer run." Your counterargument essentially endorsed stock price speculation, rather than doing your own evaluation based on a company's fundamentals.
However, once that had been pointed out to you, you turn around and claim that you were actually saying something else that agreed with the point you'd shouted down: Warren Buffet invests in companies that pay a nice dividend or that he believes will grow their stock price. How is that any different than what I said? That's right, it isn't. Warren Buffett invests in companies whose stock may be purchased for less than (his estimation of) their real value -- "undervalued" stocks. He establishes valuation primarily in terms of present assets, present income and income potential (especially ability to raise prices above competitors because of unique branding/product characteristics, like Coca-Cola or See's Candies -- a commodity business is a chump's game), and quality of management. He's not especially focused on "nice dividends;" he believes that companies should be a sufficiently high-quality investment that they're willing to invest their surpluses in themselves, through stock buyback or debt reduction. He thinks, if the company believes some other company is a better investment than itself, then he should take it at its word, and find that better investment. (You'll notice that many of the companies for which Buffett is a large shareholder have placed him on their boards, and that in those positions he's frequently encouraged debt reduction and outstanding-shares-buyback programs).
Of course, he also believes in buying something only if it's sold at or below the correct valuation, so he'll be happy to take a dividend if the stock price is overvalued or there aren't good opportunities to grow the business. (Which in turn means, if Buffett is willing to sell you a stock, you're probably paying more than it's worth). Berkshire Hathaway itself has paid dividends maybe once in its existence, the one time Buffett couldn't find something worthwhile to invest in.
Buffett does not invest in stocks that "will grow their stock price" -- that's thinking like a high-trade-volume speculator. He invests in companies that he epxects will grow their profitability, with a rising stock price as a happy result. It's a seemingly trivial distinction that points to a significant difference in focus: he's not chasing numbers and shuffling paper like a hedge fund, he's buying part of a business, which he intends to hold long-term, because it's a successful, profitable business, available at a favorable price. In short it's what you originally disagreed with.
So, basically, you're trying to transition your previous statements into agreeing with what Buffett thinks, but you still haven't moved over all the way, because it isn't actually what you originally meant. Keep redefining your position and I'm sure you'll agree with him eventually, but the context makes it pretty clear that that is not what you were originally saying.
I've never encountered a Windows app whose UI confused me at all. They're easy. You explore a bit, you figure it out.
I was generally persuaded by this article; it started off strong and had some specific, pointed criticisms to make from the perspective of someone who cares about programming and dealing with a consistent environment.
Then the last page degenerated into fussy UI-wank. Look folks -- look-and-feel is nice, and MS absolutely should've done more to enable consistency. But I don't use software for the pretty eye candy (certain gaming titles aside -- which, surprise!, have no expectation of consistency with the rest of the OS).
About the only place I do care is that the default Swing look-and-feel is just plain hideous. But whatever; I can cope with that even so.
Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain used this in places -- the narrative voice shifts a good bit between chapters. Was a pretty good book really (won a Nobel and everything). I believe Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, others) uses it from time to time -- maybe in Coming Through Slaughter?
I am also told that Bright Lights, Big City uses the second-person exclusively. You might find that a bit tedious, but you never know.
at least for FPS.
Otherwise, mostly a Gee Whiz! tech, though I suppose it could have useful applications for the disabled. But I wonder if we won't see wrist-based Repetitive Motion problems transferred to increased eyestrain...
The point of having the police force reflect society is that communities are much more likely to have cooperative relationships with police officers that look like them. It lowers the total number of confrontations and reduces the crime rate by making the law seem more respectable, because it has friendlier-looking representatives.
I don't know how they do things in Australia, but in the US, while I have seen 5-foot-tall cops, they're always in groups of three or four. Nobody reasonable expects the police to be Iron Man, busting up riots single-handedly. If NYPD is called to a bar fight, they bring lots of back-up. Cops don't go for fair odds when subduing violent suspects (nor should they).
Ugh, you're one of those jerks that messes with the smoke detectors in airplane lavatories, aren't you?
Seriously, though, you're absolutely right; leaving a known automatic monitoring device around is just asking for somebody to figure out a way to spoof it or turn it off without being detected. Countries that are willing to sell off their reactor fuel must need money even more than they need energy*, and that's precisely the spur to push some good old-fashioned brainpower into action.
*or have their reactors overseen by greedy functionaries who want money more than they want a reputation for success and political advancement; same effect.
The trick is to work help desk somewhere that the help desk is meaningful, where you get to do lots more than just answer a phone and read a tree. For instance, I spent two years under "help desk" hacking Perl every day.
Any job is a dead end if you take it as an excuse to stagnate and never learn anything beyond what's needed for competent performance.
The trouble with help desk is the reputation as help desk -- you have to be able to convince people that you know something beyond the job title. Of course, file that under "resume-cold-calling is hard." You would be well-advised to take on as much responsibility outside your limited official purview as you can handle. If you don't know how to do it yet, know that you'll learn it, and offer to do so at every opportunity. Make sure that you have specific, quantifiable achievements that you can point to, and make sure that someone with some clout at the company -- maybe your manager, maybe the manager of someone you're helping, who knows, but someone worth listening to -- is aware of what you've accomplished and can vouch for it when you apply for your next job.
Help desk, approached smartly, can be a great place to start building diverse skills and making connections for future recommendations. Just don't let yourself get pigeonholed and don't get trapped in bad politics.
Oh, and I'm assuming you mean help desk somewhere you can talk with people who aren't. If you can't, you can't do much other than show off for the other drones.
This is a natural consequence of your first point. Again, it's a temporary thing.
You're advising him to pick a future career based on the last six months, which happen to have bucked a thirty-year-long trend, and he'd be a fool to listen to that. You also overlooked the fact that states who have agriculture as the primary industry enjoy unemployment rates under 3%. Show me the source, and I'll give you the explanation. Most likely it will have to do with the temporary changes in the price of staples -- which are due to a number of factors, including recent fad-interest in biofuels, bad weather in non-American breadbaskets, and increasing costs of inputs (since practically all fertilizer in use in modern farming, not to mention plenty of the pesticides, comes from petrol).
And again, even if these trends are sustained, none of this is in any way helpful for an individual who might want to become a small farmer. Profits are mainly going to the likes of ADM; even to the extent that the few remaining small-holders are benefiting, the current agricultural boom would be factored into the purchase/lease price of any land that the questioner wanted to get to set up his own farm.
This is really interesting -- reminds me of when I was working helpdesk for a law services software company. Since it was a small, crappy company, and because I was young and exploitable, they decided that I got to have the pager and do 24/7 support for months on end.
My friend who'd got me the job (before leaving to do something else) came for a visit and saw me at that time -- she described how my shoulders slumped and my entire body collapsed when I heard the phone ring. It got to the point that I couldn't see a phone ring on a movie screen without being surprised that the person picking it up didn't answer "Application Support, may I help you?"
I don't think PTSD is too strong a comparison.
"Agriculture"? What planet are you on?
There are plenty of jobs for undocumented immigrants getting paid a quarter of minimum wage to pick tomatoes. Nearly everybody else who is in agriculture is operating a loss center.
Also, I don't know of anybody who ever got into education to get rich. And I understand now's not a great time to be in IT, what with new developments shipping a lot of development offshore, but this may be blown out of proportion.
Health care is recession-proof. It's about to implode for other reasons (sez the medical publisher), but it is certainly hiring at the moment.
The other issue is that we're a common-law society -- legal precedents have meaning, but aren't written up as laws. (They tend to answer the kinds of questions above). But unless someone's going to come out with the footnoted version of all the laws out there (which, admittedly, companies like Westlaw try to do, for other lawyers), just reading simple laws won't give the answers. The law isn't what Congress says -- it's what a judge says. (That's what I learned working in the Senate).
We can't blame the voting-machine companies entirely -- they aren't behaving out of character; they're doing exactly what they've been bred to do by our competitive marketplace. We live in a society in which to admit error is seen as a fatal weakness rather than a mark of strength. In the American corporate world, you only apologize when you've done something greivously wrong, and even then only under extreme duress, and without admitting fault. You never admit fault, because you never make mistakes. Fault is fatal.
So of course if anything bad happens, that defense mechanism kicks in--"Surely you're wrong, because it would be impossible for us to have committed an error!" A company without that instinct, led by people with a more reasonable approach to the world, would have been torn apart in the marketplace long before winning a major government contract, because there's selective pressure for trumped-up perfection.
Obviously we need to seriously rethink this whole electronic-voting concept and its current implementation. But we also need to rethink a society that kills the stock price of any corporation, or the reputation of any person, that admits a mistake. And yet I think I heard somewhere that before you can correct a mistake you have to admit it?
To err is human; so to claim inerrancy must be monstrous.
(Of course, none of this goes into the possibility of wilful tampering, which is a separate point. I don't discount the possibility, but I think what I've said still stands.)
All respect, Bruce, but I think you're talking through your hat on this one.
Those third world countries don't have the budget to spend on textbooks, whether they're DRM-encumbered e-books or not. So either way, they won't be buying them--because they can't. OLPC being built on Linux doesn't mean that publishers are going to start giving away their content. If they can't publish in a way that will prevent copies being made without them getting compensated, then they just won't publish to that market, full stop. They're on a narrow enough margin already, they're not going to start giving away all that effort, especially all translation work. So don't expect ebooks to be any cheaper than the real thing, unless we intentionally make them free ourselves. (Note how little any of this has to do with laptops).
If the goal is to get un-DRM'd textbooks to kids, then we'd be better off giving our time and money to Wikibooks than to OLPC, to make sure those decent-quality un-copyrighted books actually exist.
Microsoft has just essentially killed OpenDocument.
Format wars are irrelevant to this.
As I understand your argument, drm-free ebooks will be cheaper than regular books or drm'd ebooks, because ??????. The only sensible ?????? I can think of is "you can wantonly infringe them"--but if infringing were the chosen strategy, schools don't need OpenDocument; they can just make PDFs. Or have some of the kids type the books up in keyboarding class, or something.
If we want free textbooks to exist, which is the more sensible option: arguing about operating systems, or writing some free textbooks?
And while we dick around about operating systems on the poor kids' e-surfboards or whatever it is that laptops are supposed to be, poor children remain malnourished. OLPC continues not to respond to the most pressing needs of the developing world. About the only thing it's a good platform for is grandstanding.
There are two axes to this change. On the one hand there's the active-vs-passive (or interactive-vs-passive), and on the other there's the trivial-vs-deep. A change from passive-trivial to active-trivial doesn't make much difference to society. What would, would be people shifting from passive-trivial activities to passive-deep activities (don't watch Survivor, read a physics textbook); after that's done, then the passive-to-active shift will mean something good for society.
Failing that change, we have the present: people yammering on without a point. It's great for a lot of people-hours to be spent interactively instead of watching TV; and for this to produce permanent content. But (as the Wikipedia example so elegantly demonstrates) all that junk from the enthusiastic amateurs easily tends to drown out the truly good contributions.
I'm all for people not watching TV and instead learning something and applying it. But what if instead we all just decided to give each other IANAL legal advice on Slashdot? Suddenly it's impossible to find the really good content, and the reader doesn't know who or what to trust (ProTip: Probably not legal advice on slashdot). I think this is exactly what's happening in the spheres of production outlined by the Internet; people are contributing but aren't yet in a position to do so effectively. Hopefully that will change as time goes on, but the real paradigm change is yet to come.
Although I am given to understand it's revolutionized the way we find people to sleep with.
In my view, it's not a distribution problem, it's an economic problem.
Right -- an economy is a system for allocating/distributing scarce resources. A "distribution problem" is an economic problem. (It's not that we couldn't handle the logistics).