He most likely meant "doubling the size of the company" with regard to revenues, not market share. As you point out, you can't double market share for very long at all if you start at a reasonable percentage.
I have NEVER seen a car with HID lights that I did not find irritating and distracting. I have a hard time believing that they were all retrofit or stolen.
Do you live in Atlanta? I swear on my immortal soul that I saw exactly that on I-75 a year or two ago. He had sheet music propped up on the steering wheel and was driving with his knees.
That incident was surpassed only by my witnessing a man starting into his rear view mirror with a fully-lathered scalp, shaving his head with a straight razor...
And our own government spying on its citizens promotes freedom? It may (or may not) discourage terrorism, but then terrorism has little to no effect on our liberties and freedoms.
Yes, I shaved off a few finer points for the sake of simplicity (apparently a mistake =). All of the terminology in my post is more accurately phrased as "xxx net of inflation."
As far as the rest of your argument, I disagree. While individual companies may be growing in these industries, the industry as whole is remarkable stable/staic (net of GDP growth). The US paper industry in particular is about as closely linked to GDP as it's possible to be. While it's true that there are many new kinds of paper, it's equally the case that we stop using as many kinds (perforated paper for rotary-style computer printers, for example). The overall variance in the proportional size of the paper industry vs GDP has been pretty much zero in the last 20-30 years.
Amen. The "growth = life" philosophy is one I see echoed repeatedly in the business world. A book passed around my office recently espoused the idea that if you couldn't grow revenues at >10% per year you had best get out of business. This is quite possibly the the most pervasively misleading attitude I've come across.
It is a fact of life that you can't grow forever (faster than the economy, anyway). Do the math yourself. How many consecutive years can you grow at 15%, starting with a 20% market share? 11, before you absorb the entire market. It's at this point that your average CEO will try to branch out into new products and new lines of business that the company has no experience in, as often as not failing and destroying enormous sums of capital. The correct answer is to stick with what you're good at, churn out cash, and return it to your shareholders. There are plenty of people who get quietly rich in "stagnant" industries.
After all, if it weren't for static industries we wouldn't have food, clothes, paper, etc, etc.
Which, if true, means that either there is an imminent crash in the San Diego housing market or no one will sell any more houses. Supply and demand are your friends.
I've dropped mine (15 gb, gen 2) from shoulder height onto a brick walkway while it was playing. Other than a pretty good nick in the casing it survived unharmed.
While I'm sure this is a great idea for content providers, the farther the fee structure gets from a flat-rate system the less popular it will be with the customers. Games like EverQuest have conditioned gamers to expect monthly billing (or no billing at all, if you look at Diablo II), so anything more frequent than that will be seen as an irritation. A linear cost per time billing scheme also makes products substantially more expensive for heavy users, who are a primary source of word-of-mouth advertising. They must be kept happy. Furthermore, consumers respond very unfavorably to volatility in the amount they pay from one bill to the next ("My cell phone bill is WHAT??"), and a micropayment system would only exacerbate short-term fluctuations.
We have a political system where we allow people to volunteer for positions that wield ENORMOUS influence and then are surprised when we end up with a bunch of power-hungry bellicose busybodies who love nothing so much as telling everyone else what to do. Duh...
To back up the above poster, world's fastest marathon times are 2:04:55 for men and 2:15:25 for women. That's a 8.4% difference. That's closer than I would have expected, honestly, so I'd believe that women are better-suited towards endurance than other activities (say, power lifting).
"When it comes to campaign finaince reform, a small amount of free speech is being sacrificed in order to ensure that our elections are democratic and not influenced by money."
I would argue that that this is a large amount of free speech. I am currently unable to publish a candidate's VOTING RECORD within 90 days of the election. I can think of very few things that are more relevant to a candidate's electability than their voting record. Prevent me from launching a smear campaign calling him a baby-eating sociopath, fine, but crimminalizing the discussion of key political issues in the context of an election is flat-out wrong.
Part of why Lance is such an amazing cyclist is precisely because he was so ill during his cancer treatment. Normal athletes can train their bodies to be very good at certain activities, but no matter what they have certain biases and capabilities based on the kinds of excercise they did or didn't do when they were growing. You can adapt the "top layer" of your body, so to speak, but changing the core is more difficult. During Lance's cancer treatment he experienced nearly complete muscle atrophy. His body was so decayed that he had to learn to walk and use his limbs again. Throughout his recovery he was working back towards being a cyclist, so ALL of his musculature, vascular, circulatory, etc, systems were optimized for biking. He turned himself into a human hill-climbing machine because he started pretty much from scratch, which most people can't do.
Furthermore, the world as a whole alrady produces more than enough food for everyone to eat well. The real issue is food transportation and storage. It doesn't matter if you can grow billions upon billion tons of wheat in the Ukraine if you can't get it to the hungry people in Africa. There are a whole host of blockages in the way: physical difficulties of getting perishable goods to remote locations, the inability of people in said locations to pay market price, political trade limitations, regional warlords, etc, etc.
As of 02/05/04 the total debt was $7,009,333,811,289.69 (http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm) . Last year our GDP was an estimated $10,983,900,000,000 (http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/home/gdp.htm). It would take 63.81% of our production from a whole year to generate that money. In other terms, that's everyone's work product for the next 7.7 months. The amount of money that we can actually *afford* to put towards debt repayment barely (if at all) services the *interest.*
As it stands now we can keep paying out bonds using money from new purchases. However, if there's ever a large-scale loss of faith in the US economy and government the whole house of cards will come crashing down...
There is a flip side. If an individual sued a large corporation and lost, he would suddenly find himself responsible for millions of dollars in high-priced lawyers. That would make people think at least twice about even highly appropriate lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
He most likely meant "doubling the size of the company" with regard to revenues, not market share. As you point out, you can't double market share for very long at all if you start at a reasonable percentage.
I have NEVER seen a car with HID lights that I did not find irritating and distracting. I have a hard time believing that they were all retrofit or stolen.
Good for consumers, less good for producers.
Do you live in Atlanta? I swear on my immortal soul that I saw exactly that on I-75 a year or two ago. He had sheet music propped up on the steering wheel and was driving with his knees.
That incident was surpassed only by my witnessing a man starting into his rear view mirror with a fully-lathered scalp, shaving his head with a straight razor...
And our own government spying on its citizens promotes freedom? It may (or may not) discourage terrorism, but then terrorism has little to no effect on our liberties and freedoms.
Informative? Paragraph 2, word 15.
Yes, I shaved off a few finer points for the sake of simplicity (apparently a mistake =). All of the terminology in my post is more accurately phrased as "xxx net of inflation." As far as the rest of your argument, I disagree. While individual companies may be growing in these industries, the industry as whole is remarkable stable/staic (net of GDP growth). The US paper industry in particular is about as closely linked to GDP as it's possible to be. While it's true that there are many new kinds of paper, it's equally the case that we stop using as many kinds (perforated paper for rotary-style computer printers, for example). The overall variance in the proportional size of the paper industry vs GDP has been pretty much zero in the last 20-30 years.
Amen. The "growth = life" philosophy is one I see echoed repeatedly in the business world. A book passed around my office recently espoused the idea that if you couldn't grow revenues at >10% per year you had best get out of business. This is quite possibly the the most pervasively misleading attitude I've come across.
It is a fact of life that you can't grow forever (faster than the economy, anyway). Do the math yourself. How many consecutive years can you grow at 15%, starting with a 20% market share? 11, before you absorb the entire market. It's at this point that your average CEO will try to branch out into new products and new lines of business that the company has no experience in, as often as not failing and destroying enormous sums of capital. The correct answer is to stick with what you're good at, churn out cash, and return it to your shareholders. There are plenty of people who get quietly rich in "stagnant" industries.
After all, if it weren't for static industries we wouldn't have food, clothes, paper, etc, etc.
That's fine so long as the government cuts spending to compensate (HA!) as opposed to raising taxes, which would have a similar net effect.
Which, if true, means that either there is an imminent crash in the San Diego housing market or no one will sell any more houses. Supply and demand are your friends.
I've dropped mine (15 gb, gen 2) from shoulder height onto a brick walkway while it was playing. Other than a pretty good nick in the casing it survived unharmed.
While I'm sure this is a great idea for content providers, the farther the fee structure gets from a flat-rate system the less popular it will be with the customers. Games like EverQuest have conditioned gamers to expect monthly billing (or no billing at all, if you look at Diablo II), so anything more frequent than that will be seen as an irritation. A linear cost per time billing scheme also makes products substantially more expensive for heavy users, who are a primary source of word-of-mouth advertising. They must be kept happy. Furthermore, consumers respond very unfavorably to volatility in the amount they pay from one bill to the next ("My cell phone bill is WHAT??"), and a micropayment system would only exacerbate short-term fluctuations.
Well, by definition you choose Budweiser over other brands whenever you buy it.
We have a political system where we allow people to volunteer for positions that wield ENORMOUS influence and then are surprised when we end up with a bunch of power-hungry bellicose busybodies who love nothing so much as telling everyone else what to do. Duh...
Trademark violations, maybe, but not copyright infringement. But Mars and Eminem aren't operating in remotely similar industries anyway.
To back up the above poster, world's fastest marathon times are 2:04:55 for men and 2:15:25 for women. That's a 8.4% difference. That's closer than I would have expected, honestly, so I'd believe that women are better-suited towards endurance than other activities (say, power lifting).
"When it comes to campaign finaince reform, a small amount of free speech is being sacrificed in order to ensure that our elections are democratic and not influenced by money." I would argue that that this is a large amount of free speech. I am currently unable to publish a candidate's VOTING RECORD within 90 days of the election. I can think of very few things that are more relevant to a candidate's electability than their voting record. Prevent me from launching a smear campaign calling him a baby-eating sociopath, fine, but crimminalizing the discussion of key political issues in the context of an election is flat-out wrong.
These are the same people that exports comedy skits featuring parrots nailed to posts? Hello, Pot, this is Kettle...
Part of why Lance is such an amazing cyclist is precisely because he was so ill during his cancer treatment. Normal athletes can train their bodies to be very good at certain activities, but no matter what they have certain biases and capabilities based on the kinds of excercise they did or didn't do when they were growing. You can adapt the "top layer" of your body, so to speak, but changing the core is more difficult. During Lance's cancer treatment he experienced nearly complete muscle atrophy. His body was so decayed that he had to learn to walk and use his limbs again. Throughout his recovery he was working back towards being a cyclist, so ALL of his musculature, vascular, circulatory, etc, systems were optimized for biking. He turned himself into a human hill-climbing machine because he started pretty much from scratch, which most people can't do.
Furthermore, the world as a whole alrady produces more than enough food for everyone to eat well. The real issue is food transportation and storage. It doesn't matter if you can grow billions upon billion tons of wheat in the Ukraine if you can't get it to the hungry people in Africa. There are a whole host of blockages in the way: physical difficulties of getting perishable goods to remote locations, the inability of people in said locations to pay market price, political trade limitations, regional warlords, etc, etc.
The United States will *NEVER* pay back its debt.
) . Last year our GDP was an estimated $10,983,900,000,000 (http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/home/gdp.htm). It would take 63.81% of our production from a whole year to generate that money. In other terms, that's everyone's work product for the next 7.7 months. The amount of money that we can actually *afford* to put towards debt repayment barely (if at all) services the *interest.*
As of 02/05/04 the total debt was $7,009,333,811,289.69 (http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm
As it stands now we can keep paying out bonds using money from new purchases. However, if there's ever a large-scale loss of faith in the US economy and government the whole house of cards will come crashing down...
That's because (in a gross generalization) Americans eat poorly and don't excercise.
You can have good health CARE and still be unhealthy. The government can't mandate that people treat themselves well. Not that they won't try...
Depending, of course, on how much said room temperature superconductors cost...
There is a flip side. If an individual sued a large corporation and lost, he would suddenly find himself responsible for millions of dollars in high-priced lawyers. That would make people think at least twice about even highly appropriate lawsuits.
"neighborhoods full of kids with massive forearms."
Yeah, but that's not from playing breakey...