Boycotts of a company's products work because the operations of a company are making and selling the product, and not buying that product cuts off their income, lowering their profits. Boycotts of a company's stock, on the other hand, have no affect on the company's operations at all, and do not affect either income or profits. The business goes on as normal.
There is _nothing_ that compels an "automatic, equal and opposite transaction"
Um, yes, there is. The fact that until someone buys the stock, you have not actually sold it. This is really, really basic. Otherwise there's no sale. Every single successful sale of stock ever, by definition, is also a successful purchase of stock by the counterparty. Until someone other than Harvard buys the stock from Harvard, Harvard has not yet divested itself. Since the amount the other party paid and the number of shares they receive is identical to the amount Harvard receives and the number of shares Harvard gets rid of, the divestment is automatically coupled to an equal and opposite investment.
selling stock can actually generate a positive feedback loop that causes _more_ stock to be sold.
But it cannot cause more stock to be sold than is bought. Because without a buyer, there is no sale. Transactions have two parties and two sides and both sides are always in balance.
Yes, if lots of people want to sell the stock and few want to buy, that makes the stock price go down, and because lots of stock traders are stock price speculators, that can have a herd effect. So what? The price of stock does not affect the operations or the balance sheet of the business in the slightest.
Stock price only matters to investors who are gambling on share price appreciation. There are a lot of investors like that, but not all. Plenty of people buy stock for the dividends, and your divestment campaign simply makes the stock more attractive to those people. Net, what you do with a divestment campaign is change the owners of the company from people who want the stock price to go up to people who want the company to pay high dividends - and the former care a lot more about bad PR than the latter. Divestment, insofar as it has any effect on a coal company, will make that company less sensitive to social pressure that might affect the stock price and more interested in maximizing operational profit to maximize dividends.
No, divestment doesn't touch income at all, in the slightest, much less "profoundly". Boycotts and sanctions do, and what hurt South Africa was the boycotts and sanctions. If they were calling for Harvard to boycott energy from fossil fuels, there would actually be an economic point to the petition.
Divestment, on the other hand, does precisely nothing to income. In order to divest, Party B, the divestor, sells Party A's stock to Party C. Party C invests in the stock to the exact same extent that Party B divests. It's an automatic, equal-and-opposite transaction. And Party A doesn't have its operations affected in the slightest.
Which makes me wonder where the "Why is this on Slashdot!?" crowds are.
Now, now. I think it is news that at least 93 members of the Harvard faculty are so ignorant of how the stock market works that they don't notice that any divestment by any party, by necessity, is automatically matched by an equal investment by the counterparties who buy the stock from the divestor.
The problem is the headline, which should read something like, "93 Harvard faculty members admit they're as ignorant of economics as creationists are of biology". Well, and a summary that seems to think it's possible for any divestment campaign to have victories. But, still, the underlying fact 93 Harvard professors are ignorant fools is worth noting.
Right now, our current observations combined with general relativity say 96% of the universe is unaccounted-for by anything resembling a solid theory in quantum mechanics. Or, conversely, our current observations combined with quantum mechanics says general relativity is so wrong that it only can be made to work by assuming a mass-energy budget 25 times greater than that of the actual universe. So how can there not be anything huge to discover?
Granted, the stuff might be beyond our ability to discover, but we pretty blatantly don't know what's actually going on.
This is not because of "regulations" it's because of anti competitive measures like "franchise fees"
So, it's not because of "regulations", just government . . . I guess we'll call them "rules" . . . that require payment of fees in order to be allowed to compete?
If the government, at any level, has the regulatory power to say no to new competitors entering a business, the incumbents in that business will spend money at that level to convince them to say "no" to new competitors. It has happened every single time, with every single industry than any country every has ever allowed its government to regulate what businesses may enter a market. From medieval guilds to Elizabethan patents to taxi medallions to the FCC, it always happens.
And it happens every single time because regulation causes corruption. Public choice economics can no more be repealed by the ignorant but well-meaning than pi can be made to equal exactly 3.
Oh? Has the NSA defied a direct Presidential order?
If and when Obama, head of the Executive Branch, tells the NSA to stop collecting, and they keep collecting anyway, then we can start talking about how the NSA is only beholden to its own agenda.
In the meantime, there's no reason at all to believe the buck does not stop with the President. This is not "NSA spying" any more than that the war in Iraq was the "Department of Defense's war".
It's not like Obama has issued an order for the NSA to stop domestically collecting metadata right now. If he did that and the NSA kept collecting, then there would be an issue about whether the NSA was "by nature beyond oversight".
Rather, what we have here is the NSA doing what the President has told them they can do. Pretending the NSA is a rogue agency is simply letting the person in charge - the President - off the hook.
The atmosphere is, on the books, $0 in assets. That doesn't mean you can phase out use of the atmosphere and not wreck the economy. Imagine how much damage the economy would take if you stopped people from using the atmosphere and instead required that they acquire necessary gasses from non-atmospheric sources.
No, it won't still be a part of the EU. As a newly-independent state, it does not inherit membership in any limited-membership treaties. Scotland will have to petition for admission to any such it wishes to join, including the EU. It will then, under EU rules, have to get the unanimous consent of all EU members to join the EU.
I know the SNP says otherwise; the SNP is spouting nonsense.
Now, it's highly likely that the EU will be willing to let it in. However, there's no way it'll be let in without satisfying the rest of Europe on entry conditions.
This is why, in fact, there's no major question on what currency Scotland will use at all. It will either use the Euro from day one or use a local currency locked in the ERM II with the auto-glidepath to joining the Euro, because agreeing to do that will be a condition of joining the EU (nobody has any reason to give the Scots a way to take the Swedish dodge).
Scotland will not get any of the Thatcher-negotiated rebate, because none of the members of the EU have any reason to give it any part; the real wrangling will be between UK-EWNI and France on how much of the Scottish-proportional portion the UK keeps and how much is eliminated.
Scotland will at the same time assume a proportional portion of the British debt, because every EU member looking at its own separatist movement and its own debt will want to make the point to their separatists that independence won't mean escape.
I mean, Kerry's the guy who as Senator led the charge to kill the Integral Fast Reactor back in '94, easily making him one of the 100 people alive in the world today who are personally most responsible for carbon emissions. So, when the fucking asshole talks about the threat of climate change, is he bragging about his role in causing it?
Wayland's an effort to stuff a pointless layer of abstraction underneath X on Linux in order to make performance worse and debugging more difficult.
(Yes, yes, they say it's an effort to replace X. But look at how they're doing the compatibility with X - running a full X server on Wayland in order to run X apps. Then look at how much effort they've put into making Wayland portable to other varieties of *nix.)
It wouldn't be a "publicly acceptable reason" if it didn't have plausibility at a first glance.
The question, then, is if any of the reasons given actually have any merit, as opposed to mere plausibility. Which would require someone to come up with an example of when a CLA actually saved a project, or a lack of a CLA actually killed a project.
The basis is that Nokia is a bunch of idiots that actually tried to do manufacturing in India, showing all the judgment they did when they went with Windows Phone as a platform.
See, India's intelligentsia, by and large, doesn't like manufacturing. It might be necessary to some degree, but, offered a chance to replicate Taiwan or China's success by starting with cheap manufacturing, they'd decline. They want to jump straight ahead to a service/software economy via education rather than pass through an intermediate step of actually making physical things. So the basic self-interested counterbalances that you'd see elsewhere ("But we need to learn from Nokia so we can do this!" or "We need to treat Nokia well so others will build plants here too!") are weakened.
So, there's going to be a new owner for the factory, and thus there's an opportunity to extract protection money. After all, it's not like India wants manufacturing anyway.
reflected the chauvinism of the nationalist, technocratic exceptionalism of the '50s -better living through chemistry, etc that presaged the rise of the military industrial complex and corporatism masking itself as progress.
Oh, yeah, that's Heinlein, all right, as exemplified by his very next book, Stranger in a Strange Land.
Look, Robert Heinlein was a writer of speculative fiction. The whole damn point was to extrapolate, odd consequences included. Which is why you get such radically different results (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example, all having completely incompatible takes on modern democracy) depending on what premises Heinlein was playing with at the time.
Ideally making the point to the thoughtful reader that the reader's society and that society's accepted theories, conscious and unconscious, are just as guilty of absurdities as those explored in the books. But some readers are too dense to notice that, and some are so invested in the propriety of their absurdities that they abandon all rational thought in their defensive denouncements.
Taiwan is an island. It wouldn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is surrounded on all sides by water. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. If the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all denied it, it would simply mean they're all denying reality.
Similarly, Taiwan is a sovereign nation. It doesn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is not actually under the control of China or anyone else and just as clearly is not in control of the mainland. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. That the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all deny it simply means they're all denying reality.
Possible, yes, it just seems less likely than the existence of WIMPs.
The trouble is the Bullet Cluster lensing pretty much requires non-visible matter, even with the theories that assume relativity is wrong at large scales. It seems you can reconcile TeVeS with the Bullet Cluster using lots of neutrinos instead of WIMPs, but then when you plug that sort of neutrino abundance in TeVeS, you apparently get other inconsistencies elsewhere.
(Now, apparently STVG manages to handle the Bullet Cluster and galactic rotational curves without WIMPs . . . it'll be interesting to see what happens when people poke at that a bit more.)
Maybe at very large size and mass such as galaxies, general relativity doesn't hold and there's a better theory for explaining motion and gravity. If so we wouldn't have to invent nonexistent dark matter to account for the faster-than-expected galactic rotation and other things.
Maybe. Physics does have people working that line (TeVeS with massive neutrinos to explain the Bullet Cluster, Moffat's STVG). But WIMPs still are considered the most likely candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
What is divestment but a form of boycott?
Boycotts of a company's products work because the operations of a company are making and selling the product, and not buying that product cuts off their income, lowering their profits. Boycotts of a company's stock, on the other hand, have no affect on the company's operations at all, and do not affect either income or profits. The business goes on as normal.
There is _nothing_ that compels an "automatic, equal and opposite transaction"
Um, yes, there is. The fact that until someone buys the stock, you have not actually sold it. This is really, really basic. Otherwise there's no sale. Every single successful sale of stock ever, by definition, is also a successful purchase of stock by the counterparty. Until someone other than Harvard buys the stock from Harvard, Harvard has not yet divested itself. Since the amount the other party paid and the number of shares they receive is identical to the amount Harvard receives and the number of shares Harvard gets rid of, the divestment is automatically coupled to an equal and opposite investment.
selling stock can actually generate a positive feedback loop that causes _more_ stock to be sold.
But it cannot cause more stock to be sold than is bought. Because without a buyer, there is no sale. Transactions have two parties and two sides and both sides are always in balance.
Yes, if lots of people want to sell the stock and few want to buy, that makes the stock price go down, and because lots of stock traders are stock price speculators, that can have a herd effect. So what? The price of stock does not affect the operations or the balance sheet of the business in the slightest.
Stock price only matters to investors who are gambling on share price appreciation. There are a lot of investors like that, but not all. Plenty of people buy stock for the dividends, and your divestment campaign simply makes the stock more attractive to those people. Net, what you do with a divestment campaign is change the owners of the company from people who want the stock price to go up to people who want the company to pay high dividends - and the former care a lot more about bad PR than the latter. Divestment, insofar as it has any effect on a coal company, will make that company less sensitive to social pressure that might affect the stock price and more interested in maximizing operational profit to maximize dividends.
No, divestment doesn't touch income at all, in the slightest, much less "profoundly". Boycotts and sanctions do, and what hurt South Africa was the boycotts and sanctions. If they were calling for Harvard to boycott energy from fossil fuels, there would actually be an economic point to the petition.
Divestment, on the other hand, does precisely nothing to income. In order to divest, Party B, the divestor, sells Party A's stock to Party C. Party C invests in the stock to the exact same extent that Party B divests. It's an automatic, equal-and-opposite transaction. And Party A doesn't have its operations affected in the slightest.
Which makes me wonder where the "Why is this on Slashdot!?" crowds are.
Now, now. I think it is news that at least 93 members of the Harvard faculty are so ignorant of how the stock market works that they don't notice that any divestment by any party, by necessity, is automatically matched by an equal investment by the counterparties who buy the stock from the divestor.
The problem is the headline, which should read something like, "93 Harvard faculty members admit they're as ignorant of economics as creationists are of biology". Well, and a summary that seems to think it's possible for any divestment campaign to have victories. But, still, the underlying fact 93 Harvard professors are ignorant fools is worth noting.
Right now, our current observations combined with general relativity say 96% of the universe is unaccounted-for by anything resembling a solid theory in quantum mechanics. Or, conversely, our current observations combined with quantum mechanics says general relativity is so wrong that it only can be made to work by assuming a mass-energy budget 25 times greater than that of the actual universe. So how can there not be anything huge to discover?
Granted, the stuff might be beyond our ability to discover, but we pretty blatantly don't know what's actually going on.
This is not because of "regulations" it's because of anti competitive measures like "franchise fees"
So, it's not because of "regulations", just government . . . I guess we'll call them "rules" . . . that require payment of fees in order to be allowed to compete?
If the government, at any level, has the regulatory power to say no to new competitors entering a business, the incumbents in that business will spend money at that level to convince them to say "no" to new competitors. It has happened every single time, with every single industry than any country every has ever allowed its government to regulate what businesses may enter a market. From medieval guilds to Elizabethan patents to taxi medallions to the FCC, it always happens.
And it happens every single time because regulation causes corruption. Public choice economics can no more be repealed by the ignorant but well-meaning than pi can be made to equal exactly 3.
Why? In large part because it was an easier migration from OS/2 to XP than to anything else, that's why.
And OS/2 was there because in the late 1980s and early 1990s IBM was backing it and the other available choice was SCO Unix.
The top is the President, unless someone has evidence he gave an order to stop the spying and it was disobeyed.
Oh? Has the NSA defied a direct Presidential order?
If and when Obama, head of the Executive Branch, tells the NSA to stop collecting, and they keep collecting anyway, then we can start talking about how the NSA is only beholden to its own agenda.
In the meantime, there's no reason at all to believe the buck does not stop with the President. This is not "NSA spying" any more than that the war in Iraq was the "Department of Defense's war".
No.
It's not like Obama has issued an order for the NSA to stop domestically collecting metadata right now. If he did that and the NSA kept collecting, then there would be an issue about whether the NSA was "by nature beyond oversight".
Rather, what we have here is the NSA doing what the President has told them they can do. Pretending the NSA is a rogue agency is simply letting the person in charge - the President - off the hook.
The atmosphere is, on the books, $0 in assets. That doesn't mean you can phase out use of the atmosphere and not wreck the economy. Imagine how much damage the economy would take if you stopped people from using the atmosphere and instead required that they acquire necessary gasses from non-atmospheric sources.
Scotland will still be part of the EU,
No, it won't still be a part of the EU. As a newly-independent state, it does not inherit membership in any limited-membership treaties. Scotland will have to petition for admission to any such it wishes to join, including the EU. It will then, under EU rules, have to get the unanimous consent of all EU members to join the EU.
I know the SNP says otherwise; the SNP is spouting nonsense.
Now, it's highly likely that the EU will be willing to let it in. However, there's no way it'll be let in without satisfying the rest of Europe on entry conditions.
This is why, in fact, there's no major question on what currency Scotland will use at all. It will either use the Euro from day one or use a local currency locked in the ERM II with the auto-glidepath to joining the Euro, because agreeing to do that will be a condition of joining the EU (nobody has any reason to give the Scots a way to take the Swedish dodge).
Scotland will not get any of the Thatcher-negotiated rebate, because none of the members of the EU have any reason to give it any part; the real wrangling will be between UK-EWNI and France on how much of the Scottish-proportional portion the UK keeps and how much is eliminated.
Scotland will at the same time assume a proportional portion of the British debt, because every EU member looking at its own separatist movement and its own debt will want to make the point to their separatists that independence won't mean escape.
I mean, Kerry's the guy who as Senator led the charge to kill the Integral Fast Reactor back in '94, easily making him one of the 100 people alive in the world today who are personally most responsible for carbon emissions. So, when the fucking asshole talks about the threat of climate change, is he bragging about his role in causing it?
You won't need X if you use QT or GTK3
Yes, I know. Reminds me of Micrografx Mirrors and WLO.
Wayland's an effort to stuff a pointless layer of abstraction underneath X on Linux in order to make performance worse and debugging more difficult.
(Yes, yes, they say it's an effort to replace X. But look at how they're doing the compatibility with X - running a full X server on Wayland in order to run X apps. Then look at how much effort they've put into making Wayland portable to other varieties of *nix.)
It wouldn't be a "publicly acceptable reason" if it didn't have plausibility at a first glance.
The question, then, is if any of the reasons given actually have any merit, as opposed to mere plausibility. Which would require someone to come up with an example of when a CLA actually saved a project, or a lack of a CLA actually killed a project.
The basis is that Nokia is a bunch of idiots that actually tried to do manufacturing in India, showing all the judgment they did when they went with Windows Phone as a platform.
See, India's intelligentsia, by and large, doesn't like manufacturing. It might be necessary to some degree, but, offered a chance to replicate Taiwan or China's success by starting with cheap manufacturing, they'd decline. They want to jump straight ahead to a service/software economy via education rather than pass through an intermediate step of actually making physical things. So the basic self-interested counterbalances that you'd see elsewhere ("But we need to learn from Nokia so we can do this!" or "We need to treat Nokia well so others will build plants here too!") are weakened.
So, there's going to be a new owner for the factory, and thus there's an opportunity to extract protection money. After all, it's not like India wants manufacturing anyway.
Well, mostly, because this way people don't send me fundraising letters.
. . . I saw this headline and expected to see something about the use of lead and mercury in attacks on commercial shipping.
reflected the chauvinism of the nationalist, technocratic exceptionalism of the '50s -better living through chemistry, etc that presaged the rise of the military industrial complex and corporatism masking itself as progress.
Oh, yeah, that's Heinlein, all right, as exemplified by his very next book, Stranger in a Strange Land.
Look, Robert Heinlein was a writer of speculative fiction. The whole damn point was to extrapolate, odd consequences included. Which is why you get such radically different results (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example, all having completely incompatible takes on modern democracy) depending on what premises Heinlein was playing with at the time.
Ideally making the point to the thoughtful reader that the reader's society and that society's accepted theories, conscious and unconscious, are just as guilty of absurdities as those explored in the books. But some readers are too dense to notice that, and some are so invested in the propriety of their absurdities that they abandon all rational thought in their defensive denouncements.
Kinda-sorta. In this context, they mean the known type of neutrinos, at high energy (and thus mass), as opposed to an undiscovered WIMP.
There are all sorts of issues with this, especially when you get into which is why undiscovered WIMPs are favored.
It's an analogy.
Taiwan is an island. It wouldn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is surrounded on all sides by water. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. If the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all denied it, it would simply mean they're all denying reality.
Similarly, Taiwan is a sovereign nation. It doesn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is not actually under the control of China or anyone else and just as clearly is not in control of the mainland. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. That the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all deny it simply means they're all denying reality.
Possible, yes, it just seems less likely than the existence of WIMPs.
The trouble is the Bullet Cluster lensing pretty much requires non-visible matter, even with the theories that assume relativity is wrong at large scales. It seems you can reconcile TeVeS with the Bullet Cluster using lots of neutrinos instead of WIMPs, but then when you plug that sort of neutrino abundance in TeVeS, you apparently get other inconsistencies elsewhere.
(Now, apparently STVG manages to handle the Bullet Cluster and galactic rotational curves without WIMPs . . . it'll be interesting to see what happens when people poke at that a bit more.)
Maybe at very large size and mass such as galaxies, general relativity doesn't hold and there's a better theory for explaining motion and gravity. If so we wouldn't have to invent nonexistent dark matter to account for the faster-than-expected galactic rotation and other things.
Maybe. Physics does have people working that line (TeVeS with massive neutrinos to explain the Bullet Cluster, Moffat's STVG). But WIMPs still are considered the most likely candidate.
Even if the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all declared Taiwan a peninsula, it wouldn't change the fact that it is an island.
Wait, you want to abolish the police?