Shorting overvalued companies is a riskier value investing proposition than buying undervalued ones, but it's something that one might want to do to diversify a portfolio.
Absolutely. However both positions require analysis and both positions exist and there is nothing in what you said that supports the GP position that short sellers are somehow magically checking better.
Really? Says the damned history of the stock market.
People are greedy, yes. And of course many stocks are sold on a hunch because something thinks something. But many stocks are shorted on the same flimsy basis. I'm still looking for an argument that explains why short sellers are all deligent careful analysts and long buyers are all idiots acting on a whim.
I've test-driven a Model S. I didn't buy it, I bought a BMW instead. But there was a lot that I liked, and while I thought it was overpriced by maybe 20k, it wasn't junk and the only reason that it's niche is the price.
Chinese cars, on the other hand, have in general failed so hard on any serious quality tests in the west that it is very clear they are still in the early steps of understanding how to build a proper car at all. I'm sure they will get there in about a decade, but I can't hold my breath that long.
I'm here with my name (trivial to link to my real-life identity even, if you are not an idiot with a search engine) and I own those Tesla stocks that you sold. And I'm holding them still and will hold them in a year, just like I did a year ago or two years ago when people were doing the same dances.
Because Tesla is hands down leader in its market, Elon Musk or not. I love idiots like you who focus on the star CEO and don't understand that half of a leaders job is to take the shit so people under him can calmly work without the interference. And what I see coming out of the company I like. There are growing pains, but as long as they are growing pains, I'm fine.
You can continue selling short, I don't care much. You can also invest in some AAA rated company that is closing factories and firing people and cutting markets and for some reason people think that leads to being more profitable (it doesn't, it just leads to a higher profit-to-equity ratio which is a KPI for analysts who think only in numbers).
At the same time, I'm driving a BMW and not a Model S because there is a lot that the guys at Tesla still need to learn about good interior design, but from what I've read (only test-driven a Model S, so I can't say myself), the Model X and Model 3 are already much better in that regard.
The shorts are literally the only group who has an economic interest in scrutinizing an asset.
That's a total bullshit statement.
Any investor has an interest in doing that, because even if you assume that in general the economy will go up, so long is always profitable, it doesn't mean that a) this specific company is not bancrupt next year or b) it isn't growing slower than some other stock that you could put your money in or c) it isn't growing slower than the inflation rate.
Without this kind of rigor you get more money being thrown at fantastic enterprises like Theranos.
Says who?
Nobody cares that they are holding lemons as long as the price keeps rising.
But the price doesn't rise by magic. Plus, see above. Also, opportunity costs.
short sellers are very much beneficial to the marketâ(TM)s well-being and by extension our resource allocation as a society.
Short sellers have their place.
Speculators, however, are debatable. The volatility of some stocks clearly has nothing at all to do with the underlying company. And that is a clear sign that something in the system is broken.
The problem with people complaining about CEO salaries is that the lower level employees make what they make because they chose to work at that place at that rate.
You are an idiot.
I've never earned minimum wage in my life. I've been among the top earners in any company I was in for the past decade or so. I've worked with CEOs directly, and not once.
A rate of 300:1 is unethical. And remember that this is compared to the average salary, the rate compared to the lower salaries is much higher. It is unethical not because the cleaning lady decided to work as a cleaning lady at a typical cleaning lady rate. It is unethical because it is not the result of rational business decisions, but of an artificial, non-free pseudo-market. If CEOs were actually paid by performance, for example, they would not get bonuses in bad years. Guess what? The bank CEOs got their full bonuses even in the years that their banks had to bailed out by taxpayer money. Somehow, the boards always find (or better: make up) some reason why the bonuses should be paid.
If these minimum wage earners are not in school or in some other way working to benefit their lives and careers they frankly have no one to blame but themselves for their circumstances.
I happen to know a couple very good people who are at the low end of society, earning badly or being unemployed. Without exception, how they got there was a mix of bad decisions and bad luck, and never just one of those.
The main problem is that if you are exposed to that kind of life for a longer duration, it changes your mind. I've seen people literally degenerate and it pained my to no end. But the constant pressure, the constant fear, the constant shortage of money - you can ask any medical doctor what long periods of stress do to mental and physical health.
Unfortunately, one of the first things that got cut in the social security spendings after the golden years were over was support networks for the unemployed and poor. They still get money and other types of support, but not the kind that would allow them to get up on their feet again.
And that is the other reason why insanely high CEO salaries are unethical. As long as people in this country cannot afford food everyday or shelter, what are we doing giving some people more money than they know what to do with? I'm not talking drug addicts and alcoholics, either. I know people who earn badly as nurses, or teachers. If we as a country cannot afford to pay such people a proper salary, then making millionaires out of CEOs whose only claim to wealth is caused by network effects that society built for them, is straight out evil.
(I know the trolls will now come out and shout "communism", but if you are able to read you see that I'm not talking about that. I'm fine with paying people well, and much more than other people. I'm saying that the gap is too wide, and is getting wider, and I don't know about you but when I'm in hospital with something life-threatening, I prefer everyone who takes care of me to be well-fed, well-rested and not stressed out. It reduces mistakes.)
So, the manager can easily (compared to anyone below) appropriate the good, and distribute the bad, and thus take out of the total pie much more than everyone else.
That assumes that board members are total imbeciles.
I would hold the CEO responsible for everything. And bash him for any attempt to weasel out of responsibility. President Truman had the right approach.
Yeah, this is why I don't get those kinds of offers. I'm just not enough of a sleazeball and my satisfaction in a job comes not from the paycheck, but from doing my job well. The paycheck is is nice, but I've taken better jobs for less pay before and I'd do it again (to be fair, I've also had considerable raises, so in the long run it evens out).
There is indeed a common denominator between fascism and socialism and that is the denial of the individual in favor of a class (socialism) or national (fascism) identity. There is also a common denominator in how both wish to excert control over the economy and society.
However, you have been utterly caught up in a false dichotomy. The left-right painting of politics is an oversimplification and real-world political positions have multiple dimensions. Fascism and socialism are near to each other only on one of them, the liberty axis.
There are many differences between the two. For example, fascism wants the means of production in the hands of few (who are easily controlled and ideally should be party members), while socialism wants it in the hands of everyone. Then, of course, there is communism which adds an organisational layer to that, and Stalinism which centralises that so the end result is again control in the hands of few.
Your idea is interesting. Your conclusion is simplistic, and misleading.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the initial assumption of your argument is wrong, and if you had read my posting, you would have noticed that I said the pension system survived both world wars. Which means it came into existence before the first one, which means the nazi party did not even exist, much less had anything to do with it.
The last part of your posting is such a pure gibberish that mumbo franco blubbo "macho" negative attitude, crap began because inlcuding long care so the sense mumfto babble AND THATS WHY!
That is actually a great point and should be modded up.
The vast majority of those CEOs couldn't do squat without the network and a vast array of support, both internally and externally, and that justifies the seemingly insane tax rates of a fair tax system. The network effects that lead to millionaire salaries would never exist without the society that enables them.
OK, but why didn't you take the job then? You could have made dramatically more money.
I've actually been CEO of a (small) company for a few years. I don't want to do it again. I am much more happy in information security, which is more interesting, more challenging and more rewarding on a personal level to me.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
People think that those millions are for sitting on your ass and playing boss. I've seen how some of these guys actually work and for my current salary, or even twice that, I wouldn't work like that. That's why I say a 20x factor is justified, because at that level, your job becomes your life.
That is insane. They are making choices that affect the EXISTENCE of every department, what every customer sees, even the location of the building they are in. It is all on them and they should be paid according to that degree of responsibility.
That is what I put below under "potential impact". The day to day work of the CEO affects very few people. His big decisions can be existential, but they are also rare.
should be paid according to that degree of responsibility.
That is exactly what I mean. First you said "by impact", now you say "by responsibility". That is not the same thing. That is why I agree with you in principle, but I disagree that this is a clean or simple way of doing it. You will have long and complex discussions about who is more meaningful than someone else, or maybe not. There are entire departments that are important once a year, but at that time, they are absolutely essential.
You are simply moving the problem to a scoring system, but the scoring system will have the same complexity.
We all know that is false, I have seen way to many imbeciles working at companies to claim every job is important
I didn't say every person. I said job. If the job was redundant, it would be done away with (ok, maybe not immediately because of intertia or union contracts, but in principle). I didn't judge the person currently sitting on the job.
Moving around physical mail is at this point laughably useless in a world where anything important is electronic, or someone can easily go down and collect a package.
I see you have never worked in a large company that gets hundreds or thousands of items of physical mail every day.
Everything is a matter of context. Some job might be pointless in one company, and essential in another. There's no IT manager position in an ice cream stall.
The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy.
The problem is that it rewards being greedy, and it rewards higher greed with higher rewards. This way, a questionable trait is amplified.
The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
Funny how the rest of the world has that one figured out. It is not a lack of plan, it is a lack of want. Too many people profit from the current situation.
The same happened in Germany, just the other way around. We had a perfectly workable pension system, which had survived both world wars and was doing ok. There were some issues that needed adjustments, and a problem of money being squandered on non-pension issues. But it was a state-run system and thus generated no profit for anyone. So in a two-decade campaign, the public was convinced that the system was utterly broken, would fail real-soon-now and they themselves would receive tiny pensions if it is not completely reworked. Then it got completely reworked and turned into a hybrid system where you get minimal payout from the state-pension system (that anyway you pay in as much as before) while having additional private insurance-based pensions with tax incentives to make people go there. Ten years down the road it turns out that people now get exactly what they were threatened with: Tiny pensions even after a life-time of work. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense until you realize that the main thing that changed is that the insurance industry has a new market and is making really nice profits from it.
Same with your healthcare system. Follow the money. Someone would make less money if you had proper healthcare, and that someone is fighting tooth and nail, before and behind the curtains, to keep the system as it is.
We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are.
You touched upon the real problem there, but didn't grab it.
This, exactly, is the problem. Every CEO of every major company these days is paid like a precious, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable snowflake. Very few actually are. Thanks to my career choices I've worked directly with a good number of top-level executives in several companies from small to 5000+ employees.
Many of these people are very competent and very hard-working. Some of them are brilliant. Most of them could not be replaced without a considerable change in the company direction and culture as their personality influences everyone down the chain.
Most of them deserves to be paid several times what I earn, and I earn not bad.
But not one of them is irreplaceable. Not one of them needs to have his salary take up its own position in the company budget. Not in one case would the entire company crumble if he left. There would be a shock wave, sure. There would be changes, sure. But after some adjustments, business would go on.
There are some iconic leaders who are or would be missed. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - you can barely imagine their companies without them.
But the number of CEOs is far larger than the number of iconic CEOs. Too many of them believe that they are irreplaceable, and too many boards think the same (because guess who sits on those boards?).
The 20x figure is a number you can justify on a rational basis. The 300+ times is a system spiralling out of control, because too many snowflakes think they are individually important, and refuse to admit that to the person throwing the snowball, they really don't matter one bit.
To my mind this is pretty simply - a person should be paid a sliding scale based on how many people their work directly impacts, combined with how close they are to affecting customers.
You will not be able to define that clearly.
The work of the cleaning crew, for example, impacts everyone in the company. The work of your genius inventor, on the other hand, impacts nobody directly.
And, quite honestly, the work of the CEO most of the time affects very few people.
What you mean is potential impact. The CEO could make a decision that affects everyone greatly, while the cleaning crew cannot - they do their job but don't make decisions.
But between the extremes, you won't be able to define the scale cleanly. Who is more meaningful, the developer or the sysadmin?
A mail guy or someone working a front desk? Come on, they are not offering much real value
Really? Do without them for a month and see how well that goes.
Every job in a company is important, otherwise the company would not pay someone to do it.
The problem of fair payment is not a simple one, and a blanket solution will not work. What we have right now is actually not that bad (a market system), except that it is skewed on both ends - on the low end, people are forced to accept bad conditions because unemployment is high and very undesireable, and on the high end, people get ridiculous salaries and aren't reviewed properly because they are all part of the same circle-jerk group.
It's in the fact that these guys basically decide their own salaries. Mr. Boss is the CEO of company A, and sits on the board of company B and C. Mr. Big, meanwhile, is CEO of company B, but sits on the board of A and C, and Mr. Greedy is CEO of C and on the board of A and B.
Guess what they will decide when it comes to yearly reviews and salary adjustments.
The system is broken because a relatively small in group decides amongst themselves, instead of the independent outside review that the system is intended to have. It doesn't even need to have all companies working like that - company D which has a clean board and CEO, will not be able to resist the upwards pull of the others, because the CEO of D one day will get an offer from A, or just look at it, and see that the CEO there gets 200% more, and he will ask his board why he doesn't and what they will do to stop him from going there.
This kind of built-in dilemma is exactly where government oversight and regulation comes into play, when the system is broken and needs outside interference to right itself. Because no publicly traded company will start with the change, because doing so just isn't a rational decision.
Of course that isn't safe. It can be various degrees of unhealthy, and some ways are faster and more damaging than others, but obviously that isn't healthy.
Short selling is more risky/rewarding, which is why you can make more money in a shorter time and also why it is preferred by people who see the stock exchange as a casino. Nobody I know or ever heard of is using shorting as a long-term investment strategy.
In principle, both long and short are perfectly valid strategies. But due to their different natures, they attract different kinds of players.
I have no doubt that there are good people with honest intentions in that game as well. Just like there are crooks on the other side. In general, however, you will find investors in the long game and gamblers in the short game.
But of course I have no idea what I'm talking about. I only worked as a broker for a relatively short time of my life.
Short sellers, though in principle the practice is legitimate, are typically a crowd of get-rich-fast schemers. The primary reason they are short sellers is not that they honestly believe a company will go down or is overvalued, but that prices almost always go down faster than up. If you want to make money quickly, you go short. If you want to invest and make money in the long run, you go long. Wait, it's even called like that, what a surprise!
Lots and lots of them are in it for short-term profit which is why they have stop-loss orders in place to bail them out if the market goes the other way. And they are often in with leverage, so that they make 10 bucks on every point that the price moves. Which, of course, is also true if the price moves the other way. So their stop-loss orders are often much closer to the current price than it would be for investors who are quite ok with having some up and down movement, because they are looking at the company behind the price and don't care about today or tomorrow, they care about next quarter or next year.
So short sellers are a) make-money-fast guys and b) volatile to price changes going against them. With that, yes they lost millions, I easily believe that, because they probably bought at $350, set a stop-loss order at $360 and were leveraged 10:1 so that the $10 upwards swing lost them $100 per stock.
I so much hope the case finds a judge who understands the stock market and flat out tells them to not play in the kitchen if they can't stand the heat.
They would have been absolutely fine if they would not play with so much leverage that they need tight stop-losses.
If you don't see it at first glance: It doesn't have keys. The whole thing is a big multi-touch surface, long before multi-touch appeared on smartphones. So you can type and the next second use it as a touchpad. It was pretty nifty.
FingerWorks, the company that made it, was acquired by Apple. Then the iPhone appeared, with multi-touch. Ever since, I've been waiting for an all-touch Apple keyboard to appear.
As I outlined, the starting conditions could not have been more different.
The USA suffered no damage to its industry at all. On the contrary, many historians apparently believe that the war was an economical and industrial boon. It then poured its economical strength into rebuilding Europe and Japan.
Russia was almost destroyed, economically. For much of the war, people were on hunger rations while manufacturing engines of war, bullets, etc. After the war, much of the industrial capacity of Russia was just gone. A vast number of its people were gone. It took decades just to return to pre-war levels at which time the Cold War was in full swing and the economy was once again tied down by military spending.
The end of the Cold War was not close at all, that is not what I said. In a metaphor: Two cars race and one of them comes ahead, very clearly. What I'm saying is: If the other car had also been allowed to drive the race with four wheels, the race would have been more close.
Slashdot Mirror
Shorting overvalued companies is a riskier value investing proposition than buying undervalued ones, but it's something that one might want to do to diversify a portfolio.
Absolutely. However both positions require analysis and both positions exist and there is nothing in what you said that supports the GP position that short sellers are somehow magically checking better.
Really? Says the damned history of the stock market.
People are greedy, yes. And of course many stocks are sold on a hunch because something thinks something. But many stocks are shorted on the same flimsy basis. I'm still looking for an argument that explains why short sellers are all deligent careful analysts and long buyers are all idiots acting on a whim.
That may well be true, but has nothing to do with the argument that short sellers are somehow magically better people.
define "better"
I've test-driven a Model S. I didn't buy it, I bought a BMW instead. But there was a lot that I liked, and while I thought it was overpriced by maybe 20k, it wasn't junk and the only reason that it's niche is the price.
Chinese cars, on the other hand, have in general failed so hard on any serious quality tests in the west that it is very clear they are still in the early steps of understanding how to build a proper car at all. I'm sure they will get there in about a decade, but I can't hold my breath that long.
Funny how the short sellers all hide.
I'm here with my name (trivial to link to my real-life identity even, if you are not an idiot with a search engine) and I own those Tesla stocks that you sold. And I'm holding them still and will hold them in a year, just like I did a year ago or two years ago when people were doing the same dances.
Because Tesla is hands down leader in its market, Elon Musk or not. I love idiots like you who focus on the star CEO and don't understand that half of a leaders job is to take the shit so people under him can calmly work without the interference. And what I see coming out of the company I like. There are growing pains, but as long as they are growing pains, I'm fine.
You can continue selling short, I don't care much. You can also invest in some AAA rated company that is closing factories and firing people and cutting markets and for some reason people think that leads to being more profitable (it doesn't, it just leads to a higher profit-to-equity ratio which is a KPI for analysts who think only in numbers).
At the same time, I'm driving a BMW and not a Model S because there is a lot that the guys at Tesla still need to learn about good interior design, but from what I've read (only test-driven a Model S, so I can't say myself), the Model X and Model 3 are already much better in that regard.
The shorts are literally the only group who has an economic interest in scrutinizing an asset.
That's a total bullshit statement.
Any investor has an interest in doing that, because even if you assume that in general the economy will go up, so long is always profitable, it doesn't mean that a) this specific company is not bancrupt next year or b) it isn't growing slower than some other stock that you could put your money in or c) it isn't growing slower than the inflation rate.
Without this kind of rigor you get more money being thrown at fantastic enterprises like Theranos.
Says who?
Nobody cares that they are holding lemons as long as the price keeps rising.
But the price doesn't rise by magic. Plus, see above. Also, opportunity costs.
short sellers are very much beneficial to the marketâ(TM)s well-being and by extension our resource allocation as a society.
Short sellers have their place.
Speculators, however, are debatable. The volatility of some stocks clearly has nothing at all to do with the underlying company. And that is a clear sign that something in the system is broken.
The problem with people complaining about CEO salaries is that the lower level employees make what they make because they chose to work at that place at that rate.
You are an idiot.
I've never earned minimum wage in my life. I've been among the top earners in any company I was in for the past decade or so. I've worked with CEOs directly, and not once.
A rate of 300:1 is unethical. And remember that this is compared to the average salary, the rate compared to the lower salaries is much higher. It is unethical not because the cleaning lady decided to work as a cleaning lady at a typical cleaning lady rate. It is unethical because it is not the result of rational business decisions, but of an artificial, non-free pseudo-market. If CEOs were actually paid by performance, for example, they would not get bonuses in bad years. Guess what? The bank CEOs got their full bonuses even in the years that their banks had to bailed out by taxpayer money. Somehow, the boards always find (or better: make up) some reason why the bonuses should be paid.
If these minimum wage earners are not in school or in some other way working to benefit their lives and careers they frankly have no one to blame but themselves for their circumstances.
I happen to know a couple very good people who are at the low end of society, earning badly or being unemployed. Without exception, how they got there was a mix of bad decisions and bad luck, and never just one of those.
The main problem is that if you are exposed to that kind of life for a longer duration, it changes your mind. I've seen people literally degenerate and it pained my to no end. But the constant pressure, the constant fear, the constant shortage of money - you can ask any medical doctor what long periods of stress do to mental and physical health.
Unfortunately, one of the first things that got cut in the social security spendings after the golden years were over was support networks for the unemployed and poor. They still get money and other types of support, but not the kind that would allow them to get up on their feet again.
And that is the other reason why insanely high CEO salaries are unethical. As long as people in this country cannot afford food everyday or shelter, what are we doing giving some people more money than they know what to do with? I'm not talking drug addicts and alcoholics, either. I know people who earn badly as nurses, or teachers. If we as a country cannot afford to pay such people a proper salary, then making millionaires out of CEOs whose only claim to wealth is caused by network effects that society built for them, is straight out evil.
(I know the trolls will now come out and shout "communism", but if you are able to read you see that I'm not talking about that. I'm fine with paying people well, and much more than other people. I'm saying that the gap is too wide, and is getting wider, and I don't know about you but when I'm in hospital with something life-threatening, I prefer everyone who takes care of me to be well-fed, well-rested and not stressed out. It reduces mistakes.)
So, the manager can easily (compared to anyone below) appropriate the good, and distribute the bad, and thus take out of the total pie much more than everyone else.
That assumes that board members are total imbeciles.
I would hold the CEO responsible for everything. And bash him for any attempt to weasel out of responsibility. President Truman had the right approach.
Yeah, this is why I don't get those kinds of offers. I'm just not enough of a sleazeball and my satisfaction in a job comes not from the paycheck, but from doing my job well. The paycheck is is nice, but I've taken better jobs for less pay before and I'd do it again (to be fair, I've also had considerable raises, so in the long run it evens out).
His death had a major effect on the company and industry. You can't say that about most CEOs.
parent needs to be modded up. excellent summary.
That is actually an interesting position.
There is indeed a common denominator between fascism and socialism and that is the denial of the individual in favor of a class (socialism) or national (fascism) identity. There is also a common denominator in how both wish to excert control over the economy and society.
However, you have been utterly caught up in a false dichotomy. The left-right painting of politics is an oversimplification and real-world political positions have multiple dimensions. Fascism and socialism are near to each other only on one of them, the liberty axis.
There are many differences between the two. For example, fascism wants the means of production in the hands of few (who are easily controlled and ideally should be party members), while socialism wants it in the hands of everyone. Then, of course, there is communism which adds an organisational layer to that, and Stalinism which centralises that so the end result is again control in the hands of few.
Your idea is interesting. Your conclusion is simplistic, and misleading.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the initial assumption of your argument is wrong, and if you had read my posting, you would have noticed that I said the pension system survived both world wars. Which means it came into existence before the first one, which means the nazi party did not even exist, much less had anything to do with it.
The last part of your posting is such a pure gibberish that mumbo franco blubbo "macho" negative attitude, crap began because inlcuding long care so the sense mumfto babble AND THATS WHY!
That is actually a great point and should be modded up.
The vast majority of those CEOs couldn't do squat without the network and a vast array of support, both internally and externally, and that justifies the seemingly insane tax rates of a fair tax system. The network effects that lead to millionaire salaries would never exist without the society that enables them.
OK, but why didn't you take the job then? You could have made dramatically more money.
I've actually been CEO of a (small) company for a few years. I don't want to do it again. I am much more happy in information security, which is more interesting, more challenging and more rewarding on a personal level to me.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
People think that those millions are for sitting on your ass and playing boss. I've seen how some of these guys actually work and for my current salary, or even twice that, I wouldn't work like that. That's why I say a 20x factor is justified, because at that level, your job becomes your life.
That is insane. They are making choices that affect the EXISTENCE of every department, what every customer sees, even the location of the building they are in. It is all on them and they should be paid according to that degree of responsibility.
That is what I put below under "potential impact". The day to day work of the CEO affects very few people. His big decisions can be existential, but they are also rare.
should be paid according to that degree of responsibility.
That is exactly what I mean. First you said "by impact", now you say "by responsibility". That is not the same thing. That is why I agree with you in principle, but I disagree that this is a clean or simple way of doing it. You will have long and complex discussions about who is more meaningful than someone else, or maybe not. There are entire departments that are important once a year, but at that time, they are absolutely essential.
You are simply moving the problem to a scoring system, but the scoring system will have the same complexity.
We all know that is false, I have seen way to many imbeciles working at companies to claim every job is important
I didn't say every person. I said job. If the job was redundant, it would be done away with (ok, maybe not immediately because of intertia or union contracts, but in principle). I didn't judge the person currently sitting on the job.
Moving around physical mail is at this point laughably useless in a world where anything important is electronic, or someone can easily go down and collect a package.
I see you have never worked in a large company that gets hundreds or thousands of items of physical mail every day.
Everything is a matter of context. Some job might be pointless in one company, and essential in another. There's no IT manager position in an ice cream stall.
The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy.
The problem is that it rewards being greedy, and it rewards higher greed with higher rewards. This way, a questionable trait is amplified.
The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
Funny how the rest of the world has that one figured out. It is not a lack of plan, it is a lack of want. Too many people profit from the current situation.
The same happened in Germany, just the other way around. We had a perfectly workable pension system, which had survived both world wars and was doing ok. There were some issues that needed adjustments, and a problem of money being squandered on non-pension issues. But it was a state-run system and thus generated no profit for anyone. So in a two-decade campaign, the public was convinced that the system was utterly broken, would fail real-soon-now and they themselves would receive tiny pensions if it is not completely reworked. Then it got completely reworked and turned into a hybrid system where you get minimal payout from the state-pension system (that anyway you pay in as much as before) while having additional private insurance-based pensions with tax incentives to make people go there. Ten years down the road it turns out that people now get exactly what they were threatened with: Tiny pensions even after a life-time of work. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense until you realize that the main thing that changed is that the insurance industry has a new market and is making really nice profits from it.
Same with your healthcare system. Follow the money. Someone would make less money if you had proper healthcare, and that someone is fighting tooth and nail, before and behind the curtains, to keep the system as it is.
We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are.
You touched upon the real problem there, but didn't grab it.
This, exactly, is the problem. Every CEO of every major company these days is paid like a precious, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable snowflake. Very few actually are. Thanks to my career choices I've worked directly with a good number of top-level executives in several companies from small to 5000+ employees.
Many of these people are very competent and very hard-working. Some of them are brilliant. Most of them could not be replaced without a considerable change in the company direction and culture as their personality influences everyone down the chain.
Most of them deserves to be paid several times what I earn, and I earn not bad.
But not one of them is irreplaceable. Not one of them needs to have his salary take up its own position in the company budget. Not in one case would the entire company crumble if he left. There would be a shock wave, sure. There would be changes, sure. But after some adjustments, business would go on.
There are some iconic leaders who are or would be missed. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - you can barely imagine their companies without them.
But the number of CEOs is far larger than the number of iconic CEOs. Too many of them believe that they are irreplaceable, and too many boards think the same (because guess who sits on those boards?).
The 20x figure is a number you can justify on a rational basis. The 300+ times is a system spiralling out of control, because too many snowflakes think they are individually important, and refuse to admit that to the person throwing the snowball, they really don't matter one bit.
To my mind this is pretty simply - a person should be paid a sliding scale based on how many people their work directly impacts, combined with how close they are to affecting customers.
You will not be able to define that clearly.
The work of the cleaning crew, for example, impacts everyone in the company. The work of your genius inventor, on the other hand, impacts nobody directly.
And, quite honestly, the work of the CEO most of the time affects very few people.
What you mean is potential impact. The CEO could make a decision that affects everyone greatly, while the cleaning crew cannot - they do their job but don't make decisions.
But between the extremes, you won't be able to define the scale cleanly. Who is more meaningful, the developer or the sysadmin?
A mail guy or someone working a front desk? Come on, they are not offering much real value
Really? Do without them for a month and see how well that goes.
Every job in a company is important, otherwise the company would not pay someone to do it.
The problem of fair payment is not a simple one, and a blanket solution will not work. What we have right now is actually not that bad (a market system), except that it is skewed on both ends - on the low end, people are forced to accept bad conditions because unemployment is high and very undesireable, and on the high end, people get ridiculous salaries and aren't reviewed properly because they are all part of the same circle-jerk group.
The real issues is not in the number.
It's in the fact that these guys basically decide their own salaries. Mr. Boss is the CEO of company A, and sits on the board of company B and C. Mr. Big, meanwhile, is CEO of company B, but sits on the board of A and C, and Mr. Greedy is CEO of C and on the board of A and B.
Guess what they will decide when it comes to yearly reviews and salary adjustments.
The system is broken because a relatively small in group decides amongst themselves, instead of the independent outside review that the system is intended to have. It doesn't even need to have all companies working like that - company D which has a clean board and CEO, will not be able to resist the upwards pull of the others, because the CEO of D one day will get an offer from A, or just look at it, and see that the CEO there gets 200% more, and he will ask his board why he doesn't and what they will do to stop him from going there.
This kind of built-in dilemma is exactly where government oversight and regulation comes into play, when the system is broken and needs outside interference to right itself. Because no publicly traded company will start with the change, because doing so just isn't a rational decision.
Inhaling smoke into your breathing apparatus.
Of course that isn't safe. It can be various degrees of unhealthy, and some ways are faster and more damaging than others, but obviously that isn't healthy.
The question is how unhealthy, not if.
Short selling is more risky/rewarding, which is why you can make more money in a shorter time and also why it is preferred by people who see the stock exchange as a casino. Nobody I know or ever heard of is using shorting as a long-term investment strategy.
In principle, both long and short are perfectly valid strategies. But due to their different natures, they attract different kinds of players.
I have no doubt that there are good people with honest intentions in that game as well. Just like there are crooks on the other side. In general, however, you will find investors in the long game and gamblers in the short game.
But of course I have no idea what I'm talking about. I only worked as a broker for a relatively short time of my life.
Short sellers, though in principle the practice is legitimate, are typically a crowd of get-rich-fast schemers. The primary reason they are short sellers is not that they honestly believe a company will go down or is overvalued, but that prices almost always go down faster than up. If you want to make money quickly, you go short. If you want to invest and make money in the long run, you go long. Wait, it's even called like that, what a surprise!
Lots and lots of them are in it for short-term profit which is why they have stop-loss orders in place to bail them out if the market goes the other way. And they are often in with leverage, so that they make 10 bucks on every point that the price moves. Which, of course, is also true if the price moves the other way. So their stop-loss orders are often much closer to the current price than it would be for investors who are quite ok with having some up and down movement, because they are looking at the company behind the price and don't care about today or tomorrow, they care about next quarter or next year.
So short sellers are a) make-money-fast guys and b) volatile to price changes going against them. With that, yes they lost millions, I easily believe that, because they probably bought at $350, set a stop-loss order at $360 and were leveraged 10:1 so that the $10 upwards swing lost them $100 per stock.
I so much hope the case finds a judge who understands the stock market and flat out tells them to not play in the kitchen if they can't stand the heat.
They would have been absolutely fine if they would not play with so much leverage that they need tight stop-losses.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Touchstream yet.
They developed this keyboard:
https://www.engadget.com/2010/...
Maybe 8 or 10 years ago?
If you don't see it at first glance: It doesn't have keys. The whole thing is a big multi-touch surface, long before multi-touch appeared on smartphones. So you can type and the next second use it as a touchpad. It was pretty nifty.
FingerWorks, the company that made it, was acquired by Apple. Then the iPhone appeared, with multi-touch. Ever since, I've been waiting for an all-touch Apple keyboard to appear.
As I outlined, the starting conditions could not have been more different.
The USA suffered no damage to its industry at all. On the contrary, many historians apparently believe that the war was an economical and industrial boon. It then poured its economical strength into rebuilding Europe and Japan.
Russia was almost destroyed, economically. For much of the war, people were on hunger rations while manufacturing engines of war, bullets, etc. After the war, much of the industrial capacity of Russia was just gone. A vast number of its people were gone. It took decades just to return to pre-war levels at which time the Cold War was in full swing and the economy was once again tied down by military spending.
The end of the Cold War was not close at all, that is not what I said. In a metaphor: Two cars race and one of them comes ahead, very clearly. What I'm saying is: If the other car had also been allowed to drive the race with four wheels, the race would have been more close.
mind-boggling
let me quote
too hot today to get a clear thought out without accidents.