Public radio are a bunch of independent radio stations. They order programing from a variety of sources. The big one is NPR. Minnesota Public Radio set up American Public Radio as an alternative source of programming the public stations could buy. One could argue it was to get a bigger cut of the fees for PHC.
But the point is that you have 2 different corporations producing content for public radio. They are not that different.
I think I am missing your point. The loss leader is now cutting into the profits, so it is no longer a loss leader - it is dragging down Amazon's profits.
Israel gets a good chunk of direct aid from the US (Classified as military aid, so the pro-Israeli Republicans can cut foreign aid to zero without touching Israel) and indirect aid (the semi-implicit security guaranty).
The point being without this aid, Israel may not have enough free resources to do something like this. Or maybe it is to remind everybody that the nuclear tipped missiles.
It could well be. While the average may be $850, the amount spent does not follow a normal bell curve distribution. IIRC, it takes the local human society about $200 to $300 to get a puppy ready for adoption (shots, spay/neuter). The average is dragged higher by spay/neuter, foreign object surgeries (dog ate something it shouldn’t.), oncology, knee surgery, etc. I know that a few cats get kidney transplants each year – owner of the sick cat has to adopt the donating animal.
I think they got rid of the handset division as fast as the tax law would allow. Take a look at this way.
Motorola (M) could get a higher price is they sold their business as a packaged deal, Motorola Mobility (MM). They got more bidders that way. (It’s not exactly what they did, but it was effectively what they did when they spun off that division.)
Google wanted the patents but not the hardware division for the reason you mentioned but they had to buy both. They wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible.
Assuming MM was spun off from M in a tax free spin off, one normally has to wait about 2 years before one can sell off a division. If it was sold off before then it would trigger a big tax bill for MM. Most spin off require the spun off division to pay their parent’s tax bill if they are bought out.
So we wait 2 years and 6 months and guess what happens – Google sells off the handset division.
Some states have open primaries, so you can go in and vote for whatever candidate you want. I think Oregon (or maybe WA. – I forget) has a system where the top 2 winners get on the general election ballot, even if they are from the same party. I think I like that system.
And sometimes even if you belong to a party it does not matter. I am a center right Republican living in a very left wing district. Whoever wins the democratic primary gets the win. Of course, the situation is reversed in the district over.
I wouldn’t say politically influential. I would say flavor of the month, politically trendy. Not always, and some of the nominations have been good, but most are “safe choices” from a isolated, Nordic perspective. (I mean, there is only so much China could do for when Liu Xiaobo won 2 years ago. Norway just does not have much direct trade with China).
As for nomination – It is a important step but I think it is overstated here. There are some big wigs who never got a noble because nobody nominated them. That being said, getting nominated is a fairly low bar to get over. IIRC there are a couple hundred people who can nominate a person and it only takes one. Some of the past nominations were truly fringe. The wheat is shifted from the chaff much later in the process.
They are built to be destroyed. Or rather, the average warships built to be destroyed. When you buy your warship you hope it will take a longer then average time to be destroyed or that it will destroy more warships then it cost to build.
So I will take the opposite side. One can have economic value by having a large wine cellar. Their can be joy in knowing that you sit on top of one. Not for me but for some people. But if you sit on it too long it will turn into vinegar destroying the second economic value of the wine – the being drunk. I would argue that a large component of EVE is using the warships in a space battle. If there are no space battles why would anybody play EVE?
It is kind of like going to Las Vegas to gambling. On average you are going to lose money – you know the odds are against you – but that is not the point. You spend money gambling because spending money that way is more fun than planning EVE or going to the movies. (which honestly I don't understand but that is how my gambling friends put it.)
It is no more destructive to the economy then drinking a good bottle of wine. While things are destroyed, they are not economically productive assets. EVE is about consumer consumption of entertainment. People pay to play – it just that the recognition of payment is delayed until the destruction of your ship.
Now, if they were an inflated asset that underpinned the credit market – that would be something different.
Most people use “Free Market” in a sloppy, non-precise term. A Free Market does not require most of those things – it only requires 2 willing participants.
Your definition is closer to a “perfect market”. Do they exist? No. Do inelastic spherical cows exist? No. yet physics use them as a starting point. You loosen the assumptions, introduce friction and other inefficient , and see what happens. A good example is that both individuals need perfect free information. Can’t happen in the real world but it does lead to interesting questions. How do we lower the cost? (headhunters? Internet want ads?). How much are we willing to pay? (How many applications do we submit? How much effort should be put into the resume?) etc.
Nope, not a high demand job - just moderate. I was lucky that job market was tight and I already had my resume out there. Which goes back to being a freelance - I suspect that I would have to wait much longer to pick up my next job in the current market so I would have to factor that in my equations. On the other hand I have seen factory workers go on long strikes. mixed bag.
When you join a union there is going to be a cost. You have to pay a negotiator to negotiate your salary. You will be unemployed for a few weeks (or months) when the union goes on strike.
Or you could go freelance. Personally, I have been downsized, walked across the street and got a better job the next day. (Well, 3 days – it was a long weekend.) That’s a special case. What is the cost to you in forgone wages until you find a new job? 2 weeks salary? 6 months?
That will tell you if you need a union or not.
And I don’t see the company as being in a stronger position. It fires you, then wades out into the labor poor, hopefully pick out a good candidate (all resumes lie), and then train them – all hopefully at a lower price than your salary. There are special cases out there but it is not the general rule.
As for meta-unions, they have been tried and there are conflict of interest issues. Unskilled assemblers verse skilled machinist. You might want to check out how German runs their unions however.
Errr-you caught me. I meant to say earnings – not revenue. You want to focus on revenue. Simple, stupid mistake on my part.
O.K. - retail stocks command less of a premium than higher-margin industries. Why? Why is the value of one dollar earned in one sector worth more than a dollar earned in another? The short answer is that it doesn’t. The answer is that it doesn’t.
So why do retail stocks command a lower premium? Go back to what I said about forecasting future earnings. You have to factor in growth and risk. Growth companies have a higher P/E ratio because you are buying growth. Microsoft is not expected to grow as fast as other tech companies. Even if they hit something out of the ball park it would only have a small effect on the overall earnings. Then you need to factor in risk. You might predict high growth but the company can still blow up. The higher the risk the lower the P/E ratio.
What you are seeing is that the companies in certain sections share the same characteristics in terms of growth and risk.
Here is a very simple model that allows you to calculate the correct P/E ratio of a company based on its growth. There are more sophisticated ones out there.
Not exactly. If a company fires you, you don’t lose 100% of your income. You walk across the street and get hired by another firm – maybe your salary goes up, maybe it goes down. And the company is going to need to hire another employee to make up that 0.1% of productivity – probably at around your old salary. A company may be able to jack you in the short run but they can’t do anything in the long run – if they slash your wage by 50% you might stick with the job but you would probably hit the want ads to find a better one.
Of course for this to happen we are making a number of assumptions – that there are other firms that offer comparable jobs. You need at least one. At around 8 firms collusion tends to fall apart – the benefits of cheating outweigh the benefits of compliance. At 16 it take firm discipline to keep it together.
And you have a few tricks up your sleeve as well, so that is going to balance things out.
Unions are something that we need when there is a strong imbalance in power. Most of the issues that with unions is that they are run poorly or corruptly. I can point to a few that work.
A free market is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of a competitive market. And what we really want is an efficient market.
A “Free Market” is when 2 people freely exchange goods. The problem is that there is a asymmetry between the people. One buyer has superior knowledge, for example when selling a used car or house. The seller knows if the car is a lemon or not. Or because there is a difference in power. Thousands of employees on one side, a few companies on the other. By collusion the companies are increasing their power relative to the employees.
You can’t eliminate this asymmetry – it is the nature of the beast – but you can minimize it.
First, do you know that Microsoft does break out its various segments? They reorganized about 2 years ago so you have a break in the data but it is still a good place to start.
Second, I guess what I am trying to get across is that margins and return of capital are relative measures. By the way, figures are for 2013.
Wal-Mart has a profit margin of 3.5% against Microsoft’s 28% - what does that tell us? Not much. 3.5% is stunning for retail, less so for technology.
Lenovo has a profit margin of 2% in a mature, highly completive, commodity like market. This tells me one thing. Then take a look at Lenovo vs. HP and Dell. Lenovo has lower margins. That tells me something else. However, over the past 3 years Lenovo’s margins have increased while HP and Dell have fallen. That tells me something else.
For Microsoft, a mature company, I expect margins to decline. Not too excited. They are moving into hardware, I expect margins to decline. Not too excited. I admit that I have not fully picked apart their financials. Maybe their margin is falling faster than I expected.
But at the end of the day what matters is future revenue – discounted cash back to the stockholder. It’s great to have high margins but what you really want is cash in your pocket. It is not that margin et. al. is unimportant. It is that they cannot be used in isolation. They are just one input as you try to forecast future revenue.
You want to focus on future revenue growth, not on margins.
First it is natural for margins to fall for growth companies. When young they have the market to themselves. Their success draws competitors that push margins down. Also, hopefully, when they are young they pursue the top tier opportunities. As they get bigger they expand into lower tier opportunities. Hopefully still profitable but they don’t carry the mouthwatering margins.
Second, hardware companies will always have lower margins. With software, you spend your money upfront for development. Margin is calculated on the cost of selling the software, not developing it. With hardware you actually have to buy inventory to make the finished product. Then you have to drop in the cost of selling the hardware.
Margin is a characteristic of a company. The level and direction can tell you a lot about a company but not if it is a good company to invest in or not.
Think along the lines of “bullpen” from newspapers. Not so much chatting, more yelling. Fast pace, high energy, deadlines must be meet, need to crank out product, short production cycles. Where I have work and where it worked well was 1. support – everybody had a few specialized areas of knowledge so you could sling the call over to the right person. The other was a daily processing cycle that had to be done in 1 hour. 7 hours of boredom, 1 hour of excitement. If something odd happened it needed to be passed to a person who could either fix it or was authorized to make a judgment call.
I am also told it works well with sales as it fosters energy and a sense of competition. I can't speak to that because I have never been in sales.
Why does energy density matter if the resulting vehicle is lighter and has a longer range. Even if it has lower energy density one may still have a net win because the carbon fibers are doing double duty – the weight for the batteries in the hood, body, etc. is free.
As for reading comprehension the OP asked for a battery that had “energy per unit weight/volume, cycle life, and charge speed” of gasoline. We have one. Where is the failure in reading comprehension?
As for your concerns, I did mention that it was not ready mass production today and that there were issues. I personally suspect that this technology will win out but the future is a dark and uncertain road.
Doing research on the internet is different than in a physical library. Some aspects are transferable, others not. Using Wikipedia is different than using a encyclopedia. You want to teach the kids the skills of the future. That is how the library is becoming obsolete.
It is kind of an extrovert/introvert thing. I have worked in both. Open offices encourages collaboration but discourages deep thinking. This has been my experience and there are studies that back this up. The odd thing is that you can skew people one way or the other depending on the environment. Extroverts skew towards collaboration but put them in a office and they do more deep thinking. Opposite is true of introverts. So it kind of depends on what you are trying to do.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very fine distinction.
Public radio are a bunch of independent radio stations. They order programing from a variety of sources. The big one is NPR. Minnesota Public Radio set up American Public Radio as an alternative source of programming the public stations could buy. One could argue it was to get a bigger cut of the fees for PHC.
But the point is that you have 2 different corporations producing content for public radio. They are not that different.
I think I am missing your point. The loss leader is now cutting into the profits, so it is no longer a loss leader - it is dragging down Amazon's profits.
Yes, with more orders cost per parcel goes down - but overall costs go up because Amazon is not charging. See the following example:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics...
Israel gets a good chunk of direct aid from the US (Classified as military aid, so the pro-Israeli Republicans can cut foreign aid to zero without touching Israel) and indirect aid (the semi-implicit security guaranty).
The point being without this aid, Israel may not have enough free resources to do something like this. Or maybe it is to remind everybody that the nuclear tipped missiles.
It could well be. While the average may be $850, the amount spent does not follow a normal bell curve distribution. IIRC, it takes the local human society about $200 to $300 to get a puppy ready for adoption (shots, spay/neuter). The average is dragged higher by spay/neuter, foreign object surgeries (dog ate something it shouldn’t.), oncology, knee surgery, etc. I know that a few cats get kidney transplants each year – owner of the sick cat has to adopt the donating animal.
I think they got rid of the handset division as fast as the tax law would allow. Take a look at this way.
Motorola (M) could get a higher price is they sold their business as a packaged deal, Motorola Mobility (MM). They got more bidders that way. (It’s not exactly what they did, but it was effectively what they did when they spun off that division.)
Google wanted the patents but not the hardware division for the reason you mentioned but they had to buy both. They wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible.
Assuming MM was spun off from M in a tax free spin off, one normally has to wait about 2 years before one can sell off a division. If it was sold off before then it would trigger a big tax bill for MM. Most spin off require the spun off division to pay their parent’s tax bill if they are bought out.
So we wait 2 years and 6 months and guess what happens – Google sells off the handset division.
Yes, spot on.
17,000 patents, plus another 7,500 pending. Also, the patents were higher quality patents, so it just was not the numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Maybe.
Some states have open primaries, so you can go in and vote for whatever candidate you want. I think Oregon (or maybe WA. – I forget) has a system where the top 2 winners get on the general election ballot, even if they are from the same party. I think I like that system.
And sometimes even if you belong to a party it does not matter. I am a center right Republican living in a very left wing district. Whoever wins the democratic primary gets the win. Of course, the situation is reversed in the district over.
I wouldn’t say politically influential. I would say flavor of the month, politically trendy. Not always, and some of the nominations have been good, but most are “safe choices” from a isolated, Nordic perspective. (I mean, there is only so much China could do for when Liu Xiaobo won 2 years ago. Norway just does not have much direct trade with China).
As for nomination – It is a important step but I think it is overstated here. There are some big wigs who never got a noble because nobody nominated them. That being said, getting nominated is a fairly low bar to get over. IIRC there are a couple hundred people who can nominate a person and it only takes one. Some of the past nominations were truly fringe. The wheat is shifted from the chaff much later in the process.
They are built to be destroyed. Or rather, the average warships built to be destroyed. When you buy your warship you hope it will take a longer then average time to be destroyed or that it will destroy more warships then it cost to build.
So I will take the opposite side. One can have economic value by having a large wine cellar. Their can be joy in knowing that you sit on top of one. Not for me but for some people. But if you sit on it too long it will turn into vinegar destroying the second economic value of the wine – the being drunk. I would argue that a large component of EVE is using the warships in a space battle. If there are no space battles why would anybody play EVE?
It is kind of like going to Las Vegas to gambling. On average you are going to lose money – you know the odds are against you – but that is not the point. You spend money gambling because spending money that way is more fun than planning EVE or going to the movies. (which honestly I don't understand but that is how my gambling friends put it.)
Mod parent up.
It is no more destructive to the economy then drinking a good bottle of wine. While things are destroyed, they are not economically productive assets. EVE is about consumer consumption of entertainment. People pay to play – it just that the recognition of payment is delayed until the destruction of your ship.
Now, if they were an inflated asset that underpinned the credit market – that would be something different.
No, he has a point.
Most people use “Free Market” in a sloppy, non-precise term. A Free Market does not require most of those things – it only requires 2 willing participants.
Your definition is closer to a “perfect market”. Do they exist? No. Do inelastic spherical cows exist? No. yet physics use them as a starting point. You loosen the assumptions, introduce friction and other inefficient , and see what happens. A good example is that both individuals need perfect free information. Can’t happen in the real world but it does lead to interesting questions. How do we lower the cost? (headhunters? Internet want ads?). How much are we willing to pay? (How many applications do we submit? How much effort should be put into the resume?) etc.
Nope, not a high demand job - just moderate. I was lucky that job market was tight and I already had my resume out there. Which goes back to being a freelance - I suspect that I would have to wait much longer to pick up my next job in the current market so I would have to factor that in my equations. On the other hand I have seen factory workers go on long strikes. mixed bag.
Think about it in a different way.
When you join a union there is going to be a cost. You have to pay a negotiator to negotiate your salary. You will be unemployed for a few weeks (or months) when the union goes on strike.
Or you could go freelance. Personally, I have been downsized, walked across the street and got a better job the next day. (Well, 3 days – it was a long weekend.) That’s a special case. What is the cost to you in forgone wages until you find a new job? 2 weeks salary? 6 months?
That will tell you if you need a union or not.
And I don’t see the company as being in a stronger position. It fires you, then wades out into the labor poor, hopefully pick out a good candidate (all resumes lie), and then train them – all hopefully at a lower price than your salary. There are special cases out there but it is not the general rule.
As for meta-unions, they have been tried and there are conflict of interest issues. Unskilled assemblers verse skilled machinist. You might want to check out how German runs their unions however.
Errr-you caught me. I meant to say earnings – not revenue. You want to focus on revenue. Simple, stupid mistake on my part.
O.K. - retail stocks command less of a premium than higher-margin industries. Why? Why is the value of one dollar earned in one sector worth more than a dollar earned in another? The short answer is that it doesn’t. The answer is that it doesn’t.
So why do retail stocks command a lower premium? Go back to what I said about forecasting future earnings. You have to factor in growth and risk. Growth companies have a higher P/E ratio because you are buying growth. Microsoft is not expected to grow as fast as other tech companies. Even if they hit something out of the ball park it would only have a small effect on the overall earnings. Then you need to factor in risk. You might predict high growth but the company can still blow up. The higher the risk the lower the P/E ratio.
What you are seeing is that the companies in certain sections share the same characteristics in terms of growth and risk.
Here is a very simple model that allows you to calculate the correct P/E ratio of a company based on its growth. There are more sophisticated ones out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Not exactly. If a company fires you, you don’t lose 100% of your income. You walk across the street and get hired by another firm – maybe your salary goes up, maybe it goes down. And the company is going to need to hire another employee to make up that 0.1% of productivity – probably at around your old salary. A company may be able to jack you in the short run but they can’t do anything in the long run – if they slash your wage by 50% you might stick with the job but you would probably hit the want ads to find a better one.
Of course for this to happen we are making a number of assumptions – that there are other firms that offer comparable jobs. You need at least one. At around 8 firms collusion tends to fall apart – the benefits of cheating outweigh the benefits of compliance. At 16 it take firm discipline to keep it together.
And you have a few tricks up your sleeve as well, so that is going to balance things out.
Unions are something that we need when there is a strong imbalance in power. Most of the issues that with unions is that they are run poorly or corruptly. I can point to a few that work.
A free market is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of a competitive market. And what we really want is an efficient market.
A “Free Market” is when 2 people freely exchange goods. The problem is that there is a asymmetry between the people. One buyer has superior knowledge, for example when selling a used car or house. The seller knows if the car is a lemon or not. Or because there is a difference in power. Thousands of employees on one side, a few companies on the other. By collusion the companies are increasing their power relative to the employees.
You can’t eliminate this asymmetry – it is the nature of the beast – but you can minimize it.
First, do you know that Microsoft does break out its various segments? They reorganized about 2 years ago so you have a break in the data but it is still a good place to start.
Second, I guess what I am trying to get across is that margins and return of capital are relative measures.
By the way, figures are for 2013.
Wal-Mart has a profit margin of 3.5% against Microsoft’s 28% - what does that tell us? Not much. 3.5% is stunning for retail, less so for technology.
Lenovo has a profit margin of 2% in a mature, highly completive, commodity like market. This tells me one thing. Then take a look at Lenovo vs. HP and Dell. Lenovo has lower margins. That tells me something else. However, over the past 3 years Lenovo’s margins have increased while HP and Dell have fallen. That tells me something else.
For Microsoft, a mature company, I expect margins to decline. Not too excited. They are moving into hardware, I expect margins to decline. Not too excited. I admit that I have not fully picked apart their financials. Maybe their margin is falling faster than I expected.
But at the end of the day what matters is future revenue – discounted cash back to the stockholder. It’s great to have high margins but what you really want is cash in your pocket. It is not that margin et. al. is unimportant. It is that they cannot be used in isolation. They are just one input as you try to forecast future revenue.
You want to focus on future revenue growth, not on margins.
First it is natural for margins to fall for growth companies. When young they have the market to themselves. Their success draws competitors that push margins down. Also, hopefully, when they are young they pursue the top tier opportunities. As they get bigger they expand into lower tier opportunities. Hopefully still profitable but they don’t carry the mouthwatering margins.
Second, hardware companies will always have lower margins. With software, you spend your money upfront for development. Margin is calculated on the cost of selling the software, not developing it. With hardware you actually have to buy inventory to make the finished product. Then you have to drop in the cost of selling the hardware.
Margin is a characteristic of a company. The level and direction can tell you a lot about a company but not if it is a good company to invest in or not.
Think along the lines of “bullpen” from newspapers. Not so much chatting, more yelling. Fast pace, high energy, deadlines must be meet, need to crank out product, short production cycles. Where I have work and where it worked well was 1. support – everybody had a few specialized areas of knowledge so you could sling the call over to the right person. The other was a daily processing cycle that had to be done in 1 hour. 7 hours of boredom, 1 hour of excitement. If something odd happened it needed to be passed to a person who could either fix it or was authorized to make a judgment call.
I am also told it works well with sales as it fosters energy and a sense of competition. I can't speak to that because I have never been in sales.
Why does energy density matter if the resulting vehicle is lighter and has a longer range. Even if it has lower energy density one may still have a net win because the carbon fibers are doing double duty – the weight for the batteries in the hood, body, etc. is free.
As for reading comprehension the OP asked for a battery that had “energy per unit weight/volume, cycle life, and charge speed” of gasoline. We have one. Where is the failure in reading comprehension?
As for your concerns, I did mention that it was not ready mass production today and that there were issues. I personally suspect that this technology will win out but the future is a dark and uncertain road.
Doing research on the internet is different than in a physical library. Some aspects are transferable, others not. Using Wikipedia is different than using a encyclopedia. You want to teach the kids the skills of the future. That is how the library is becoming obsolete.
Here's one. Well, it is more of a super capacitor then a battery, but still
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Not ready for prime time – and maybe it never will – but it is a viable avenue to pursue.
I would second that - it is a very good book.
It is kind of an extrovert/introvert thing. I have worked in both. Open offices encourages collaboration but discourages deep thinking. This has been my experience and there are studies that back this up. The odd thing is that you can skew people one way or the other depending on the environment. Extroverts skew towards collaboration but put them in a office and they do more deep thinking. Opposite is true of introverts. So it kind of depends on what you are trying to do.