james1071

Normal rules don't seem to apply in Silicon Valley.

Council tax is not a tax on property values.

The amount that a person has to pay depends on the budget of the local council and the banding of the property that the person lives in.

Better according to you or according to the French?

My guess would be that the film industry in France is good at persuading politicans to pass agreeable laws.

You know what hppens when you have been driving at 70mph - 30mph seems incredibly slow.

So it is with money and finance.

There are two separate issues.

1 The expected returns from the two investments. 2 The likley returns at the time the bet was made.

You have not got a clue.

Companies with monopoly power do not allocate resources optimally (for society) because they choose to optimise resources optimally for themselves.

Because they have pricing power, profit maximising behaviour does not allocate resources optimally.

1 I think we all understand that there are are degrees of monopoly power:one company might be a pure monopoly, a few big players (known as an oligopoly) can behave cooperatively (like a monopoly) or engage in price wars (with the objective of driving out the weaker player).

2 There are lots of businesses with high fixed costs and low marginal costs - tech is not that different from others in that regard.

3 Tech, does have one key difference - the network effect. In other words, a company's history in building up a large network of customers may matter more than how efficiently it operates today

4 The dynamic effects of concentrated industries (as I mentioned earlier) are complicated. There is no guarantee at all that the result will be optimal.

5 We have nice examples of this in collusive behaviour by the major tech companies in their hiring policies.

6 There are other alternatives to the status quo than, as in your example, of reducing companies to one hundredth of their former size.

The reasons that you have given might be part of the explanation, but on their own they do not explain it.

Yes, it is true that there is a tax benefit to employers purchasing healthcare insurance, which is tax deductible, and providing it as a benefit in kind.

However, it does not follow at all from that the insurers should benefit: their costs are not affected and in a competitive market, they would price at marginal cost.

Yes, it is true that people in employer plans could be perceived as being a better risk than those who are do not have them.

They would still be better risks (and 'deserving' of a lower premium) however they obtained their health insurance.

So, as I said before, there must be something else going on.

Similar arguments apply to your claim that employers are less price sensitive than consumers - that really is implausible, given their buying power and incentives to maximise profits.

You need to check out perfect competition, monpoly and oligoply.

Briefly, with (textbook) perfect competition, profit maximising firms will price their goods at marginal cost and produce a socially optimum amount.

A company with a monopoly will sell at a higher price and sell less than the socially optimum amount.

There are also dynamic effects:competition acts as a spur for innovation.

This is the text book argument against monopolies.

You asserted that a highly concentrated industry is evidence of optimal resource allocation.

It isn't.

Someone needs to learn some economics.

There are many things that started 70 years ago which have long since gone.

So, there must be forces which sustain the US model, where the employer pays for medical insurance.

Also, I fail to see how employers offering medical insurance should make insurance for an individual any more expensive.

So, while I appreciate the sentiment that something is clearly wrong, the two things that you mentioned are not the cause.

Things might be different now, but Bloomberg used to be unique in what it offered:fixed income price feeds, analytics, news feeds and messaging service for market participants.

Another killer feature was that there were addins to excel spreadsheets.

Now, there are probably competing products, but Bloomberg has a large user base who are very familiar with its product.

Oxford:27 Cambridge:14

Since 1945 Oxford:10 Cambridge:0

The point of long-term incentive schemes is that bonuses can be clawed back.

The main problem is the greenbelt.

Because Americans worship celebrities and bribe their politicians.

It all stems from the Chinese tradition of competitive examinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination

What is hard to understand?

What is at issue is that Ireland did not enforce its own tax laws.

Yes-that is exactly what this case is about.

There is no work in selecting the companies-what is difficult is running a fund with very low dealing costs.

I am not sure that you appreciate what is involved.

Running an index fund is largely mechanical, but the main issue is dealing costs.

What Vanguard have to do is seemingly impossible, which is to deal at the mid-price every day, when they invest net inflows (or dis-invest the net outflow).

They also have to deal at the mid-point whenever the index changes (usually every quarter).

That is what programmers like to say (when they are comparing their salaries with the value they say they have created).

The reality,of course, is that most of the value created is attributable to the franchise value of the company, not the programmer.

Private equity means leveraged buy out.

I really don't see what the problem is.

What does it matter who funded his legal case?

There is a good chance that the person who took the laptop was acting with an accomplice, and that the woman making the scene was involved.

My guess is that the person who took it was acting with an accomplice, possible the one who caused the distraction.

They would make an exchange in a place where there are no cameras.

The person who took it would have a story ready in case she was challenged.

As for the TSA - they want to pretend that the incident never happened, because it would make them them look bad.

Its click bait plus some useful info.