2,951 karma · joined August 28, 2011
Technology equities have highly variable price to earnings rations because of the expectation of greater growth in the future. This expectation means investors are effectively speculating about the future growth of the company, rather than making decisions based on classic quantitative methods like you would apply to an older company in a better understood industry. Applying these methods ignores this dynamic and also buys into the myth of the quantitative analysis that's so appealing to mathematically minded geeks like ourselves.
I submit that the only thing posts like these really accomplish is letting the author stroke his or her by using big words and apparently clever concepts, while simultaneously making it clear that they're misunderstanding the market.
As for the immediate reason Mozilla is backing off, have you ever wondered how you make money as a browser? One of the key revenue streams for a company like Mozilla or Opera is referral fees from search engines. Ever wonder why Microsoft is so desperate to make it difficult to use non-IE browsers? it's because they have their own search engine.
My own personal speculation is that some of Mozilla's search engine customers, whose business model often includes using cookies, came forward and indicated their displeasure with this initiative and pointed out that this would basically amount to biting the hand that feeds it on Mozilla's part.
As luck would have it, this essay was my test case:
I find that the new scrolling behavior is too sensitive, and there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to the original.
I'd like to read Alexander's departure as a practical acknowledgement that the agency's work is likely to have to be conducted in the open from now on, and that new leadership is necessary to make that happen. However, it is just as likely that the man is leaving out of embarrassment over the fact that his lax security allowed Snowden's leaks to occur in the first place. Let's not forget, the leaks were a major blow to the operational integrity of the NSA. This is further backed up by timing of the departure: if he had left immediately after the leaks, at the height of the media coverage, it would have been seen as a result of embarrassment of the program.
Or, maybe he just left because he's been at the job for a while.
Wantrepreneurs think in vague terms about what they would like their company to be. Entrepreneurs think in concrete terms about the money and time commitments it would take to make that happen.
I suggest you randomly pose this question to people: the answers are often very telling.
http://startuplab.googleventures.com/public-workshops-2013-0...
Suppose Lessig wins the case. The greatest impact to record labels I could foresee is they would have to be more careful about their takedown requests.
It sounds like a favorable outcome for Lessig isn't going to turn the world of youtube copyright upside down and automatically grant an umbrella to legitimize works in a legal grey area. They're still going to receive takedown requests, and they're still going to have no recourse.
Wow, not even the top legal scholars in a field, pursuing a case in their own field, are willing to represent themselves. Why is that? I'd think that Lessig would feel safe representing himself in this case.
Do you honestly think your bank is responsible for your economic well-being? Or that bankers are responsible for every economically bad thing that happens?
Also: you don't feeeel that anything was done. So what? Feelings are misleading. Angsty teenagers often don't feeeel their parents love them, no matter how much they actually might. I didn't feeeel like getting up to go to work this morning, but I sucked it up and went anyway.
If our country were governed by feeeelings we'd in a deep, deep hole.
This argument hinges on the idea that the executive is earning rewards that are vastly disproportionate to the risks he faces for making mistakes.
Since the executive is compensated orders of magnitude more than any individual rank and file employee, it's easy to think that his reward is too large. However, on deeper examination you find that this isn't as clear as one might think it is.
Doesn't every employee enjoy the benefits of the company's success? Individually their pay is small compared to the executive's, but taken together their collective reward dwarfs what the executive takes home. When taken in the context of the entire company, the pay of the executive seems more reasonable.
As for risk, remember that however all-powerful the executive's role is portrayed to be in popular culture, he is ultimately a servant of the shareholders and the employees. He acts according to pressure from the owners of the company to transform an existing business into a more profitable business. Morality can and certainly does enter into it, but only in such a capacity where it doesn't interfere too severely with this mission.
When viewed from this angle, it's clear that putting in place laws that would allow you to prosecute CEOs that execute this mission in good faith is foolish. It would be incompatible with our legal principles because it would assume that all leaders of faltering companies are criminals unless proven otherwise, simply by virtue of being at the helm during bad times. Worse, it would transform the role of the CEO from that of the responsibly careful and reasonably bold leader to a timid sheep who lives in fear of mob justice for impossible-to-foresee consequences of his innumerable, seemingly innocent, decisions.
Secondly, would the crisis could have been prevented if this practice were not in place? Absolutely not. This behavior was a symptom rather than a disease.
The rationale seems quite reasonable up front: something bad happened, we should find out who's responsible for it and punish them. There's also an unspoken assumption that this punishment would be a deterrent to future catastrophes, either by making these people too afraid of the consequences to commit their crimes, or simply by removing them from their positions of power.
This view of justice makes very good sense on the level of an individual. An individual who can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have committed a crime is considered responsible for their actions, and it is appropriate to punish them. If their punishment is incarceration, then locking them up for a time arguably makes society safer. Their fate would serve as an example to others of what happens when you commit a crime.
The problem with this view is that the financial crisis was not the result of individual actions on an individual level. What transgressions met the standard of our justice system, namely the rigorous demonstration of concrete, individual crimes, were treated. This article itself says this: those (relatively few) individuals who were demonstrated to have committed actions that were against the law were investigated, tried, and sentenced.
The financial crisis as a whole, however, was a consequence of the structure of a system. Risk was commoditized. Loans were gathered, sliced up, and sold as instruments. Incredible complexity was introduced: witness the explosion of demand for financial engineers specializing in derivatives pricing. Banks sold mortgages with the intention to sell them up the chain as components of complex securities, encouraging them to be lax with their lending standards.
In a way everyone involved was to blame, from the homeowners who filed shoddy-to-fraudulent paperwork, to the loan officers who looked the other way and accepted it. The mistake this and other articles like it make is it attempts to aggregate this blame upward. After all, the thinking goes, it's a manager's responsibility to ensure the proper behavior of those who report to him, and that chain ends at the CEOs. Therefore, the view goes, the CEOs must be held accountable.
Sometimes a more ephemeral, less informed view is at play. The reasoning is that these companies do what their leaders tell them to do, so naturally consequences of the company's actions are consequences of its leaders' actions. In addition, the CEO is a public figure. When we need a human being to personify a company, he's the first that comes to mind.
This is where things break down. To be held responsible for a crime, you personally have to have done something illegal. Not "you should have known better." You have to have broken the law. These people were investigated and even brought to testify before Congress, and no actions were found that met the rigorous requirements to be called a crime. Perhaps it can be argued that they were morally culpable, but as far as the justice system is concerned, their hands are clean. Their actions could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have directly brought about the financial crisis.
Suppose they had been tried and given jail time, as this and other articles demand? In the absence of all other interventions, would that have made the system any more stable? Certainly not. The economic ingredients for another crisis would still be in place. Would their example have served to convince others to behave better? Certainly not. The message would not have been "don't cause financial crises," (whatever that means) but rather, "try not to be at the helm when things go badly." Their incarceration would have served no purpose beyond crowd pleasing.
It's time to give it a rest. You will never see these people prosecuted because by our standards of justice there is nothing to prosecute. If you want to make the financial system more resilient against collapse, you ought to press for structural reform to prevent these unstable situations from occurring again. If you want mob justice, it not happening. Deal with it.
I wonder if all of this recent Google-bashing is really just a symptom of something larger. People are suddenly waking up to the obvious-in-hindsight realization that simply giving their data to a third party involves a certain amount of trust.
The reason people don't seem to be ganging up on Facebook, Apple, etc. in a similar way is because they never really earned that faith. Take Facebook: from the very start their founder was known to consider their users "dumb fucks" for entrusting him with their privacy.
In my opinion, the fact that Google went out of their to, and generally succeeded at earning that trust is a good sign. It shows they take the matter seriously.
All American companies operate under the same rules. If you've taken the position that all American companies are not to be trusted, fine. But if you haven't, wouldn't Google's history make them one of the more trustworthy ones?
Would you mind defining success for us?