5,502 karma · joined March 3, 2011
Not entirely sure this applies across ALL carriers, but it does apply to ATT/Sprint/TMO I believe.
Couple of things:
1. Reference to Apple PE ratio is likely a market driven phenomenon that has occurred before to the other technology company that grew very large very fast (MSFT) ie. sometime around 2000, most mutual/institutional investment funds literally owned more of MSFT (and now they likely do of AAPL) than they were legally allowed to own. At this cap, given that these buyers are the largest "long term" drivers of a stock's directionality, the stock must change direction. The second part of this effect is that now a bunch of them are underwater, and the psychology of holding a bad trade will affect whether they decide to book the loss (likely they wont for a while). TLDR: Apple is simply too large, relative to the tech sector, for its stock price growth to match its business fundamentals.
2. Re: markets functioning properly - we should remember that the "markets" are literally a construct. For all the logical arguments made about how HFT reduce the bid/offer spreads, I'm philosophically opposed to them. Mark Cuban has articulated why better than I can: http://blogmaverick.com/2010/05/09/what-business-is-wall-str...
In a nutshell, if we constructed the markets fundamentally to make it easier for businesses in the real economy to raise and price capital, and HFT starts to account for a multiple of that, then the purpose of the "market" construct has been hijacked.
This leads to all sorts of gnarly questions about how to decide what the right volume is etc, so I recognize its'a thorny area - just pointing out that HFT is not so benign, and oftentime comes with consequences that far outweigh the benefit, and happen too often to ignore.
Site and signup looks sweet. Will dig in later today.
1. You'd choose carefully what you owned and why you owned it. No matter how you slice it, its hard to justify why someone should own ~30, ~40, or ~50 firearms (dont know how often this actually happens but I believe owning multiple weapons happens fairly frequently), and any insurer seeing that, would price your risk accordingly. You'd be forced to take steps to reduce the cost of ownership, hence reducing it to the amount you actually use.
2. As a result of this change in ownership, the likelihood of weapons getting stolen drops, and correspondingly the flow of new guns into the black market.
assuming here that guns on the black market typically start out under legal ownership.
Every single gun has a unique signature (like a VIN #), and you had to buy insurance on your gun in order to own it, transfer title anytime its sold, and be held liable for any violence damage caused by a gun you own.
Insurance companies would have to vet you in order to give you a price, and any mishaps that occurred from guns you own, would make your insurance rates increase. As such you would take as much care who has access to your guns as you do with who has access to your car, and you'd only own guns you need.
Gun owners who are responsible would see the cost of owning guns go up a bit, but more careless folks would feel the economic effects, which would prod them to behave more responsibly.
This way, we can worry less about loopholes around what kinds of weapons people should own, or deal with bans or gun buybacks (which would secretly just be a boon for gun manufacturers). The people so adamant about owning weapons would now have a mechanism to compensate society for the damage they caused (if any).
Good policy because it's a market driven mechanism for gun safety, and good politics because it's functionally the government setting the rules, and getting out of the way (which the right wants) and reducing the societal cost/damange of gun ownership by pricing in externalities (which the left once).
That would clearly have been the right answer here.
Definitely a better response. No excuse for the casualness of my tone - just reflective of my relationship with Jon (which at the time was more casual/familiar than with others)
Omitted for brevity (as others have pointed out in the comments): we maintained a relationship with the customer long after the exchange. The goal definitely wasn't to get him to "find another service provider" so much as it was to reset the tone.
All that being said, clearly my casual response ("can't replicate it") definitely was the wrong thing to do, as I didn't intend it to offend at all.
You're totally right. No excuse for the casual tone there.
1. go offline. find photography specialty stores as well as 2nd hand camera equipment stores. Get them to list some inventory, as an additional revenue source, and perhaps you can post some handbills there. There's a little bit of conflict here, but the additional revenue might justify the risk and allow them to keep more/broader inventory while they're at it.
2. Find their sites. If you can find photo equipment sites who'll list with you and link to you, even better
3. Craigslist: respond to every buy request, autopost inventory etc
4. Autoretweet everytime someone on twitter mentions a model of equipment that you carry (This last one might be spammy).
Good luck!
Nothing is wrong with it. It's ideal. That being said, the main issue with lobbying is that if you're not doing it, someone else is, and they're generating an outcome that impacts you. Even if you were a purist who truly didn't want to lobby the government, everyone else's rent-seeking puts you at enough of a disadvantage, that you'll eventually have to do it, just to maintain your status quo (not to mention moving forward).
That being said, a meaningful portion of the premise is doubtful:
"In order to realize its hundred-billion-dollar dreams, Facebook needs to forever dominate all of the world’s social interactions"
Not really. In order to realize it's hundred-billion-dollar dreams, Facebook needs to figure out a. how to make more commerce happen (Eg gifts) b. how to make more ads happen (As they're working on) or c. how to make a kind of ad that converts at a massively higher rate, (such that ceteris paribus, their ad inventory climbs in value)
Dominating all the worlds social interactions, while a nice goal, is hardly necessary, and if that was the standard Facebook was judging itself against, they're likely being set up to fail fail. For example - email in the work context is a social interaction (and a large and high value one at that). What are the chances those sorts of interactions (Where privacy/security/proprietary data are concerned) ever happen on Facebook?
Separately - as data gets cheaper and video chat is further optimized, video chat over 3G/4G becomes more feasible. Probably our answer to this is in the countries that have abundant bandwidth? What do high schoolers in Korea/Scandinavia use for video chat?