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Of course it's the new technology that causes this and not economists running monetary experiments, that keeps wages stagnant. (who would expect the purchasing power of money to drop when increasing the money supply!?)
For the past thousands of years we've seen incredible productivity gains thanks to technology (the wheel, the loom, the steam engine!), and purchasing power always kept increasing across the population.
On the other hand, we've been running this kind of monetary intervention for a very short while, at an accelerating pace, but no way this is causing an increasing pay disparity.
This is why you test from the outside in: You first write an acceptance test where you just specify what goes in and what should come out. The error/failure messages you get when running this test drive your design and tell you which components you should write next.
The RSpec book is a pretty good introduction to this topic.
You couldn't by the NYT as a whole for its market cap. Companies are almost always bought at a premium, as the sellers receive some of the value that is generated by the transaction itself (actually, there is some evidence that the sellers receive all the value generated by the transaction).
This seems like a pretty poor strategy for the involved companies.
1) It makes other companies (not involved in the agreement) more attractive, as their salaries will be closer to the salaries offered by the companies involved in the cartel.
2) This means that the pool of potential employees is reduced due the agreement, which means that the companies involved in the cartel will have to bear higher recruiting costs.
3) These recruiting costs make a mistake in hiring more costly. It gets harder to "test" employees and let them go when they are a bad fit, because expenditures from your HR budget are shifted to the front (on the promise of savings down the line).
4) Further, when the cartel breaks (as it will, each company has an incentive to cheat on the other members) the payoff of this inflated recruiting "investment" disappears.
Don't be torn: there's a place for both. The affordable mass-produced stuff is great for obvious reasons, while the wasteful, pretentious hippster-alternative is cool for whomever happens to get off on this stuff. The latter is such a small niche, it hardly makes a difference economically, but people still value this stuff.
Not liking it doesn't make you a Marxist but just somebody who happens not to like this kind of stuff.
As a European I don't feel this way. Unless you have a contract with a company that states you such rights, that is...
If you give up information voluntarily (even if you aren't aware of it) why should it obligate anybody who collects it to spend resources on informing you what they know about you? Morally, why does gathering information imply obligation to provide certain information? This is a total non-sequitur.
> It's not about morals, it's about the law as it is right now.
Depends on the discussion. I doubt anybody claims that the laws don't obligate facebook to make the data available, because they do. What people argue is that said laws are bad.
> And the truth is that Facebook is breaking our laws and need to be prosecuted for such.
That's what we are having an argument about. I agree that they are breaking our laws, but I don't think that they should be prosecuted. I think the laws should be changed instead, because they are bad.
> Why is it bad that users have a right to know what companies have on them?
Because it isn't the state's business what customers and companies agree with each other. If facebook states in its contracts with their customers that they will make this data available then they should be prosecuted for breach of contract if they don't.
I'm against the state (or the EU or whoever) making laws that deal with private matters because lawmakers are notoriously bad at thinking things through. This leads to a bunch of unintended consequences and ultimately is bad for both customers and companies and anybody else. E.g.: copyright laws, patent laws, immigration laws, drug laws etc...
> Facebook is a victim of itself. If it didn't track users in the first place, it wouldn't be in hot water.
I don't want to defend facebook. Maybe what they do is bad, I'm sure that's an interesting discussion, I really don't know. What I'm saying is: Even if what they are doing IS bad, then the state still shouldn't intervene if they don't breach the contracts with their customers. Facebook doesn't force you to use their services, and if you do so voluntarily then it's on facebook's terms, though luck.
> Facebook has bases, and operates, in Europe. Thus they MUST abide by our data laws.
Why? One might argue that European laws MUST be changed. Pointing to laws is hardly a moral argument, there are tons of terrible laws and facebook might as well be a victim of one of them.
Of course.
I didn't mean to say that she/he should actually start an insurance company. I wanted to point out that there are market-incentives that might motivate someone to offer such a service without the need for a law.
No.
I wasn't even making an argument for mandatory car insurance. I was merely pointing out the difference to mandatory property insurance and said that this difference _might_ be the basis for a convincing argument in favor of the former.
Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured.
There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whether they should insure their property than lawmakers and thus it should be up to them (again: as long as their property doesn't have a high probability of damaging other people; in such cases mandatory insurance might be reasonable).
Why don't you start a business that offers competitive insurance packages to people who want to use airBnB (and similar products) instead of demanding a law that obviously would have a lot of unwanted side effects on people who _do_ know about the risks they are taking by entering this business?
Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing pros and cons of said laws.
I didn't mean to imply that markets were efficient or that MZ can't have information that suggests that fb will surpass Apple in market cap or otherwise.
I really just meant that historic trends don't imply future trends.
Your (and maybe also the previous poster's) point that Apple is an example of valuations changing rapidly is obviously valid.
It doesn't really make sense to extrapolate future stock performance from past stock performance.
The market says: If you consider all publicly available information, we think that facebook will earn its shareholders the present day equivalent of 70bn dollars. Apple will earn its shareholders 330bn.
These numbers reflect expected future performance and expected growth is already priced in.
“Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”