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alnilam posted:In a related note on discourse, it seems crazy to me how people don't talk about "this business is doing just fine, but not growing" (which would make sense to me), but rather "this business is doing poorly because it's not growing fast enough." Apart from the "What's with growth?" question, I want to ask: what's with this discourse? Is that kind of talk aimed towards investors, who indeed would be upset if the company weren't growing? Is there anything wrong with operating a business that is doing just fine? On a personal level, not at all. If you're a small business owner and your business is doing well enough to support you and your family and maybe pay your few employees enough to do so, then I don't think anyone's going to fault you. Run your CPA business or whatever, pay your bills, and leave it to your kids or sell it to help fund your retirement. But, yeah, it's obviously aimed at the investors. If I've got $10,000 tied up in your business and you're not growing then I'm in a bad place. I'm not making any money off of my investment in you, and I could be doing better just loaning that money to someone else. Multiply that out by factors of a million and you've got the mindset of a fund manager who's handling, say, $40 billion worth of people's retirement money. If you loan GE $500 million and they have to pay back $550 million, then you've done well. If you buy $500 million worth of GE and they're not growing, then you're never going to get your return. If GE isn't growing then the likelihood that your $500 million will ever get you to a better place than the loan is kind of low.
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Jun 28, 2011 15:33
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randyest posted:There is no "end game" -- it's a "keep it going game." Growth is needed to keep the ever-increasing human population alive. Without growth, people would need to stop loving and making babies or just watch their kids (or someone's else's kids) die for lack of food/water/shelter/medicine and/or let the old people die to save resources. Or, more likely, someone strong would just start killing the weaker people who are using up the things that the increasingly-scarce and expensive oil is needed to produce. Seems to me this is talking about first world nations and not third world nations. To help the latter, we just need to reallocate our resources and attention (not all of both, but just evenly). And it also seems to me that the earth's oil would last for many millenia if we didn't use it on the biggest consumers of oil right now. I saw another documentary called Gas Hole that talked about patents from 50+ years ago that allowed cars (as heavy as the Hummer) get over 100MPG, but oil companies like Shell took up the patents or fought hard to keep them from the public. I'm not sure about this because this movie came off as amateurish and full of conspiracy theorist types and I wasn't impressed at all that they were touting hydrogen or vegetable oil as viable alternatives. I'm taking the mindset that equal education for everyone is the most important thing ever now. Every stupid thing I see on YouTube, I'm thinking, "Wow, if these people had a better education/upbringing, they wouldn't be doing this stupid thing now." I mean I knew it was important before, but it just kind of sunk in for me. --------- And on this question of growth and investors. Why is Facebook (just one example) going public talked about like it's an inevitability? They seem fine to me the way they're growing. Why is it such a big deal that Facebook's exact value be known? I don't see how going public would benefit them when they're worth billions, but not sure exactly how many billions. And other top companies like Twitter. I wouldn't think you need to go public if you're already at the top of your field. Dudebro fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jun 28, 2011 |
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Jun 28, 2011 15:53
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TO UNDERAGE GYMNASTS
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Neofelis posted:Since the last competition entry was well received, and the obvious searches (Tineye, dozens of GIS pages and most of the wikilist of fictional bunnies) didn't yield anything useful for this round, let's see if goon power can help again. So, does anyone recognize this character that apparently has been on television? Thanks in advance for anything that might nudge towards the solution, only twenty more people left to beat! With less than four hours to go and more than four hours spent googling red rabbits and similar things in most European languages and checking plenty of tv shows (since it looks like it could be from some obscure vintage children's show), still no clues. Not even sure if it's the real character or just a toy version of an animated cartoon character. All I know is that the character has appeared on tv and it's supposed to have a last name in English, but that could just mean it's been translated into English. Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
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Jun 28, 2011 18:17
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I tried googling for a while, but I couldn't find anything similar to that.
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Jun 28, 2011 18:40
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So I just got introduced to Moral Orel from the South Park thread in TVIV. I watched the whole series and liked it pretty well. I did see this in one ep though and screenshotted it. I don't remember what ep, probably something season 3. Is that supposed to be an AR-15 lower Clay's holding? (link to a real one http://dynamicarmament.com/items/ar-15-lower-receivers/del-ton-ar-15-stripped-lower-receiver-forger-154-pin-size-del-ton-lower-detail.htm ) That's pretty awesome random attention to detail on a stop motion show full or puppets if so. He is a gun nut and this would be proof positive there's some type of actual gun nut working on the show. (I can't imagine him ever being sober enough to put a lower together though.) Or is it something completely non-gun-related I'm missing and just seeing that? Vin BioEthanol fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jun 28, 2011 |
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Jun 28, 2011 19:23
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^^^ didn't put my screenshot in there ^^^:
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Jun 28, 2011 19:24
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Dudebro posted:Seems to me this is talking about first world nations and not third world nations. To help the latter, we just need to reallocate our resources and attention (not all of both, but just evenly). And it also seems to me that the earth's oil would last for many millenia if we didn't use it on the biggest consumers of oil right now. What you're saying is we should employ massive wealth redistribution from the first world to the third world. There are a number of problems with that suggestion: 1) A lot of people in the first world won't want to lower their standard of living in order to allow that. 2) We already do it to a certain extent, and it's not as beneficial as it first sounds. For instance, sending massive amounts of food to impoverished nations merely lowers the cost of locally grown food, putting farmers out of business. Which leads to no food. Which leads to the first world sending massive amounts of food to the third world, which lowers the cost of locally grown food. You get the idea. 3) Oil is actually a great example of this: there are lots of third world nations with massive energy reserves. The only companies with the talent and equipment to extract them are first world nations. The proper way to solve this dilemma is for third world states to sign contracts with the ExxonMobils and Shells that require them to use a certain number of local employees and engineers. The local intelligence level is bolstered, the people learn how to do those sorts of things on their own, and eventually you have state oil companies capable of genuinely contributing to their economies. The wrong way to do it is Nigeria-style: have the state do nothing more than keep a cut of the profit, which will get skimmed off by corrupt officials. There's a lot of D&D angle here - my answers aren't the only "right" ones to this problem. I will point this out, though: there's little economic benefit to anyone in the chain in preserving oil for millenia. There are lots of potential long-term downsides, but there's a major profit motive weighing against that, and the downsides often impact those who don't stand to profit. It's why there are huge debates related to carbon emissions, conservation, etc. Dudebro posted:I saw another documentary called Gas Hole that talked about patents from 50+ years ago that allowed cars (as heavy as the Hummer) get over 100MPG, but oil companies like Shell took up the patents or fought hard to keep them from the public. I'm not sure about this because this movie came off as amateurish and full of conspiracy theorist types and I wasn't impressed at all that they were touting hydrogen or vegetable oil as viable alternatives. There was some shady poo poo; GM, for instance, bought up and tore up a bunch of city streetcar tracks all over America to encourage auto purchases. Many oil companies are far from models of good citizenship. But that documentary is nonsense. dudebro posted:I'm taking the mindset that equal education for everyone is the most important thing ever now. Every stupid thing I see on YouTube, I'm thinking, "Wow, if these people had a better education/upbringing, they wouldn't be doing this stupid thing now." I mean I knew it was important before, but it just kind of sunk in for me. --------- Dudebro posted:And on this question of growth and investors. Why is Facebook (just one example) going public talked about like it's an inevitability? They seem fine to me the way they're growing. Why is it such a big deal that Facebook's exact value be known? I don't see how going public would benefit them when they're worth billions, but not sure exactly how many billions. And other top companies like Twitter. I wouldn't think you need to go public if you're already at the top of your field. It also does dick to buy a warehouse full of servers right now. If Facebook needs capital to expand their operation, they need to find someone willing to invest. In the beginning, that someone is going to be a venture capitalist - someone who's willing to buy a share of the company in a small-scale, non-publicly traded environment. The problem is that when that venture capitalist wants a return on his or her investment, he has two options: to sell that share in the company or to have designed his investment such that he starts getting X% of Facebook's profits each quarter (or, more likely, some combination of the two). Selling his share is trickier when Facebook isn't publicly traded. When I want to sell my shares of GE, I click two buttons on a website. When VC wants to sell his shares of Facebook, he needs to find a small group of people wealthy enough to afford his multi-million dollar stake. Lawyers and accountants are going to get involved because they want to accurately value what the company's worth. It's harder to value the company because, as a private company, they aren't required to disclose as much information about earnings, profits, liabilities, etc. The other wrinkle is that VCs work great for earlier funding, but you run the risk of eventually saturating those options: they want preferred status, they want better protection, they want more active decision making power than a regular shareholder of a public company gets, and eventually it's simply not as easy or convenient to access that money when compared to the public markets. The end result of this is that most VC's business plans are based around a pretty simple model: invest in a company before it goes public, then get the company to go public and sell your shares. So why so much talk about Facebook going public and what it's worth? What it's worth will (to a great extent) determine the final value and cost of those shares, and the fact that it could go public represents a big investment opportunity for the ordinary folks and a big payoff opportunity for the private investors.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:27
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Neofelis posted:With less than four hours to go and more than four hours spent googling red rabbits and similar things in most European languages and checking plenty of tv shows (since it looks like it could be from some obscure vintage children's show), still no clues. Not even sure if it's the real character or just a toy version of an animated cartoon character. All I know is that the character has appeared on tv and it's supposed to have a last name in English, but that could just mean it's been translated into English. I tried for an hour or so last night, but came up empty. Good luck.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:35
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Neofelis posted:With less than four hours to go and more than four hours spent googling red rabbits and similar things in most European languages and checking plenty of tv shows (since it looks like it could be from some obscure vintage children's show), still no clues. Not even sure if it's the real character or just a toy version of an animated cartoon character. All I know is that the character has appeared on tv and it's supposed to have a last name in English, but that could just mean it's been translated into English. Are you sure it was a character/stuffed version of a cartoon character or could it have been a prop that some little girl or something carried around and gave a name? My first thought was cartoon character but I've found nothing even remotely close on Google.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:39
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Wagonburner posted:^^^ didn't put my screenshot in there ^^^: It does look a lot like one, and his finger is curved in a circle around the buffer tube mount
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Jun 28, 2011 19:44
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SIHappiness posted:A company goes public to access funding that they can't get otherwise. Think about it this way: Facebook has the holy grail of targeted advertising right at their fingertips. They can tell that I like Band X, and that Band X is coming to MyTown in 2 months, and they can throw up an ad that's far more likely to get clicked on by me than by the average person. That's a really valuable commodity. Thanks for engaging me there. About the third-world situation. I didn't really mean send packets of money and food, but rather helping to improve infrastructure and education, stuff that's an important foundation for a functional society. It's hard to find the incentives without looking to large multinational corporations who may want too much control for "doing their part" to help. Stuff like donating money to set up water wells although I'm not sure how effective those are and the longevity of those things, but there's value in those projects if you go to the right places. And maybe sponsoring children there to get through K-12. I think it's a lot cheaper than people may guess (less than $500-1000/year for high school?). ------- And how much say does Mark Zuckerberg have in Facebook staying private? I hadn't thought about the venture capitalists, but that makes sense. I don't think someone like Zuckerberg has any incentives for going public.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:53
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Knightmare posted:Are you sure it was a character/stuffed version of a cartoon character or could it have been a prop that some little girl or something carried around and gave a name? My first thought was cartoon character but I've found nothing even remotely close on Google. I suppose it could have been just a prop, but the wording suggest that it probably has had some sort of adventures. That wouldn't rule out that it has had them with a child, so I guess something like that is possible. And big thanks to everyone who's tried to help, much appreciated. Finding the solution seems so hard that it probably requires either luck with the exactly correct words, or prior knowledge of the character/show.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:55
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What's the best option for a Microsoft Word replacement? I've tried openoffice, but I'm not sure if there are any better ones out there.
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Jun 28, 2011 19:57
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Dudebro posted:Thanks for engaging me there. About the third-world situation. I didn't really mean send packets of money and food, but rather helping to improve infrastructure and education, stuff that's an important foundation for a functional society. It's hard to find the incentives without looking to large multinational corporations who may want too much control for "doing their part" to help. Stuff like donating money to set up water wells although I'm not sure how effective those are and the longevity of those things, but there's value in those projects if you go to the right places. And maybe sponsoring children there to get through K-12. I think it's a lot cheaper than people may guess (less than $500-1000/year for high school?). Of course, the counterpoint is that those multinationals may be just the ones suited to doing the work, and they may be willing to do it for no more reason than it ultimately benefits them. Third world shitholes don't buy cars. 1970s China didn't buy cars. If I recall correctly, GM sells more cars in China now than they do in the US. Similarly, a lot of the big oil companies do tend to try to fund stuff on their development sites because it's a net benefit to them. Angry people tend to mess up your operations, whereas people who see a direct benefit from the big natural gas project tend not to. ------- DudeBro posted:And how much say does Mark Zuckerberg have in Facebook staying private? I hadn't thought about the venture capitalists, but that makes sense. I don't think someone like Zuckerberg has any incentives for going public. How much say depends entirely on how his deals were negotiated. It's not uncommon to hear about founders of a company being pushed out by VCs because they're not willing to do what the money wants. On the flipside: Zuckerberg owns metric shittons (presumably) of Facebook stock even if it isn't already public. Non-public companies still have stock shares to refer to what individual owners own and to provide different benefits to different "classes" of shareholders. It is, for instance, very common for early founders to have a special preferred stock category that grants more powerful voting rights and dividend options while also being allowed to exchange out for a certain number of common stock shares (the regular stuff you or I could buy). Zuckerberg's "net worth" is a paper valuation - just like the VCs, if he wanted to cash out all or part of it now, it's much more difficult than just placing a call to a broker and selling stuff. If Facebook goes public, he could (probably) sell his common stock much easier when he wants to go do something else with the money. The Google guys had a very similar arrangement, and that's what they've done.
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Jun 28, 2011 20:09
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alnilam posted:This is neither a stupid nor a small question. SIHappiness posted:Also smart
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Jun 28, 2011 20:13
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[quote="Dudebro"] Thanks for engaging me there. About the third-world situation. I didn't really mean send packets of money and food, but rather helping to improve infrastructure and education, stuff that's an important foundation for a functional society. [/url] These most definitely important parts of a functional society once you can get the people sheltered, clothed, feed, and fresh drinking water. However, the best roads, bridges, and colleges are not going to mean dick if the average person can't get enough food to live on.
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Jun 28, 2011 20:20
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Can someone tell me where I can get a drug screen test and background check? This is for employment purpose. No they do not provide it for you.
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Jun 28, 2011 20:29
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Dawncloack posted:And to the other poster, his post history says his las post was friday... And it's already archived? I'm confused :-/ not blaming anybody or anything, just saying. His last post was 2010. It's 2011 now.
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Jun 28, 2011 20:30
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Farcus posted:Can someone tell me where I can get a drug screen test and background check? This is for employment purpose. No they do not provide it for you. Hmm, that's really unusual and doesn't sound right. They want you to pay for and set up your own drug test and background check? Companies like this will conduct a drug screen. I'm not sure about a background check, it would depend on how detailed it needs to be. edit: Regardless, your prospective employer should be able to point you in the right direction. Xandu fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jun 28, 2011 |
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Jun 28, 2011 20:36
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Farcus posted:Can someone tell me where I can get a drug screen test and background check? This is for employment purpose. No they do not provide it for you. 
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Jun 28, 2011 20:41
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randyest posted:If they don't even give you a list of acceptable test/check providers it maybe time to set up your own screening LLC to provide your "certification" results That's what I was thinking, there must be some sort of miscommunication with the prospective employer.
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Jun 28, 2011 20:48
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Captain Novolin posted:What's the best option for a Microsoft Word replacement? I've tried openoffice, but I'm not sure if there are any better ones out there. I just use Google docs for pretty much everything.
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Jun 28, 2011 21:12
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Captain Novolin posted:What's the best option for a Microsoft Word replacement? I've tried openoffice, but I'm not sure if there are any better ones out there. Just use Microsoft Word, SH/SC can point you to where to get it really cheap.
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Jun 28, 2011 21:16
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Fire In The Disco posted:I just use Google docs for pretty much everything. I have been suggesting this for a while now too. The revision history/rollback and collaborative stuff is awesome and free.
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Jun 28, 2011 21:20
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Dudebro posted:What's the endgame (or point) of economic growth? alnilam posted:This is neither a stupid nor a small question. Please either make a thread for this, or go to D&D (or both). I am glad you're having a good discussion and I really don't want to stifle it, but it looks a bit silly to have all these enormous seriousposts in the stupid/small thread  If D&D intimidates you, you can totally start one in A/T. I may move it there eventually depending on what the D&D mods think, however. ninja edit: Actually, SAP might not be a bad choice either, if you want to keep it more theoretical/philosophical and less  political .
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Jun 28, 2011 21:46
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What makes high-speed rail and modern commuter rail system so expensive? I've seen numbers of $10 million per mile for the California high-speed system, to a mindboggling $32 million per mile (just over $6,000 per foot!) for Charlotte's light rail line. Why do high-speed rail projects have a projected cost of around $10m/mile? Is it materiel? Labor? Right of way? Cost of building stations? Is any one of these vastly larger than the others or is it all just expensive?
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Jun 28, 2011 21:55
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Golbez posted:What makes high-speed rail and modern commuter rail system so expensive? I've seen numbers of $10 million per mile for the California high-speed system, to a mindboggling $32 million per mile (just over $6,000 per foot!) for Charlotte's light rail line. Why do high-speed rail projects have a projected cost of around $10m/mile? Is it materiel? Labor? Right of way? Cost of building stations? Is any one of these vastly larger than the others or is it all just expensive? BBC News covered a similar question today. "The most expensive road per mile is the Limehouse Link. The 1.1 mile (1.8 km) tunnel in London's Docklands opened in 1993 at a cost £293m. Adjusted for one measure of inflation that would be £445m or £230,000 per yard (£250,000 per metre)."
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Jun 28, 2011 21:58
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I have a .pdf of a map that's huge. I also have a ton of toner to burn through, so I thought I'd print out the map on 40 pages or whatever, and then cut/tape them together and put the whole thing on my wall. Adobe Acrobat Reader seems to have no real option to do this, the best I can do is turning off page scaling in the print options, which gives me 1 sheet per page of the non-scaled document, which is a worthless zoom in of the top left corner. I wish Rasterbating was an option, but aside from the program not working with the .pdf for some reason, it also would have way too low a resolution to be able to read street names on the final product. Is there any way to old-school print a huge .pdf to 40 sheets of paper? My only option seems to be shrink it down to fit on a standard page size. Edit: Sweet, the 'tiling' option is available on acrobat 10 and later, which solves my problem. Welp, guess this post is pretty much useless. Pythagoras a trois fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jun 28, 2011 |
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Jun 28, 2011 22:05
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Golbez posted:What makes high-speed rail and modern commuter rail system so expensive? I've seen numbers of $10 million per mile for the California high-speed system, to a mindboggling $32 million per mile (just over $6,000 per foot!) for Charlotte's light rail line. Why do high-speed rail projects have a projected cost of around $10m/mile? Is it materiel? Labor? Right of way? Cost of building stations? Is any one of these vastly larger than the others or is it all just expensive? It takes a lot of work and materials, that's all there is to it. You have 4 trackways, overhead wiring for the electric power, you need to make sure the ground's stable and bridges and tunnels and other ways for other traffic to not directly intersect at grade are built, you need to be building substations every x miles to provide the power feed, and then you need all the dudes to actually get it done.
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Jun 28, 2011 22:25
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Update for the rabbit thingie: no luck finding anything, and my guess "Red" was incorrect so I'm out. No idea what the correct answer is, but please don't spend any more time looking for it, and thanks for all the effort you already put into it.
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Jun 28, 2011 23:04
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Where do the gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses being poked at with pencils and coins come from? They are used by anti-abortion activists all the time, and they were even at my college campus a while back outside the window of the dining area with huge posters facing in with these pictures on them. But there is never any explanation of the pictures.
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Jun 29, 2011 00:44
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Selavi posted:Where do the gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses being poked at with pencils and coins come from? They are used by anti-abortion activists all the time, and they were even at my college campus a while back outside the window of the dining area with huge posters facing in with these pictures on them. But there is never any explanation of the pictures. Most of those are medical photographs of natural miscarriages.
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Jun 29, 2011 02:53
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Farcus posted:Can someone tell me where I can get a drug screen test and background check? This is for employment purpose. No they do not provide it for you. I definitely remember someone posting on SA about a scam job offer that required the applicant to provide their own background tests. It also fails the sniff test: they don't trust you to be honest about your personal history, yet they trust you to provide an honest check?
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Jun 29, 2011 03:11
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haveblue posted:Most of those are medical photographs of natural miscarriages. This is what I have heard from actual doctors. It's a complete lie from the "fact" that "this is what they are doing" to "we found this is in a dumpster behind an abortion clinic". It's creepy and gross but medical science is that; stillborn babies need to be autopsied, some person realized it would make a good promotion for "anti-choice" and ran with it. It's definitely effective.
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Jun 29, 2011 03:57
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Why are they being jabbed at with pencils? And do you have a source that talks about them? I hardly know what to search for.
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Jun 29, 2011 04:38
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Selavi posted:Why are they being jabbed at with pencils? And do you have a source that talks about them? I hardly know what to search for. Probably just to highlight/examine something on the body? Are the coins you speak of put on the bodies or next to the bodies? Those are probably for scale. If the coins are being used as morbid comic props, then I dunno.
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Jun 29, 2011 04:46
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stoops posted:i like to collect random little toys, like action figures, etc, that i find at garage sales, on the street, or wherever. Any makers marks on it? Dates, brand names, copyright, etc? That will help narrow the search a bit. http://www.action-figures.ca has a pretty exhaustive database but no good way to search other than by looking through each category. Edit: vvvvvv drat son you're good. That's obscure as hell. alucinor fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jun 29, 2011 |
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Jun 29, 2011 19:23
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stoops posted:i like to collect random little toys, like action figures, etc, that i find at garage sales, on the street, or wherever.
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Jun 29, 2011 19:57
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TetsuoTW posted:I think I found it. It's Jeff the Director from a 1977 Fisher Price toyset called "TV Action Team" in the Adventure People line. Respect.
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Jun 29, 2011 21:22
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How in god's name did you find that one figure? My question is about the American debt counter. How accurate is it and who's in charge of it? Is there more than one source? MSNBC was showing it alongside Obama's press conference earlier today.
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Jun 29, 2011 21:44
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