I think it is mostly psychology via ratios. For example a number of institutional investors go by EPS. If shares in this industry are trading at a 20 x multiple and your companies shares are trading at a 10x multiple, you can try to buy back shares to get your multiple higher. Again, just one example but I'm sure the boards of directors, who are elected mainly by the institutional investors determine what will multiples and ratios they need to hit to be in the magic zone for algorithms and also investor psychology.
There is a disconnect here that needs to be clarified but you are actually part correct. The 'corporation' owns the shares, but shareholder 1 owns the corporation and thus it is his now. Shareholder 1 now owns 100% of the company but the company is worth 50% less because it spent half it's money on buybacks. So shareholder 1's value of ownership did not increase at all, only shareholder 1's % of ownership. Stock buybacks do not add value to a company and are not like a dividend at all. All they are is an indicator that the board thinks the shares are undervalued.
It's not even that bad for users. Paypal sucks for people on the merchant side of the transaction. People who actually accumulate money in accounts are those that always complain. Merchants feel like they have to stick with it just to open up more payment options to their customers though. Now paypal even keeps all fees no matter if a customer returned an item. So if you are selling say cameras for $1000.If someone returns the camera. Paypal keeps about $30 - actually you are out $30 for every return.
Places like Birchbox are huge pieces of crap. They free trial you but also renew you automatically for a year at a time and won't let you cancel. Look up reviews of it any you will see hundreds and hundreds of complaints and I experienced it first hand.
Only a small share of people who use twitter actually tweet and yes a smaller share of those people tweet on a specific subject. I'm no sure how this is news. "Only a small share of U.S. adults product majority of tweets on ______." Fill in the blank.. only those interest in a topic will tweet about it.
Is it a veil? Imagine you are a landlord and you rent to a Walmart. Are you as the landlord responsible for all of Walmart's products? It is the same thing but Amazon owns a virtual high traveled location instead of the landlord who owns a place on a busy street. Amazon shouldn't be responsible for the third party seller, but it should be extremely clear that it is a third party seller, like the sign on the side of a building.
What Chinese companies actually do is both really. They take an order of 1000 say Apple iPhones then actually produce 2000, keeping 1000 for themselves. They then sell the knock-offs themselves within China or into the U.S. on e-bay and other 'used' sites.
Exactly this. It has nothing to do with the boat cost or economies of scale because once it arrives it has to still go that last mile - or last hundred miles within the U.S. the same as any package.
Even in industries the U.S. does have manufacturing for the cost of manufacturing is insane. I shopped around to literally every apparel production company listed on any list in the U.S. 50% of the companies said they don't have bandwidth to take any more orders, they literally didn't want the business at any price. The other 49% didn't deal in 'small orders' basically anything under 5000. In the last 1% of U.S. companies the very cheapest cost was double the price to manufacture in China - where we got very few quotes because of the language barrier.So Electric scooter or simple piece of clothing, the U.S. just loses out in every single way. This is the smallest of a long road to challenge China, point being if the U.S. companies are more comparable in price they will become more profitable, will be more likely to expand and build, and buyers will be more likely to buy U.S. Not to mention, the U.S. really needs it's own version of Alibaba so businesses can shop easier, it boggles my mind that it doesn't exist.
Not the OP, but you could technically win the popular vote with those same 13 state's voters. When there is overwhelming support for one candidate the electoral college and popular vote would always be exactly the same. It actually only matters on a closely contest election and in that case the edge goes to the person with more broad support.
Senators get elected at best about 70% to 30% in votes also so assume that only 70% of that 38.4M people actually 'control' the laws. "Completely control" is a bit of an exaggeration though, I think you mean not allow new laws to get passed. Having a small population with the ability to prevent new laws is less concerning to me than a populous majority with the ability to pass laws. New laws should have broad support and broad appeal before getting enacted. Due to the internet there is much more spread of culture and thought between states than ever before and I think we could see much more laws getting passed very soon if democrats and republicans, and the media, could stop acting like every single day is election day again and are contrarian to every single word that comes from the other party.
I think you are underestimating the size of these companies. You say get a "real job" but YouTube pays millions upon millions of people and may be the largest employer by number of people paid. It is already a real job. There are many insanely huge YouTubers who have started their own websites and they have all failed with them. Even being the largest creator on YouTube they couldn't move traffic to their own website.
I don't think the monopoly the previous user mentions implies you can't speak but it implies you can't be found. For instance if you don't show up on Google, yes you can tell your friends to visit your website but you can't tell everyone where your website is. If you get banned from one or more of these websites, it is like there is a town square and 99% of people are huddled in one side of the square and you are standing in the far corner where no one can hear you even if you shouted. Maybe you can tell your friend to go walk over to that side and tell people to come over to this side, but no one wants to come over to this side because they want their voices to be heard over where the rest of the town is having a conversation.
The most popular websites in the U.S. where users share content are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram (Facebook's subsidiary), Reddit, Twitch, then arguably Imgur which is more a hosting site of images for other services, and maybe even iTunes for podcasts. You can monetize your content on most of these sites but if you get banned from say YouTube, your audience just dropped from the whole country to say half of the country. To compare to the real world, imagine if you were banned from speaking where half of the country lives. Besides the fact you can't get your message out even to those who want to hear it, but that your income is earned from speaking and now you can't reach your audience. These are real concerns for most content creators now that their voice and livelihood relies on these services. There is a point where we can decide these companies have too much control. Whether it be by site visits, % of total internet audience, or number of accounts/reach... YouTube has more accounts than the entire population of the U.S. Maybe that could be the threshold where we consider a company should be a 'public forum' or subject to meet certain free speech standards/regulations with their policies.