101 karma · joined May 1, 2011
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 time it must be the AI.
The RSpec book is a pretty good introduction to this topic.
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.
Not liking it doesn't make you a Marxist but just somebody who happens not to like this kind of stuff.
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.
> 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...
Actually, they aren't bad at thinking things through, it is impossible to think things through. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1...
> 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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
That's how Mufasa pitched Simba.
It's weird how "intellectual property" somehow got associated with personal liberty, the free market etc., when in fact it totally goes against those ideas.
The alternative is inflation (and economic instability) as soon as people start generating income by producing money for basically nothing.
Asymmetric information is another possible reason to prefer debt: If somebody wants to sell something, it often means that he's not happy with it. So what does it tell a potential investor if management wants to sell equity? Thus, management will often prefer to issue debt as to not send a negative signal to the market. (see the pecking order theory)
It's interesting to note that Modigliani & Miller have proven that the financial structure (ratio of equity to debt) wouldn't matter in a frictionless market. There are many theories concerning many different market frictions, e.g. bankruptcy cost, agency problems, etc.