Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (783973)	5/9/2014 1:13:59 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576377

Wharf Rat is probably the smartest and most decent person on SI. That you can't see that is your fatal flaw! You lack a conscience. Empathy. I have read that people like you really cannot see how wrong they are. I feel sorry for you. << By the way, Wharf Rat is too detached from reality to be a reliable source of info on California. He still longs for the days when Silicon Valley was just an agricultural region full of orchards. Tenchusatsu

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (783973)	5/9/2014 1:23:31 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576377

Silly Valley will be Detroit someday.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (783973)	5/9/2014 12:27:50 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1576377

Pope Francis urges governments to redistribute wealth to the poor — maybe even half of it By Travis Gettys rawstory.com ( Are Catholics even allowed to BE Republicans now? ) Friday, May 9, 2014 11:32 EDT Pope Francis called on “legitimate redistribution” of wealth by the world’s governments to undo the “economy of exclusion” underlying capitalist society. The pontiff appealed Friday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies in Rome, warning that wealth inequality promoted a “culture of death” at odds with Catholic teachings. “An awareness of the dignity of each of our brothers and sisters whose life is sacred and inviolable from conception to natural death must lead us to share with complete freedom the goods which God’s providence has placed in our hands,” Pope Francis said. These may be “material goods but also intellectual and spiritual ones,” Francis said, and he urged the world’s people “to give back generously and lavishly whatever we may have earlier unjustly refused to others.” The Catholic Church’s first Latin American pope has upset American conservatives with his critiques of the unrestrained free market and “trickle-down” economics, which he dismissed as naïve and unsupported by the facts. “A contribution to this equitable development will also be made both by international activity aimed at the integral human development of all the world’s peoples and by the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society,” Pope Francis said. Pope Francis asked U.N. officials to consider the biblical story of Zacchaeus the tax collector, whom he said showed it’s never too late to correct injustice. In the Luke 19:1-10 account, the diminutive tax collector tells Jesus he will give away half his possessions to the poor to atone for his sins and pay back four times the amount to anyone he’s cheated. “Zacchaeus made a radical decision of sharing and justice, because his conscience had been awakened by the gaze of Jesus,” the pope explained. “This same spirit should be at the beginning and end of all political and economic activity.” He urged world leaders to make similarly “courageous decisions with immediate results.” “I urge you to work together in promoting a true, worldwide ethical mobilization which — beyond all differences of religious or political convictions — will spread and put into practice a shared ideal of fraternity and solidarity, especially with regard to the poorest and those most excluded,” Pope Francis challenged them. Watch video of the pope’s remarks posted online by Catholic News Service:

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (783973)	5/9/2014 12:56:44 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576377

Yes, we're in a tech bubble. Here's how I know it By Adam Lashinsky, Sr. Editor at Large May 8, 2014: 7:00 AM ET tech.fortune.cnn.com When tech startups are willing to offer almost anyone -- even a journalist -- shares ahead of an IPO, a burst isn't terribly far behind. FORTUNE -- I was surprised but not completely flabbergasted by the phone call I received a few weeks ago. A representative of Arista Networks, a networking company I've written about recently, phoned to inform me that the company's chief executive wanted to offer me "friends and family" shares in Arista's upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit, down to the number of shares I'd have the opportunity to purchase at the IPO price. The caller specifically wanted me to understand this offer came directly from CEO Jayshree Ullal. I declined. I briefly explained that it was impossible for me to accept the gift that was being offered. I also told the (clearly uncomfortable) Arista rep, with whom I've dealt for stories forFortune, that it is a horrible idea to be making these shares available to me. That's because the company must be similarly propositioning other business partners who, like me, are neither a friend of the company nor family members of its employees. I never heard another word from the company, which hasn't yet gone public. (I phoned Wednesday to ask if other journalists had been offered IPO shares; a spokeswoman pointed me to a section of its Form S-1 filing which states that a directed share program exists -- and nothing more.) But as I hung up the phone, I realized that I finally had tangible confirmation that we are squarely in the middle of a tech-company bubble. At the outset of this post, I wrote that I was merely surprised by this slimy suggestion that it'd be okay for a journalist to buy into the IPO of a company he has covered. That's because, as with so many of the telltale signs of a bubble, I have seen this before. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early aughts, a colleague of mine at the San Jose Mercury News got into hot water for accepting a "friends and family" share allocation. (She contended that the CEO who offered her the shares was indeed a friend. I had and have no reason to doubt her assertion, which was and is beside the point.) When times are so good that executives are willing to disregard the difference between ethical and unctuous behavior, it's just one sign that the end, relatively speaking, is near. MORE: Startup funding will go on, even after the music stops It's not the only sign. Calling a bubble is something of a fool's errand. Some will rely on comparative valuation analysis to argue that private and public prices for companies are overvalued. That's fine though imprecise, and almost no help in terms of timing. *Others will point to scarcity of real estate, salaries paid for engineers, or the inability to nail down a reservation at a hot San Francisco restaurant. All are good tells of a tech bubble. Mine, however, revolve around my personal experiences of having lived through the last one. The oversupply of journalism jobs covering the technology industry, for example, is a good indicator. Silicon Valley is the hottest story going these days, and not just because The New Yorker, New York* magazine, and the New York Times Magazine have discovered it. New digital publications devoted exclusively to covering technology have sprung up, including PandoDaily, The Information, Re/code, and Mashable. That, in turn, has provoked a frenzy of tech-coverage hiring at the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. All of these reporters are now competing for what a wise editor at one of these publications calls "micro scoops," stories that are fresh, exclusive, newsy -- and most likely irrelevant to all but a group of people you could count on your hands and feet. At the risk of sounding old, I've seen this before, too. Back in the good old days, there wereUpside and Red Herring magazines (each notable, like some of today's new outlets, for being backed by some of the venture capitalists they covered), as well as CNET News, The Industry Standard and robust coverage in the Journal, Times, and -- bless its diminished soul -- theMercury News. MORE: Silicon Valley discovers secession, decides it's supercool The fact that most people reading this post won't have ever heard of some of these publications should sufficiently explain how it all turned out for them. And some of the news organizations that I listed above that are in existence today won't survive the demise of the current bubble. Some will, of course. That's how bubbles work. I can also gauge the tech bubble by the flow of dinner, drinks, and other social invitations in my inbox. The PTA at my daughter's school is hosting a really neat fundraiser this week in San Francisco, the kind of event that appeals to an audience far beyond our school community. I personally know of no fewer than four other significant functions happening that night elsewhere in San Francisco, and that's not counting straight-ahead business functions. I could easily dine out four nights a week on the dime of some public relations firm that is hosting a dinner in an attempt to drum up publicity for its client. And I'm not invited to nearly the number of swanky gatherings that my younger, more receptive colleagues are. This isn't new, either. During the last bubble -- when I was younger and had fewer responsibilities outside of work -- I pretty much stopped going to tech-related dinners because they were all the same. The stories were the same. The people were the same. The restaurants? The same. After the bubble popped, the invitations slowed down dramatically. It was a relief. MORE: Is HBO's 'Silicon Valley' any good? I'll conclude with one caveat and one lesson learned. The caveat is that I have no idea when this game of musical chairs will end and who will be left standing. I just know that it will end. The lesson involves how I intend to behave differently this time around. Before, I was so exhausted from the trajectory of it all -- first the giddy run-up, then the monotonous exuberance, and finally the depressing collapse -- that I had a hard time getting excited about the technology business for a while. For a short period of time, it blinded me to legitimately cool companies that were still grinding away on interesting businesses. I remember visiting Google ( GOOG), for example, during the depths of the tech downturn and being simultaneously excited by its optimism and unimpressed with its business model. (Oops.) This time around, I plan to keep my eyes open for the interesting companies and entrepreneurs that are sure to survive this strange period. Because the tech bubble is upon us -- and I fully expect it to burst.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (783973)	5/10/2014 1:19:30 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1576377

The Most Popular Tax in History Is Getting Real Momentum Here in the U.S. The U.S. would do well to emulate its European neighbors' Robin Hood Tax. alternet.org *This article originally appeared at The Nation, and is reprinted here with their permission.* The European Financial Transaction (akaRobin Hood) tax scored a big legal victory on April 30, when a challenge regarding the legality of the tax brought by the British government was thrown out by the European Court of Justice. The ECJ has struck a serious blow for fairness, as the dismissal essentially chastises the British government for championing the interests of the U.K.’s financial industry over those of its citizens. David Hillman, spokesperson for the Robin Hood campaign, told The Guardian, “This futile legal challenge tells you all you need to know about the government’s misguided priorities: it would rather defend a privileged elite in the City than support a tax that could raise billions to tackle poverty and protect public services.” What’s more, these “misguided priorities” of David Cameron’s government became all the more apparent last Friday, when an analysis of the Bank of England’s £375 billion stimulus program determined that those public funds, according to the International Business Times,“[have] made the wealthiest five percent even richer, worsened the economic recovery, made pension pots smaller, failed to stimulate business investment, and given a bonus to financial services.” To recap, then, Britain’s response to the financial crisis has included flogging for the finance industry at the ECJ and giving them a £375 billion gift from the public coffers — what one analyst actually calls a “Robin Hood tax in reverse.” In this environment, then, the real, non-reversed Robin Hood tax has serious momentum within Europe, just as the 11-nation coalition behind it is expected to make an important announcement about the first phase of the tax on May 5 or 6. The proposed tax includes a 0.1 percent tax on stock and bond trades and a tax of 0.01 percent on derivatives. It’s now expected that the tax will indeed be phased in, with the levy on stock-trades comprising the first step. Reportedly, the finance ministers involved in the negotiations plan to use the rest of the year to negotiate over taxes on derivative-trading, which could be introduced later in a second phase. While the German government is reportedly determined to get an agreement from the outset to include derivatives, there has been some resistance, including from the supposedly more left-wing French government. The Robin Hood Tax is, as European FTT campaigners say, the “most popular tax in history,” and such high regard — even for something as seemingly unromantic as a 0.1 percent tax — isn’t difficult to understand: FTT revenue can be used to create jobs; spur economic development beyond the financial industry; and combat climate change, global poverty and HIV/AIDS. One measure of the tax’s popularity is that this week’s announcement about the FTT’s first phase has been scheduled to occur during the lead-up to the European Parliament elections of May 22–25, and support for the tax is expected to be a major vote-getter. Not exactly an American-election-style “October Surprise” to be sure, but certainly a signal to candidates: Robin Hood matters to European citizens. You can lend your name to the movement, too, by signing the “1 Million Strong” petition. Even if this week’s announcement isn’t everything campaigners have been hoping for, the announcement itself will send a strong signal that the European FTT — despite the U.K.’s legal challenge, despite a strong backlash from the financial industry, and despite concerns from the U.S. Treasury Department about possible impacts on U.S. investors — is moving ahead. We’re seeing more and more popular, judicial, and — increasingly — legislative support for the tax in Europe. This kind of visible success should boost efforts to build support for such a tax in this country, currently represented by Representative Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) Inclusive Prosperity Act. While the Obama administration has not yet supported the idea, there is increased openness in the Treasury Department to at least take a closer look at a FTT as one possible remedy for high-frequency trading (which happens to be the subject to Michael Lewis’s latest best-selling book, Flash Boys). Thanks in part to Lewis, there’s increasing awareness of how these high-speed/high-frequency traders are rigging American markets in their favor. (Lewis writes, “…f a single Wall Street bank were to exploit the countless minuscule discrepancies in price between Thing A in Chicago and Thing A in New York, they’d make profits of $20 billion a year.” And obviously, as Flash Boys illustrates, that exploitation of those countless minuscule discrepancies is only available to a handful of deep-pocketed outfits with access to certain blazing-fast fiber-optic cable lines, effectively reducing much of the stock market down to a few guys in a black box making 10,000 trades per second. “It is hard to see the benefit to society as a whole of enabling such trades,” muses The New York Times’s Floyd Norris in a discussion of the book.) But as Sheila Bair, former head of FDIC, has put it, an FTT “would penalize those who destabilize our markets with rapid fire trading, while rewarding those who invest for the long term.” In the City of London and on Wall Street, the price of doing business should be paid by, well, those doing business. We pay a steep opportunity cost — ”dead weight loss,” as Robert J. Barbera of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins puts it — when we give the finance industry free reign to make money by any means necessary, even if it destroys the economy for the rest of us. They’re on the right track in Europe; here in the U.S., we need to join them.