2 minor nits.
1. Hummers are no long being made.
2. Most F-150s are sold as work trucks. Also, F-150 is one of the more efficient work trucks out there.

Agreed.

Maybe if there were talking about full size SUV sales in general they would have a point. With cheap gas, buying a gas guzzler makes more sense.

Of course, the number of miles Americans have been driving have been falling for the past 5 years. Partly this is due to the internet which allows people to schedule themselves more efficiently, making few trips.

I am a little confused.

I am an investor, be it equity (stock) or debt (bank loans). I invest in housing. Maybe new construction, maybe something already built. It should not matter. The deal goes south and the project goes bankrupt. Under current law, the house is resold and the cash gets divided up by the investors. Normally equity gets whipped out the debt holders get paid some fraction of the loan's worth – say between 80% to 20%

Are you saying that we should rewrite the laws so that bankrupt properties get handed over to the public, with the equity and debt holders getting nothing?

Or are you trying to say that IP is a special, inferior good. As an inferior good, we in society should actively discourage people from investing in R&D by giving IP a lower standard of protection?

I don't think that either of the choice you offer is rational. I have issues with IP. However, the correct answers is to raise the standard that parents are granted and/or shorten the lifespan of the IP.

Let us break this question into 3 parts.

Frist, I still think you are confusing Zelman (child company, maybe viable) with Moneual (parent company, fraud, massive bank loans, not viable.)

Second, why operations vs. financials matter. Here is an example. You buy an apartment building with a 10m loan. The building is fully leased with long term leases. It is not sitting on a toxic waste dump, is not filled with asbestos, etc. It generates enough cash to cover maintenance, management fees, taxes, etc. There is a problem. It does not generate enough cash to pay the 10m loan. Maybe it can only support a 8m loan. Look at Enron. They had many well run viable electric power plants that are still running today. They just needed to be separated from the massive fraudulent debt of the parent.

The project is a failure. Question – should you tear down the building? Probably not. The building is economically viable. The problem is that the price paid for the building was too high.

The rational course of action is to restructure to loan to 8m. (which kind of implies that the banks should size the building and push the current owners out.). Note, we are not making a judgment on how we got into debt. Bad judgment, over optimism, fraud, etc. We don't care. Assigning blame won't change how we get out.

Third, why exaggerate sales to get loans. Or to simplify your question, why commit fraud? Exaggerating sales is just a means to an end. Most accounting fraud starts off small with good intentions. One has a temporary short fall, there is a really good opportunity, normally I am so good a picking the ponies, etc. It's just going to be a few thousand. There is always a promise to make it up next week. Or the week after that. And after a few years and a few million dollars, people wonder where they went wrong.

The book is better, but here is a favorite of mine to explain why people commit fraud: Rogue Trader with Ewan McGregor as Nick Lesson
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

Zelman is a public company and I assume has a vigorous outside auditor.

Moneual, which committed the fraud, is not a public company. I would assume that their audit standards are lower.

Of course, even public companies can commit financial shenanigans.
http://www.amazon.com/Financia...

This has nothing to do with Zelman selling $10 CPU coolers. No acquisitions of fraud against Zelman yet.

This is about Moneual and the fraud they committed. Moneual just happens to own 90% of Zelman.

I am familiar with US / western bankruptcy law. This is Korea so your mileage will vary.

First, the issue is one of finance, not operations. If that is true, that means the company is still viable – that is worth more as a operating entity than being sold off for parts. So it will probably keep on going.

Second, from a brief scan of the article, there are no allegations of fraud against Zalman. It is against Moneual, which owns 90% of Zalman's shares. It sounds like it is not the court seizing Zalman's assets, but freezing Moneual's assets.

Technically as a independent entity, Zalman should keep on ticking like it has. This assumes that Zalman did not assist Moneual's fraud. Since Moneual had a controlling interest in Zalman that is a big assumption that needs to be checked out. Probably another reason why the shares are frozen.

Technically speaking, "Watchmen" was the first comic to score big in the trade paperback market. Nobody had any expectation that Watchmen could keep on selling. The success and longevity was unprecedented, so I am not sure if it would matter how closely Moore had read the contract.

I think that part of the problem was that Moore was more familiar with British copyright laws which tend to be more generous to the creators.

I like the thrust of your question but you might want to reword it, removing references to the Comic Code.

At that point the Code was fadding. As you mentioned, most independent publishers no longer followed it. However it was also losing mainstream acceptance. Vitergo titles, which includes Hellblazer, had abounded the Code about 10 years earlier so that was not a factor.

And, of course, today it is dead.

I will second that Alan Moore is almost always "upset".

this. From what I have read of Allen Moore, he is an arrogant demanding S.O.B who does not play nice with corporations. He and his works have not always been treated kindly by them. He is an anti-corporate anarchist so I think that is kind of par for the course.

I think you other comments are a bit off the mark. I can't think of any of his works that have been well adapted – large sums of money or know. For myself, V for Vendetta and Watchmen were adequate. I thought that From Hell was a good movie but a very poor adaptation. Everything else was pretty hideous. Just because somebody drops a large sack of cash at my door does not mean I have to think highly of them.

And just because he is a arrogant demanding S.O.B. does not diminish the brilliance of his works.

I personally thought it was funny that Allen Moore was pissed that V for Vendetta was re-tasked from being anti-Thatcher to anti-Bush when he had re-tasked so many different characters from Watchmen.

I am curious about anthropologist – I have 2 questions.

First, where are you getting your data from? Do they account for the lag between graduation and finding a "real" job and a temporary job to pay the bills until then? (off of the top of my head, I would think a lag of 6 to 12 months would be right)

Second, what do you mean by "working retail"? I ask, because I know many retailers who hire anthropologist to study their shoppers. So while "retail", it is not the low paying "Do you want fries with that" type of job.

Which is kind of sad.

Graduating with a degree in Fine Arts from your local state school still leaves you with a ton of debt, poor job prospects, and a high chance of default. The only good thing is that you are ahead of the people who took got a degree in the Preforming Arts.

If they are going to apply it private colleges they should also apply to state colleges as well.

This is true. Operational costs are also higher. Working off a hunch here – not hard numbers.

Return on Investment = (Revenue - Costs) / Investments.
Year 1 = (200-100)/500 = 20% ROI
Year 5 = (220-100)/(500+200) = 15% ROI
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. I think you are confusing investments, a balance sheet operation, with costs, an income sheet operation. If I take 700m in cash and buy 700m of cable equipment, gold, land, or government T-bills I haven't accrued any costs. I have moved assets from one part of the balance sheet to another.
Depreciation of assets is another thing. That hits the income statement and is considered to be part of operations. In theory depreciation should match it's usefully life, meaning ROI would be correct. Of course estimations in the real world have issues.
However, in any event, using your methodology, we are back at 26%. Which is standard for cable but fat for most business.
On to AT&T. I have to ask – what competition are you talking about? I grew up with a municipal owned telco. They were a monopoly and they gouged us. Sure, there was AT&T and another municipal owned telco 30 miles away, but they could not offer us any services. There is no reason to think that 100 local monopolizes would be subjected to competitive forces just because there are 100. What broke the market wasn't other monopolizes but new technologies – the cell phone, and latter VOIP.

To your question

Let see, the US has 1. Above average costs, 2. Below average speed, and 3. Higher than average profits. So I don't know this.
Let me ask, why would Comcast expand?
Can they expand out into new areas? Nope. All of the markets have been colonized.
Can they expand up by offering better services? This assumes that any costs associated with building better services can be matched raising the prices. Normal firms expand until their marginal costs equal their marginal revenue. They must keep prices low. Not monopolies. They expand until their average cost equals their marginal revenue. Higher prices, lower output, and more profit.

I would recommend reading up on Jean Tirole won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this year for work in this area. Different solutions gets different results. I have not found the perfect article yet, but here is one.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

It would depend on the question being asked.

If we want to know if the cable business has fat margins, we want to know how the "real" business is really doing. Yes, the CFO could load up the balance sheet with debt while doing share buyback, causing the profit margin to fall into the single digits. However, the fact that different CFOs chose different levels of debt does not affect if they have monopoly pricing.

Besides, Verizon and Comcast only break out their segments at the operational level, as required by the SEC. If you operate at the profit margins you need to disentangle cell phones and amusement parks.

As for time, feel free to go back 5 years. I have. The cable divisions have fat margins. My gut tells me this has always been true.

Now, maybe you are saying for investors net profit margin is better than operational income margin. Maybe. It is the more popular number. I will point out that while the net profit margin (or better yet, the earning yield) does a better job on returns, operational income margin is a better predictor of a company's health. A classic sign that a company is getting into trouble is when net profit and operational income margin goes in different directions. This could indicate deteriorating fundamentals, increasing leverage, accounting fraud, etc.

Personally I have found few unimportant numbers in the financials. It is knowing how to use them.