Any link? I suspect that those cars had a negative average cost - taking into account fixed overhead, sales, general and administrative, depreciation, etc. The difference here is that they are earning negative variable margin. In my world, there's a constant joke when you come across a product line with a negative variable margin: people like to joke, "yeah, but you make it up volume." Here, people don't have the same sense of irony. Perhaps if we close our eyes and concentrate, we can wish it to be economically feasible.

of electric sheep?

I wonder how many /.ers could balance a simple checkbook if they had to.

My guess is that the company weighed the merits of continuing to exist against the issues of giving up control. They've lost over $250MM over the last few years and are probably still looking at a few years of losses ahead of them; that money has to come from somewhere. It might as well be public shareholders.

But why don't they just raise prices on mail? The amount of junk mail I get seems to indicate that the cost of mailing things to me is too low. I'd much rather get less mail, more reliably.

Indeed - long term investors should cheer market inefficiencies. No one forces me to buy an overvalued stock or sell an undervalued stock, and when prices are too low - that is a good thing for a buyer.

"Lagging" means that it is easily predicted by other variables - such as industrial production (see federal reserve website for all sorts of fun data). Industrial production is arguably the most important variable. Stock market tends to be correllated to it, and lead it by a month or two. The objective facts are that 1) the stock market is correllated with many things that will happen in the future and 2) unemployment ~1 year out is very easily predicted. If unemployment matters most, we should address policy using "leading indidicators" and "coincident indicators" (those that tend to predict unemployment) rather than addressing the lagging indicators. To do otherwise would be to drive using the rear view mirror.

...and just 10 years ago it was worth 14,000. The point is that the only valid way to value a company is based on its projected cash flows, discounted to the present. Reasons for changes in price include: changes in projected cash flows (looks like we are not heading for a great depression), low treasury interest rates and low expected inflation, and higher degree of risk tolerance. I must have missed the semester where you value a security based on what some idiot pays for it (actually I guess that is technically the price=value strong form market efficiency hypothesis, but no one actually buys into that).

You have much to learn.

Studies have shown that nearly all of people who contracted cancer had lived in a house within the past 5 years. I'm surprised there isnt more of an uproar.

I'm curious about whether the number of planets of the type that are detectable with current technology can provide us with estimates of total earth-like planets. For instance, if we know that we can only currently detect large mass planet orbiting quickly, and have found that X% of stars seem to have them, what does that imply for small rocky planets that are not close to their stars? As our technology improves and we expand the set of types of planets that we are able to observe, it seems like we should be able to refine our estimate of the fraction of stars that have earth-like planets.

Rhodes' "Making of the Atomic Bomb" has an excellent recap of the path the atomic physics took from discovery of atom to the atom bomb, with a strong focus on how the physical experiments were married to the theoretical. In fact, there are a number of examples of people uncovering results in physical experiments without realizing the implications. For instance, the Joliot-Curies ran experiments which demonstrated the existence of both the neutron and positron, without realizing it. Others came up with the theory, realized the Joliot-Curies misinterpreted their findings and achieved glory. Doesn't go too in-depth on some phenomena like the photoelectric effect, but I can highly recommend it for the path between the birth of quantum physics and the atomic bomb.

How does one get from, "I have not found a systematic flaw in the quality of Knuth et al.'s reasoning" to "Knuth Got it Wrong"?

From my experience, the answer is likely vietnam or cambodia. I have seen a few firms considering pulling out of china due to rising wages/price inflation, and they were all looking at these two countries.

If memory serves, 19th century England had an interesting anomaly, in that during some period overall life expectancy declined, while life expectancy improved both for city-dwellers and non-city dwellers. The reason the overall statistic declined was the flood of the people to the city (where life expectancies were lower) had the effect of lowering the average.