Hmm... fleeing the country and be free or staying and getting locked up but having your full moral support ... decisions, decisions...

Someone should've told that prick Washington and his cronies, then the Brits would still have a nice big colony.

There should be proper operational management and risk management at every level. If you're elevating everything to the same people in full, uh. Yeah, that's broken.

Patching is an operations issue. If the patch process ever changes--if you find a patch that breaks your stuff and you need to take an unprecidented action--that's some kind of project. Decisions are made. Usually it's a very minor project that ends in a decision to exercise a known process (upgrade, contact vendor for fix, etc.), and doesn't require spinning up a whole waterfall methodology and going through all these motions of scheduling and such. Part of project management is knowing when to be more or less formal.

At least someone gets it.

OP should probably pick up a book on project management and familiarize himself with change control management concepts, and the need thereof. In large IT shops, change controlling patches is important: I've been in shops where critical patches were held back because the 2 week testing round showed that they caused critical services to fail, which was unacceptable. We worked out workarounds, fixed our own software, or got the vendor on the phone as necessary and suspended those patches for those systems in particular until we could get things straight; but if we'd just fired patches off as they came, we would have been in a WORLD of hurt!

My current employer has no change control management for anything, and every time something breaks there's just arguments and shouting. I have to weed through a whole lot of shit, de-tangle lossy memories, and eventually form a picture of when this was first noticed, how frequently it occurs, what changed around that time, what else could be broke in the same way but is not, etc. Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis. If we had a CCM, I could just pull up the changes at that time and avoid a whole lot of guesses and conjecture, solve problems quicker, and have fewer instances of problems never getting solved because everyone would rather sit around and cry like babies while throwing wooden blocks at each others' heads.

And they wonder why I'm suddenly studying for project management...

Liquidity is the ability to turn an asset into something else, I guess. It has to do with spending. If you can spend it, it's liquid. Savings accounts are less liquid than checking accounts because you can only make 3 withdrawals per month from savings (Federal regulations). Concrete is not very liquid because you can't trade directly in concrete; you have to liquidate it to cash first.

I got something jumbled up above though, yeah. Solvency is access to funds equivalent or greater than funds required. Ugh.

Point still stands: The stock market has as much money available as it has coming in and out. It does not, however, have the capability to liquidate its assets. It is insolvent: those $72 billion worth of AAPL are not worth $72 billion, because if you liquidated the whole fucking market cap you would find FAR more than $72 billion, but enough of it would be spent buying off other stocks that there wouldn't be $72 billion left for AAPL and the price would come down.

Or something. Look, the mechanism is too complex in the real world to explain in any sensible terms.

It's like the young universe: There's more matter (stock value) than antimatter (cash value), and if we ever tried to annihilate it all we'd wind up running out of antimatter and have just piles of matter sitting around that can't find any antimatter to react with. The stock market is valued at more than the actual cash value of the stock market in practice; there is not more money in the market simply because we turned up some of the numbers.

Running a store is different. When you run a store, you are buying product and selling it for a profit margin. Tangible goods and services. You staff people for a certain wage and provide services for a higher hourly surcharge.

The stock market is like running a store where you sell iPads, but nobody opens and uses the iPads. Instead, you sell iPads to other stores, and then use that money to buy iPads back when you think they're undervalued and can be sold again later next week for more money. Someone in this might get their hands on more money by other operations (i.e. actually selling iPads to customers) and buy more iPads from the supplier (new stock) or from other stores.

Trade provides a comparative advantage, where one party can provide one economic service cheaper than another party, and vice versa. For example: consumers can't build iPads cheaply, and manufacturers can't open direct retail outlets cheaply. Thus manufacturers use ecommerce and shipping, as well as third-party retailers. Because of the comparative advantage each participant has over others, the total wealth of this system is greater than the wealth of only individuals accomplishing the same: less labor and capital and energy and other resources are expended to get the same result.

The common argument for the stock market NOT being a zero-sum game is that share prices can be bid up without introducing new money. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that you allegedly have $5000 of stuff to sell, but everyone together has only $500, and thus if you actually tired to sell all of that stuff you would eventually end up selling it all off for $500, in the process some of it likely becoming worthless.

This argument, thus, ignores the whole of the market. It's the same argument as "I am rich because I buy lots and lots of shit I can't afford on my credit card": you're making the payments, but you're perpetually in debt you can't pay off and thus you are poor. That you just got another car loan for a $60,000 Jaguar is immaterial, since you still only have $1000/mo and you have a 40 year mortgage letting you pay $150/mo on that jag by some fantastic manipulation of the banks.

You own $3300 of stock and get $225 per year dividend, so in about 14 years 9 months you'll break even in the event of a sudden bankruptcy, assuming their dividend doesn't decrease for any reason (i.e. more dividends to preferred, more stock issued from executive stock options exercise or otherwise, competitors, a change in government policy in the US to not buy 500,000 tons of sugar every year as a way to keep the prices artificially high...). We haven't even considered income tax on dividends, but some investment plans in the US have no taxes.

Your risks are that the stock could go up, and you'd make more money; that the stock could go down, and you'd lose money (your break-even point approaches, but cannot exceed, 15 years); that you could save more than $225 per year by paying off debt instead of holding a stock; that profitability drops for any reason; that company policy leans toward more bonuses or more stock options; etc.

The dividends come from profitability; the stock price is a spot price on the exchange, which is based on public sentiment. You could hold a worthless company taking heavy losses and the stock price is soaring. I did that for a while, made a lot from securities like IVAN and schizophrenic symbols like GMCR. But don't tell me you've found a magical risk-free investment.

I got the advice years back that dividend stocks are more stable from The Motley Fool. It has been proven true. But that doesn't mean they're no-risk investments; they're lower-risk investments with more steady return. If Domino Sugar starts flooding the Canadian market with cheap sugar, your little nest egg will suddenly shrink, and you might take a loss or just break even.

You're right, I guess there are a few too many "nots" in the construct to be clear.

I should not write my messages the way I write my code for the IOCCC. :)

As I stated before, of course these indies exist. On a municipal level where they have little, if any, influence on the grand scheme of things, or if at a higher level, then they're embedded in enough members of The Party to be kept under control. How many independent senators/congressmen are there? And, please, REALLY independent ones only, not some R or D that decides to go "indie" because he lost the primaries.

If you suggest that kids are little angels, pure and unable to be sinister little bastards, then yes, you are. They are quite capable of being little scheming assholes worthy of being kicked hard enough to fly half a week past Wednesday.

Sadly, yes, the problem has arrived on this side of the pond, too. For quite a while now, voting meant that you vote for a predetermined coalition. Though I already see this trend in decline, at the very least since the German FDP dropped out of the Bundestag (their Parliament) completely because they tied themselves for good or ill to the CDU/CSU. The reaction from voters was mostly to shift over to the CDU/CSU entirely, essentially cutting the FDP out of the parliament altogether.

The German Greens were facing a similar fate and are already trying very hard to present themselves as something other than the "SPD-light". Which is admittedly easier now that they got a big coalition government.

I can't talk about France, since I don't know whether there has been any movement over there as well, but there are quite a few countries where you don't really have predetermined coalitions, where voting for "your" party does actually make sense.

It loses a bit in the translation but essentially it says "When you're living with wolves, you better learn fast how to howl, lest they might think you're a sheep".

Content "owners".

A comparable example would be to go against Smith&Wesson for robbery and murder.

Technology is neither good nor evil. Its application is.

That's not money coming from somewhere; it's the ability to access money. The correct term for this is "solvency", and if you yank out the full actual dollars on hand then the bank (or stock market) becomes "insolvent". It's when you have less money being demanded than is actually there, even if there's much more money on paper than in reality.

Except dividends are money from outside being put into the market, increasing the money in the market. Buybacks are money being put into the market from outside the market, to remove stocks from existence. In any of these cases, there is money flowing into the market.

Money flows from an outside source into the market. When an investor puts capital into the market to buy stocks, money comes into the market. When an investor sells those stocks, he has money that he can re-invest. If he decides to not re-invest some of the money, then that money leaves the securities market. If he decides to bring in more capital, he injects more money into the securities market.

The securities market has exactly as much money as has been injected into it minus exactly as much money as has been removed from it; you cannot put $100 in to buy 100 shares of a stock, hit $2/share, sell that for $200, and actually get $200 unless another $100 is brought to the table from outside the stock market.

This is called a zero-sum game. Every stock that's brought in is put there from the outside. Every dollar that's brought in is put there from the outside. The amount of money in the market minus the amount of money that has come from outside the market is zero, and when we all go home we have exactly the same number of dollars that we started with--just divided up differently. That somebody can bring more monopoly money in at any point in the game doesn't change this: money comes from outside, not from within. The market doesn't create money and it doesn't destroy money; it transfers it.