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Comment: Re:oh shut up (Score 2, Insightful) 657

Not really.

In short, you have (1) a woman who didn't play by the book and is an asshat, (2) a company that overreacted, and (3) a guy who did play by the book and who clearly had a legitimate beef.

You seem to be directing your outrage at #3.

Way to set priorities, dude. I'm outta here, have a nice day.

Comment: Re:Context? (Score 4, Informative) 301

by Joe Decker (#39405053) Attached to: Apple to Buy Back $10bn of Its Shares and Pay Dividend

By itself it is (here) a small concentration of power, roughly speaking offset in Apple's plan by the deconcentration of power that happens when they issue new shares of stock for stock option grants and so on. No big deal.

Another way of thinking about it is that there's a lot of money sitting around that isn't actually doing much for it's share owners. It's making maybe a couple percent in government bonds. By returning some of the "wealth of the company" to owners, it allows those owners to decide how they want that additional money invested. If Apple could make a new product that cost $50B to make and returned a good profit on that, it'd be much better for investors if they didn't issue a buyback. But it doesn't do anyone much good for a cash pile that big to just sit around in low-yielding bonds, unless it can eventually be put to work.

Comment: Re:Context? (Score 1) 301

by Joe Decker (#39404995) Attached to: Apple to Buy Back $10bn of Its Shares and Pay Dividend

It's not particularly nasty. The fact that they're doing both share buybacks and dividends is a little imperfect, but falls well short of evil.

In one sense, the two are similar. Some of the "value of the company" is returned to its owners. In the case of a dividend, it's obviously pretty even-handed, in the case of a buyback, it tends to be too, those whole sell into the buyback get paid off, those who don't effectively end up with their shares being worth proportionally more.

However, you generally want to do one, or the other, not both. Roughly speaking, if the stock is undervalued, you want to do a buyback, if the stock is overvalued, you want to issue a dividend. There's maybe a little adjustment you should do for this because of tax policy. Being unclear about which is better for investors is commonplace and, to be fair, often a compromise that reflects the fact that "overvalued" and "undervalued" are often debatable. So it's not "evil" or even "oh my god stupid", just a little bit meh, IMHO.

Comment: Descriptivism, folks (Score 2) 287

by Joe Decker (#39402701) Attached to: Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language

Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000) with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF).

Umm, no. The phrase "true number of words in English" is sufficiently ill-defined to make the question meaningless. There are two ways people think about whether something is a "true word" in English, but more or less, you need to either rely on an authoritative reference to make that determination (which is not what's happening here), or you note it's existence by some level of usage in practice, and set a somewhat arbitrary bar for how often the word has been used (which is what's happening here.)

As per Zipf's law, etc, tweak that "bar" a little bit, and you'll get quite different results.

Envy is a pain of mind that successful men cause their neighbors. -- Onasander

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