Interesting point. I suppose the difference arises because with a monarch someone is responsible in a fairly undeniable way. The king may be an ass, but only a true sociopath is willing to be solely responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. In more democratic structures there are ways to spread the blame, and especially to pin it on ideology and the "good of the people" (not including those killed, presumably).

I don't see that such a perception exists. Investors fully understand that growth stocks aren't growth stocks forever. At some point growth declines and they become something else. Those that continue being reliable generators of income, often by diversifying, become blue chip stocks. Some decline. Some become cyclical.

Of course, once it becomes clear that a company is no longer in its growth phase, investors looking for growth stocks will leave, and those looking for income or wealth preservation will come in, depending on the characteristics of the company. This isn't because those growth investors believe that perpetual growth is possible, but it is because they're looking for ways to grow their money. At 40 years old, that's certainly what I want my retirement investment portfolio to be doing, growing! Isn't that what you want?

Of course not. That would be ridiculous. My investment goal isn't to build better companies. My investment goal is to get a good return so that I can live comfortably when I can no longer work. Other investors have other goals, but none of them are focused on benefiting the companies.

Nonsense. Well, certainly there are some who are focused on flipping. HFT, day trading, etc. But long-term buy-and-hold investors who are looking for growth are also going to buy companies who are growing and get out of them when the growth slows. Not because the investors are stupid, but because they're smart and want their money in stocks that match their goals.

Apple is up 5% today.

Go to work for a place that pays peanuts and treats you like crap. They're always hiring, and have pretty low standards because people don't stay long. You don't have to stay long, either.

This is how I got started. It's not so bad. You only have to work for the really crappy place for a few months, maybe a year. Then you can step up to the semi-crappy place. After a couple more moves up the scale you should be able to get a good job if you're decent.

Bah, I have no problem being critical of Google products that I dislike, and there would be no repercussions whatsoever. Google isn't that kind of company, there's no blowback for criticizing -- in fact good criticism is more likely to garner kudos. And identifying me is trivial.

I'm glad you're entertained.

Actually, I find cloud print to be very convenient. I print to my home printer while I'm at work and printers at work (my office and remote offices) from home, I have printed to my mom's printer and my father-in-law's printer from another state (easier than sending them a document and helping them print it). It's also zero setup when I get a new computer... as soon as I'm logged into Chrome I can print and it just works. No fiddling with drivers because that was already done once.

Bah. Common sense is usually neither common nor very sensible. But what do I know? I work for Google :P

Yep, but even after removing those, there's still a spike.

Indeed, I have. It makes a lot of sense, too, though I doubt it's the only element at work. Reality is never simple.

Did you read the article?

There's no doubt that the structure of effective stories has been studied for millenia, but what's different about this is the degree of detail with which its laid out, including not only the key elements (15, not three or five), their exact sequence and even their timing to a fairly high degree of precision.

Aside: Something that has occurred to me of late (while watching discussion about the Zimmerman trial, actually), is that I think humans have a tendency to fit real-world events into neat, narrative structures that have the same three-act form as good stories. I'm wondering if any news story that achieves really broad penetration of a large population's collective psyche doesn't end up getting "adjusted" until it fits a smooth, memorable narrative arc. This became apparent to me in the case of the Zimmerman trial when I realized that those who argued for guilty and not-guilty verdicts were discussing two rather different versions of the narrative, each of which followed a traditional storytelling arc, and neither of which was overly concerned about including facts that didn't fit the arc. The whole sequence of events, especially when the focus is on the actual evidence, makes a rather lumpy, disjointed tale with false starts and inconvenient edges, but the pro- and anti-Zimmerman stories are both much smoother.

I'm going to start watching to see if that phenomenon arises frequently.

Who noticed the essay following the formula before the end when it pointed it out? I didn't notice until the "all is lost" section, but perhaps more astute readers saw the pattern earlier.

Those numbers would be a lot more meaningful except that Britain's murder rate was much, much lower than the US's even before they passed restrictive gun laws. In fact, since the UK has clamped down and the US has been relaxing restrictions, the gap has actually closed considerably (note that I'm not claiming that the changes in gun laws caused the closure of the gap; there's evidence that they are correlated, but the evidence is somewhat equivocal). The murder rate in the UK has risen slightly* while that in the US has fallen dramatically, in fact in 2013 it's expected to reach the lowest rate in over a century -- though that will still be almost triple the UK's rate.

The fact is that murder isn't related to the availability of better tools to commit murder, because adequate tools are absolutely everywhere. It's culture that drives murder, and the US has a more violent culture than the UK.

* The UK murder rate rose consistently and gradually from 1960 through about 2000, when it spiked sharply, peaking in the early 2000s. Since then it's been declining fairly rapidly, and has dropped to early 80s levels. Note that a significant chunk of the 2002 peak was attributable to Dr. Harold Shipman, but even if you subtract the deaths he likely caused, there's still a fairly sharp spike in the murder rate following the 1997 handgun ban.