This was my initial thought. But after consideration this would likely to just lead to companies creating holding/shell companies for groups of patents.
Effectively, Big Corp would spin up "Obvious Shopping Cart Patents, LLC", wholly owned by Big Corp, and register their patents for a given category through it. Then they could sell the entire company to another entity without the patents themselves transferring ownership.
The best fix for patents I can think of is simply lowering their lifetime to somewhere in the 2 - 5 year range.
Thats too short for some fields. The real problem is that tech moves so fast that a lot of the assumptions and hard coded values in the law simply don't work in tech.
Longer lived patents totally make sense in other industries, though. Look at the pace of innovation in, say, space exploration. It can take longer than two years just to build and test a new rocket design, so if your patent expired before your first real launch, it would have huge chilling effects on R&D.
I'd say a better solution is to just make software ineligible for patents entirely.
Yes, the stock price represents the last transaction.
If you are looking at a stock trading platform, you will usually also see "Current Ask" and "Current Bid" representing standing sell and buy prices (respectfully) for the stock.
Re: the last transaction, what if I sell someone a couple shares of Microsoft stock for $1? That obviously wouldn't affect the stock. Is there some mathematical expression of amount of stock that has to be sold to impact the price? Or is it a question of the sale being done by certain authorized entities?
BTW, if you don't see "reply" under this comment like I don't for yours, you can go to my profile page and "comments" and then you will see the "reply" link.
I think if you're a member of the public trading on an exchange, all you can do is ask an authorised entity to accept the "bid" or "ask" price (mentioned by brwnll above), which are set by other authorised entities. Maybe you can trade at another price by not using the exchange, in which case the market price would not reflect that trade, but I imagine that it would typically be difficult to find someone to trade with unless (maybe even if) you set a generous price.
I don't know, but maybe donating securities to charity and accepting a takeover bid could be considered examples of off-exchange trading.
If an authorised entity wanted to set an unusual "bid" or "ask" price, I think that would either trigger a trade (if it made the "bid" higher than the "ask") or (otherwise, assuming other authorised entities don't follow suit) merely signal that particular entity's unwillingness to trade that security at that the prevailing market price and have no effect on the market price.
I don't know whether this differs from exchange to exchange.
The specifics of charter school success isn't really the main concept of the article. I believe the grandparent is pointing out the writer attacks the "billionaire philanthropists" donations as an assault on democracy, without acknowledging that the main donors on the other side were all vested interest groups (Teachers Unions, etc)
In this case, I think I trust vested interests (teachers unions) more than unaccountable external parties with billions of dollars.
I also question whether it's "philanthropy" or just plain business - meaning these foundations see a way to make a profitable "omelet" by breaking the public education "eggs"?
But the vested interests(teacher's unions) aren't vested to protect educational outcomes, but the teachers. I don't see why we should trust them more than large donors to charter school campaigns.
The article more than acknowledged the vested interests on the opposing side. The author even breaks down their actual campaign contributions and budgets. I'm not sure what you think it means to acknowledge both sides, but even despite the article's obvious biases, there was very clear delineation of both sides, their budgets, and their impacts.
Love when people call something undemocratic just because they are against the goals of a group.
Wealthy individuals and groups have power to publish advertisements and arguments for their ideas/proposals to try to change the mind of the voters. Attempting to convince the voters your right is not undemocratic, it's the core of democracy.
Additionally, anyone who believes that the plutocracy has more power in America now than ever before is entirely ignorant of even general American history. It wasn't that long ago where there was so little regulation on business, political and police bribes so common, that the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal.
The point of the article is that they didn't convince on the merits, they convinced by completely saturating all forms of media with a single point of view, losing repeatedly (still), until they eventually eked out a win. Then when that win was found to be unconstitutional, they paid politicians directly. If that's the core of democracy, I don't understand what was so bad about Pravda.
This is likely true, but for a less nefarious reasons. It's very unlikely they received your order and were sitting around twirling their thumbs until the last possible moment.
Instead Amazon has algos that know exactly when they need to get an item in the mail to make it before the deadline. Every time an order comes in, the pickers list is updated.
Meaning that every time a customers order comes in with a tighter deadline, their order will be picked prior to yours, until you deadline is sufficiently close (or there is a lack of more pressing orders) for your items to make it to the top of the list.
I'm pretty sure it is for nefarious reasons. For the last year or two (maybe more), Amazon has never failed to deliver my free shipping (non-prime) orders in 1-2 days from when they ship. Since this would be a disincentive to subscribe to Prime if they shipped it within a day or so of receiving the order, they just do nothing for 4 or 5 days so that it arrives in the 5-8 day quoted window.
Its clearly in their best interest to push people to subscribe to Prime to recover their costs, their order fulfillment is so streamlined that a standard free shipment and a prime shipment probably cost the same in 95% of cases.
Don't most ad blockers also block third party trackers? I know uBlock Origin blocks Google Analytics for example.
I don't know Alexa's fallback/tracking methods, but couldn't these be an indicator of adoption rate of ad blockers, as these charts are not precisely an indicator of traffic, but specifically a measure of trackable traffic.
This is nonsense. A company "swooping in" to buy a company assumes the liabilities of that company.
If Alphabet were to buy a struggling company, they don't get to go to it's creditors and say "We will pay you $1, which you should consider a blessing, since if the this company went out business you would have got nothing".
Similarly, if the company made sales of a product on the notion of "lifetime support and updates", a purchasing company is absolutely responsible to uphold those guarantees (this is the type of thing companies do due diligence for before acquiring a business).
Society is nothing more than a collection of people who agree/desire to abide by a common set of rules. Typically enumerated and enforced by some type of governing body.
If the American people in general want to live in society with only a subset of gambling is allowed (which it appears they do), that's exactly the point of the government.
Abraham Lincoln had an impossible choice to make, and withoutthe benefit of hindsite I dont know anyone could have made a better one.
Unfortunately,
Allowing states to decide for themselves whether they could literally own humans or not, lead to a civil war that strategically undermibed states rights.
So no, it is a lot harder to just 'have a subset' of something. Plus, obviously the internet is national + global, so while I agree with you I would argue the governments only role in the matter is arbitration in the event of a lawsuit as these are simply contracts.
While humorous, this is nonsense, and a complete mischaracterization of what a stock market actually is.
A stock market is a place where a group of businesses are able to offer ownership stakes in their company in exchange for cash.
The fact that people have built a speculation market around it is very different than a gambling wager. If you buy stock and it decreases in value, you still own the stock.
Edit: As CPLX points out below, in reference to a derivative market, the point is much more valid.
My assumption was that he was talking about derivatives and synthetic securities (i.e. "non-collateralized" as he said). If that's the case his analogy is actually quite reasonable.
I am talking up structured financial instruments like that. Obviously, DraftKings doesn't map perfectly to etfs and options, but i think the analogy stands.
To be clear, I think that skill based wagers should be allowed. I was begging the question, is there a difference here, and it is:
It is a lot better known how the outcome of a football match will be determined than other fin. products.
Football is pretty discrete and doesn't have a broad impact on soccer outcomes (unless you are not American the soccer === football)
This is discretionary capital and not investment money.
So, my sarcastic point was: thanks for protecting me from having fun with $20 i earned weekly, don't you have anything else you might want to look into?
You don't think the stock market maps perfectly to real world markets? Average investors need nano-second liquidity. Hedgefunds help the price stay consisten so that when a massive order comes in it goes into a blackpool and is split up, that way the price isn't off by 0.001% which in my opinion, is well worth destabalizing tge global economy.
I mean, prices are just information, don't we want that information to be a meaningless and irrelevent measure? Luckily, equities prices are well known to be irrelevent to investors.
a well known fact that price was dropped from standard metrics several years ago in favour of popularity.
Effectively, Big Corp would spin up "Obvious Shopping Cart Patents, LLC", wholly owned by Big Corp, and register their patents for a given category through it. Then they could sell the entire company to another entity without the patents themselves transferring ownership.
The best fix for patents I can think of is simply lowering their lifetime to somewhere in the 2 - 5 year range.