The legal doctrine that a company's primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value dates from the 1970s. It started with Milton Friedman with a 1971 essay in the NYTimes [1] and then gained a lot of currency throughout the 70s stagflation and economic malaise. The final death-knell of the corporation as a social enterprise came during the 1980s era of corporate raiders and PE buyouts.
Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way.
Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are.
I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.
I used it most key to learn about history. There isn’t much damage if it got 1600s or 1700s detail wrong. My high school teachers got much of it wrong too.
The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far from perfect, but certainly good enough.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
I also like doing that for topics that I am tangentially interested in. One minor thing that I find annoying is that the narrators switch roles in the middle of conversation. They start with the female voice explaining a concept to the male voice and suddenly they switch. In the meantime I have identified myself with the voice being explained to.
Okay but the user is describing listening to papers, then having to read the papers because listening to them isn't efficient. So why bother listening to it in the first place if you're going to read it?
No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived experience.
Right? $2.50 an hour is trivial to a Government that can vote to invent a trillion dollars. Even just 1 million dollars is the cost of monitoring 45 real time feeds for a year. I'm sure just many very rich people would pay that for the safety of their compound.
I agree with you, but i want to also ask, have you heard what the ayatollah and the mullahs have said about killing Americans, dismembering protestors, raping children, nuking the United States. Have you heard the protestors mowed down by machine guns, have you heard they make you buy the body of your loved ones for the cost of the bullet, assigning that value to their life, have you heard that they literally living inside hospitals and schools, that they told the iranians they would rather every iranian die then let go of power, have you heard at all how insane the islamic regime is? How seriously they talk about destroying America and all of the west so they can spread their Islamic regime (forced conversions or death, forces prayer or death, women cannot go outside with men, men have all rights in marriage, age of consent is 9 years old _for girls_, older for boys, speaking against the governed is death, protesting is death. They literally walked the streets with speakers and plays on the national tv (propaganda, the only channel allowed now) that the people should go into the street and leave their houses, while america and israel are saying to shelter while we take out military installations. The mullahs are trying to get people killed to use that as a story to get us to stop the war. They've literally embedded military installations in every single block of most of the cities. They do that to use the citizens as human shields. The only reason they haven't already been toppled is that owning guns is illegal, and the regime and their insanity are willing to murder anyone and everyone it takes to hold on to power. They don't care about iran, they care about islam and nothing else, they're willing to destroy the world if it means no other religions are allowed. They killed tens of thousands of protestors, they raped the bodies of women then ripped out their wombs to prevent investigation. It's categorically insane. These are facts. If you don't believe them is cause you don't know anyone who came from Iran, i know many and all of them support toppling the ayatollah, sending in pahlavi as transitionary leader to get democracy running again. Trump is and has always been a crazy person too, but having learned some farsi and listened with my own ears, he's nothing like the mullahs.
Okay, let's compare. How many iranians has the regime killed over the last few months. They've said they would continue indiscriminately killing as long as it took, the regime would literally destroy Iran rather than let go of their dreams of Muslim empire. They killed tens of thousands of people. Every persian person i know or have even heard about had been highly supportive of the war, with the singular goal of replacing the ayatollah. I hate Trump, i don't think he's necessarily doing it for the right reasons, and i think he's incredibly stupid for the way this didn't need to be a catastrophe for the economy (saying he would fill the strategic oil reserves, not doing that, starting a war that blocks hormuz). But it really bothers me to see everyone touting around the girls school. Do you really think they did that on purpose? The iranian regime would do that in a heartbeat if it meant harming America. How can you care so much about the 1 school and not have cared at all about the tens of thousands of brave protestors literally mowed down with machine guns. Or does it not matter because you didn't see it? They shut off the internet for a reason, and it appears to have worked.
Yes, was is bad, trump is a massive ego and idiot. But nothing we've done has come even close to what the regime has been doing to their own people since 1979.
But at some point incompetence crossing the line to being gross and shifts the moral balance as well. This wasn't a 'deep in the fog of war' situation, that girls school was part of an opening strike package...and because of that, we need to find out more, but that "deliberately" is an open question with the facts we have now.
In the end Iranians who want freedom need to form a different regime but when a group is under attack it rallies around the flag so it is a setback not an opportunity for dissidents.
The chance of Iran having regime replaced dropped to, like, zero.
Besides, Israel wont allow democratic or other functional regime change. Their goal is failed state with forever civil war in it. Something they can regularly bomb whenever it will seem functional. This can still happen, so everyone around should be ready for refugees waves.
Trumps idea of regime change is replacing head for someone who pays him personally - while keeping regime in place. This wont happen now.
Iranian monarchists want own dictatorship, but wont be getting it either.
Iranians who protested were just fucked and that is all about it.
Honestly what would happen if the stock market didn't exist. It seems like these days the price of stock is so disconnected from lived reality that genuinely confused if it would be all that catastrophic
Well we’d go back to an era where private capital owns the world. The public would not be able to participate or benefit from the ownership of companies and share in the prosperity.
I should of used the term "equity" instead of "capital". I meant that the worlds largest companies would no longer be able to be owned by public equity and would only be available to those in the exclusive club of private equity.
I mean the average person already barely has any participation at all, and certainly doesn't benefit from it when their money gets dumped down the toilet because of some widespread financial scams and grifts that repeatedly happen over and over again.
And how many of those people are actively making decisions about what companies they are investing in instead of blindly putting money into a black box 401k account because they are financially punished for not doing so?
Not by choice. Stocks are pushed onto Americans (as well as Europeans, and most people in the West) via their pension funds, advanced savings accounts, and sometimes even their salaries (via options). If normal savings accounts in their local credit union would offer adequate interest rates (and if paying in stocks was outlawed by their unions) stock ownership would plummet. I would be surprised if it would even exceed 2%.
That feels like a disadvantage by design. In a different (and more fair) economy, investing in government bonds or a savings account in your local credit union would give you a better deal then leaving your money with a global hedge fund conglomerate which in turn invests your money into all sorts of unethical companies, including oil and weapons companies.
Your government is way more democratic then your hedge fund. And I would wager your are in a massive minority (perhaps among my hypothetical < 2% who would own stocks by choice in my hypothetical economy) if you desire your unused money to be spent by Canadian billionaires to further enrich them selves, instead of your government investing in infrastructure, health care, education, etc. or your local credit union lending it to somebody in your community buying their first house, or opening up a new business which you are likely to shop at.
It's not disconnected from reality. You just don't understand it.
If the stock market didn't exist you would have less opportunities to invest in well priced companies and people would be manipulated in investing in opaque, often ridden with accounting shenanigans things like private equity.
The more companies are public and subject to price discovery done by sophisticated players the better it is for uninformed players like normal investors but also less sophisticated informed players like pension funds.
Like which one?
2008 crisis was caused by reckless lending by banks as a result of silly regulation (government guaranteeing loans), implicit promise of bailouts and you could argue corruption.
What does it have to do with the stock market?
It's a nice dismissing soundbite but you're just missing the broader point and real issues coming with people's money being invested in non public entities.
Besides, just because some problems also happen with solution A doesn't mean they wouldn't be worse with solution B. You are not really making a point just dismissing the idea of a public market without understanding the value of it.
that makes no sense. companies need capital, that's why there is a stock market. dividends are paid from past earnings, never capital (earnings are only a %age of the value of the capital) and not from higher expectations of the future.
Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!
This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.
Yes, i was thinking just this. Having been prescribed multiple immunocompromisers, turning up my immune system sounds terrifying. There's all these supplements and things that talk about boosting your immune system and i get probably most are unrelated, i don't have the time to get a degree in immunology to find out. Zinc does well enough for me, thanks. But if any immune boost started to increase my tnf-alpha or il-23 i'd be on the long and painful road to a terrible death. Or yet another high side effect medication.
Sure you could, just don't tell them. The fast food burgers are already part soy and no one is yelling. If they replaced that with lab meat people would probably like it better.
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