1) Are you solving the problem that someone (your customer / manager / stakeholder) wants you to solve right now?
what makes you think the thing you're working on is the priority, have you checked with someone or got convincing data
2) Are you taking longer than expected?
if yes, why? What's a practical solution now and for the future so everyone remains happy? If no, why do you think so?
3) Are the people in charge of your future happy with what you've delivered?
How do you know and what's the reason if they're unhappy?
4) If there's a disconnect on any of the points between you and the stakeholders, what is a practical solution that you can implement it quickly?
5) Are you knowledgeable enough that people can rely on you to solve their problems in the most practical manner?
Unsure what you want to explain or what your nine year old already knows, but generally I would start by explaining to him/her/them that these are pictures of very far away and enormous objects taken from a telescope that is located further away than the moon.
The telescope takes pictures in a different frequency band, like an infrared camera. These pictures are then color mapped to blue, green yellow and other colors that you normally see because just black and white image are boring to look at.
I too grew up outside the USA, I'd say in a culture very different from any western ones and not just America. We didn't have anything like dad-jokes as far as I can remember.
Both my children (almost teens now) have only lived in the USA, and they yell "dad-joke" at any attempted humor that fails to make them laugh. On my part they're mostly sarcastic remarks veiled as a joke to keep the conversation pleasant or makes a fun one more interesting, by showing my participation. Sometimes I also initiate it because I simply want to bond with them but I don't know how to talk like their age. I don't want conversations to be too serious.
I guess, my ultimate motive is to bond with them with humor but I have to choose ones that isn't too confrontational, aggressive or other negative connotations. I pick these almost silly bad ones on purpose because they're light-hearted, they have been used it since they were very small and I really don't feel the need to be perfect around them, they're too young for me. Lately I have also been thinking that maybe I do want them the opportunity to laugh at me, instead of seeing me as authoritative, all the time.
In the culture I grew up in fathers were supposed to be quite strict so even talking to them was a big deal so jokes were rare. Even then we used talk about silly things our old men did, on rare ocassions in front of them so the last one might be a big part of it.
While social media seem to be the problem, I find myself internally conflicted. On the one hand I see myself as a supporter of democracy, freedom of speech and liberty of expression, but I'm dismayed by the self harm these ideals are causing at the moment. It's the feeling of being unable to defend against painfully obvious (to me) propaganda but also the worry that I don't close doors to the freedom these platforms allow.
Why do information campaigns seem to be failing against the propoganda mills?
Living in underdeveloped part of the world I believed for the most of my life that it was lack of education but having in the US for the past few years I had to firmly discard that notion. I currently believe that it is the inherited values that society imparts on us, and that serves as a lens to view facts that is being manipulated.
The last company I worked for our executives, all highly educated and good natured, for most parts, held political opinions that I thought were only held by the 'idiots' captured by someone on cell phone videos. They had built a successful company on highly educated immigrant workforce, with major workforce still outside the US, headquarter located in a deep 'blue' state with the founder and chairman of the company an immigrant and PhD holder a first generation immigrant but everyone still a vehement, vocal supporter of current anti-immigrants, anti-science, anti-obama/hillary, anti-medicine propaganda.
I don't think it's simply dismissable as biased by financial profit. Is it because everyone near them believes in such and these opinions are manifestation of values they grew up with? Is social media just giving it a loud-speaker. We need to address that somehow I feel.
it still is lack of education. it's the moral education that is lacking.
education in justice (part of that is social justice if you like, but don't mistake that with social justice warriors, those are not about actual social justice, but rather they are political correctness gangsters)
education in equality.
education against racism.
education to help people out of poverty.
education about diversity.
education about critical analysis and discourse.
education about religions. (even atheists should have a better understanding about the various religions and vice versa)
people claim a right not to be subjected to ideas that they don't agree with. they want to live in a bubble. this is part of the problem.
these are just some of the points that current education is missing. i am sure we can find a few more.
Who determines what is moral as the baseline? That's the problem. You could argue your morals are right, the opposite side could argue theirs are right. People do have a right to not be subjected to ideas they don't like. I think part of the problem is hard line stances against ideas, then yelling at people that they're not "moral" ends up pushing people further away.
The 2A arguments are a good example of this. By default you would think many of the 2A advocates would be against federal forces policing (ignoring any context, not taking sides, just using an example). In fact many of the left that aren't pro 2A are calling them out for just that. But from their perspective, for years they've been told they are foolish, uneducated, or just simple people that are wrong. After all of that treatment for their stance on 2A, why would they be open to discussions from the same individuals on other topics?
So the problem is two fold. Both sides are ignorant, both sides get hyper focused on their causes, and don't care about the other sides perspective, or the collateral damage the hardline stances have.
In order for anything to work or be peaceful, we have to stop trying to change each others positions on everything, but instead realize, that for a functioning society, we have to accept, not everyone is going to get what they want.
It's tough. It requires calm discussions on both sides and notably hyperawareness about how one projects themselves. Online media makes it infinitely worse when you don't have the human behavioral cues as part of the narrative. It's why you can read the same line two or three ways and get two or three things out of it based upon the state of mind you enter the conversation at.
we can start with the things that we agree on. racism for example is a rather obvious one (although there will still be differences about what that means).
and with the tools, how to have a calm discussion and the related aspects that you mention. those things are learnable. learning how to communicate, how to listen to others, all that should be part of education
Think of Democracy as a system that embodies the wishes & will of the average voter (not the average citizen).
Now imagine that you invented a system that would get tens of millions more people emotionally engaged to vote, but they happened to also be the least educated, least nuanced, least mature voters - people who seldom voted before.
Then imagine your surprise when intelligent debate disappears, and politics devolves into reality television.
That is what we've done.
Imagine if we allowed the average person dictact Climate Change policy, rather than the scientists? ...oh wait, we've done that as well...
Since the effects of regulations put in place around climate change are enjoyed/suffered by all citizens, and not only scientists, it's appropriate that everybody gets to dictate what those regulations are.
So, it looks like GDP would be comparable to total market value of products and services provided the company in a year. That would be equal to revenue ignoring any free products/services the company provides (or do we also need to take into account sale of pre-owned products by third parties? ) I guess. Out of curiosity, is there a number then that is equivalent to market value of a company but applicable to a country?
Level 0: GDP is a flow, market value is a stock. Market value is a distance reached, GDP is a velocity.
Level 1: GDP is gross domestic product. It's not adjusted down for depreciation in order to be the Net domestic product. The proverbial Chaplinian window-breaker who sells windows adds to GDP, but not to NDP.
Integrating the net domestic product over time would get you something like the accumulated wealth of a country.
Level 2: There's a differentiation between the gross domestic product and the gross national product. GDP means within-borders; this includes for example the income of migrant workers who remit cash to their families abroad. GNP means by-national-citizens (and companies); many American companies have operations abroad, for example.
Level 3: Integrating a company's (discounted expected) net revenue will give you its market value, roughishly. But what constitutes a country's net revenue is murkier. It would seem that countries who are net importers are in the red, but imported goods generates consumer welfare that's not easily accounted for. To the extend a national economy can even have goals (it cannot), it isn't to maximize net exports.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not an expert in economics and also not sure how much wikipedia is to be trusted, but going by definition: "IMF publication states that "GDP measures the monetary value of final goods and services—that are bought by the final user—produced in a country in a given period of time (say a quarter or a year)", GDP is an aggregate over a time period, more like distance and not similar to velocity. GNP though is interesting, I hadn't heard of it before, I will explore it further.
The 'valuation' of a company is basically the present value of all it's estimated future cash flows (edit: by this I mean profit).
So think of Apple like a 'cash machine' - and it spits out profit to the bank account.
Well - the 'valuation' is just how much we think will be in that bank account.
The inherent problem with this is 'seeing the future' - both in terms of predicting future cash flows way out ... that's obviously hard, but the second part ... is the fact that the value of 'future cash flows' to you might be different than it is to someone else!
Basically, the way we calculate the 'present value' of those future cash flows is by discounting those values by some amount - $100 in 100 years is worth less than $100 tomorrow.
But what 'discount rate' do you use? That's another hard question. Typically, it's the 'risk free rate' i.e. the rate of return you can get on your money by parking it somewhere and doing nothing.
Another term for that is 'cost of capital'. Everyone's 'cost of capital' is different.
So when everyone takes there estimates of 'future Apple cash flows' and then applies their specific 'discount rate' - we then have a balance of supply and demand for their shares and voila - a 'market cap'.
Also we should point out that this is private wealth - and that massive surpluses in one part of the value chain isn't necessarily healthy for you, for me, for anyone else, or 'the economy'.
For example - what if Apple had more competition? Well, then we might be getting the very same great Apple products for 20% less. Apple might be making 'very little profit' but nevertheless be providing you and I with vast consumer surpluses.
In a funny way - every dime that a corporation makes in 'profit' is a dime that you and I (as consumers) are losing out on in terms of consumer surplus.
> The 'valuation' of a company is basically the present value of all it's estimated future cash flows.
?? A company could have huge future cash flows yet operate with zero profit, or with a loss.
Maybe you're referring to the Dividend Discount Model of valuation. In that case the only flows that are discounted to present value are the future dividends paid to shareholders, which are tiny subset of a company's future cash flows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_discount_model
There's so much loose and confused use of terminology in threads like this generally, that I tend to think they're unhelpful to the majority of people who read them.
Future cash flows to be interpreted as 'free cash flows' i.e. profit.
What I'm articulating is not complex or obscure or even really very theoretical - it's literally the most basic idea for valuation, though admittedly the term 'cash flow' might be misleading in the context of accounting.
'The company is worth how much money it will eventually put in the bank i.e. how much profit it accumulates'.
That's it.
Dividends are a separate thing and technically have no effect.
If a company pays you a $1 dividend, then you have $1. If a company keeps that $1 for you in it's bank account ... well, you have ownership of that $1. So it's a matter of accounting, not of valuation. Pragmatically, there are differences but theoretically dividends don't matter.
You could add up all the market caps of all of a country’s businesses, but thst only captures publicly traded companies... So, not sure it can be done directly, but indirectly by extrapolating onto private cos and enterprises, but that still would not capture grey market activities, etc.
It doesn't seem like that link controls for the area you live in. I don't think it addresses the concern of being conspicuously wealthier than your neighbors.
You'r right but it does say that if you live well below your means (more in poverty) your chances of being robbed increases. Living among poorer people than he can actually afford does increase the crime around him and probably subjects him to more crime as well (I didn't research this last correlation, just a practical guess. If you can provide research pointing otherwise please do, it will be an interesting point to know).
1) Are you solving the problem that someone (your customer / manager / stakeholder) wants you to solve right now? what makes you think the thing you're working on is the priority, have you checked with someone or got convincing data
2) Are you taking longer than expected? if yes, why? What's a practical solution now and for the future so everyone remains happy? If no, why do you think so?
3) Are the people in charge of your future happy with what you've delivered? How do you know and what's the reason if they're unhappy?
4) If there's a disconnect on any of the points between you and the stakeholders, what is a practical solution that you can implement it quickly?
5) Are you knowledgeable enough that people can rely on you to solve their problems in the most practical manner?