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>A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”

Comment · 8 years ago

Usually means an obsessed superfan but have evolved to mean someone with unwavering support of a person or entity. Came from the Eminem song "Stan" about a crazy fan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)

>The name of the eponymous character has given rise to a slang term online which refers to overzealous, maniacal, overly obsessed fans of a celebrity or personality; the term has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Comment · 8 years ago

The line I quoted was from the article. It's a summary of the argument from the much longer paper. It's not an implied argument. I repeat the quote from the article below.

>A company’s profits are, however, the financial foundation for investments in productive capabilities, first and foremost in employees. Investment in training and retaining employees is the key to productivity growth and innovation, for individual companies and for the economy.

Comment · 8 years ago

You are thinking of gross income. Net income includes depreciation for assets acquired under capital expenses.

Comment · 8 years ago

>If you want to argue against buybacks, you need to argue that they are worse than other methods of returning cash to shareholders.

He does make that argument. He argues that buybacks incentives cause a higher % of net income to be spent on buybacks than dividends.

>We found that from 1981 to 1983, these companies spent 4.3 percent of profits on buybacks. In comparison, from 2014 to 2016, these same companies spent 59 percent of their profits buying back their own stock. Dividends absorbed just under half of profits in both periods.

Comment · 8 years ago

>I criticized him for not making an argument in the article. He didn't, nor did he link to this paper.

But he did make that argument in the article. It's a short-oped so he didn't make it in the same amount of detail, but it is in the article. Did you read the entire article?

I'm not saying the argument is right or not. I'm saying your outright dismissal of the entire premise as garbage and a meme not worth considering is wrong.

Comment · 8 years ago

One of his arguments is that corporations spend a larger % of their net income on buybacks due to exec compensation incentives and many companies do both dividends (which tends to be continuous and a shock to the stock price when removed) and buybacks which are more isolated events.

Comment · 8 years ago

>lol...maximizing shareholder value is a cause of sagging productivity?

Here's the longer paper the author wrote a couple years ago that explains his reasoning. You may disagree with his argument, but to dismiss it outright as having no merit says more about you than it does about the author or the NYT.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/lazonic...

>Once the problems of strategic control have been addressed, the process of taking back the corporation can turn to the critical role of organizational integration. Productivity in an advanced economy depends on the extent to which members of the labor force have the opportunity to engage in collective and cumulative learning over the course of careers that may span 40 years or more. Under the Old Economy business model, major corporations supported this social condition through the norm of a career with one company, albeit almost exclusively for white males. It is unrealistic to assume that in a world of open-systems technologies and intense global competition the norm of a career with one company could, or should, be restored. That does not, however, lessen the need for collective and cumulative careers as the employment foundation of a highly productive economy. It is reasonable to believe that in the provision of lifelong learning through on-the-job experience, government agencies and civil society organizations, including universities, will have to continue to play important, and perhaps even growing, roles. The business corporation, however, will have to anchor a national system of career employment through a retain-and-reinvest resource-allocation regime. Jettison the downsize-and-distribute ideology of MSV, and U.S. business corporations can focus on becoming learning organizations once again.

>If hundreds of billions of dollars annually stop flowing out of the nation’s major corporations to do buybacks, then vast amounts of resources will become available to provide the financial commitment that innovation requires.84 Ban buybacks, and companies will be able to use these funds not only, or even primarily, to finance capital expenditures but more importantly to attract, train, retain, and motivate their career employees. In high-tech companies a significant proportion of these employees will be engaged in R&D, but the innovative enterprise needs experienced and motivated employees in a range of other functions as well. And some of the funds made available by a buyback ban can flow to the government as tax revenues to enable it to invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge that can underpin the next generation of innovation.

Comment · 8 years ago

The press derived a valuation using valuation = price paid X 100/percent equity

Those liquidation preferences mean that investors will pay more for their equity % than they would have without them which inflates the valuation estimates used by the above formula. The basic idea is that not all % equity is the worth the same amount, but it is assumed to when a valuation number is reported.

Comment · 8 years ago

Unfortunately the piracy users for kodi now far out-strip the non-piracy users and so kodi gets de-facto associated with piracy. Just like mp3 CDs and bit torrent, when the single biggest mass market appeal for your product is piracy then the product gets associated with piracy.

Comment · 8 years ago

Almost 100 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popsicle_(brand)