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adrock3215

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  1. And how does that affect the overall economy when the total amount paid out in dividends remains the same?
  2. No, inflation would not occur. Each shareholder does not have "less money" to invest in other things in the strict sense. All that has happened is that each shareholder now owns a smaller piece of Wells Fargo. Take this example: I own 1 share of Wells Fargo's (WFC) 100 outstanding shares (1% of the bank) WFC issues 10 new shares and sells them to new investors I now own 1 share of WFC's 110 shares (0.91% of the bank) If the total market cap of WFC was originally $1000, then each of the 100 shares was worth $10. Say that the market cap stays the same after WFC sells the new shares (in general, this is about what happens). Accordingly, each of the 110 shares is worth $9.091. This means that each shareholder's shares are worth less, which means that each shareholder's net wealth has declined. One could say that since the shareholder's net wealth has declined, he will choose to invest less money in other ventures through the so-called "wealth effect" (also demonstrated with the principle that, when peoples homes increase in value they spend more, even if their income remains constant). However, if you want to make that argument, then it would follow that any stockholder who owns a stock that is currently worth less than what he paid for it has "less money to invest."
  3. There are a lot of mistakes in your post Brian. Companies issue and destroy shares all the time. Sometimes they issue shares to pay off debts. It's called converting debt into equity, which is a normal recapitalization procedure. If you and I own a business, and then we each sell more or less 17% of our shares to a third person, then each of the three of us will end up owning a third of the company. The same process is at work here. That's why you see terms like dilution. Instead of floating (say) 1,000,000 shares, Wells Fargo will float (say) 1,200,000 shares. Therefore each share represents a smaller ownership stake in the bank. Public companies do this all the time. During the boom, many companies would buy back their shares and then destroy them, effectively increasing the ownership stake of each share. The reason that Wells Fargo did not do this originally is that it could not sell new shares in the midst of the financial crisis. Nothing has changed about the company per say. It's just that, in some environments, it is harder to raise money than in others.
  4. You cannot prove the existence of free will deductively. As Thomas said, most attempts to do so usually lapse into a discussion of physics, since that is the logical deductive starting point. Instead, I recommend approaching the conversation by rejecting physics as a starting point. The method which I have found to work (at least on some level) is to get at the following questions in some way: "Do you have any reason to suppose that human beings do not have free will? Are you really good at predicting the actions of human beings? If so, what will Tom be doing tomorrow afternoon at 1:21?" Let me know if you find a better way to get the point across. I have thus far been unable to do so.
  5. adrock3215

    Mark Twain

    I think he is a great writer. I always find Twain eminently quotable. He is full of witty aphorisms. I also think that Huck Finn is a great novel, though I remember the second half of the book as being somewhat crude (Twain stopped working on the novel about halfway through, where he picked it back up several years later is obvious.)
  6. I posted yesterday: Facebook user: thinks that no one should die because they cannot afford *your* health care, and no one should go broke because *you* get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.
  7. Interesting appearance, but CNBC anchors do need to do a better job mediating the discussion. Overall, I don't think that appearance was very productive.
  8. Like sNerd, I do not see the problem with this statement. First, I don't read it as pushing blame on Rand for the current crisis at all. Second, everything said in the sentence is factually true. The key is that "influencing" White House policy means literally just that; it does not mean that the White House literally followed Rand's philosophy.
  9. Jonathon13: Dali purposefully ignored the knowledge gained during the early Renaissance regarding the acurate portrayal of three dimensions on a two dimensional picture plane and distorted the lines of the cross in this painting. The reason this painting is subtitled Corpus Hypercubus is because the cross is created from an unfolded hypercube. A hypercube is the four dimensional analogue of a typical three dimensional cube. You can view a picture of one here. In the same way that a three dimensional cube can be unfolded into a two dimensional image composed of six squares, a four dimensional hypercube can be "unfolded" into a three dimensional image of eight cubes. As you will notice, Dali's cross is made up of eight cubes. By the way, as an aside: you should study 19th century art. Artists in many of the known movements began to challenge the notion that the artist's job was to portray the three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface as closely as possible. Hence, you have movements like Realism, in which artists experimented with the picture plane by abandoning such notions as vanishing points. The portrayal of space became increasingly (and intentionally) unrealistic. The effect from the beholder's perspective was that the picture appeared "flat." This effect was reinforced with other techniques. For example, many artists moved the light source directly in front of the painting so that they would not have to depict shadows. This heightened the effect of two dimensionality. If you read the writings of some of these artists, you will see that they were heavily influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. A good pictoral example of all of these ideas synthesized is Courbet's The Stone Breakers.
  10. I think that you are being dishonest; that is to say, that you made all this up to try to get someone to congratulate you for being honest, while you are in fact lying.
  11. Given her intense admiration of Victor Hugo, this should be an obvious point incapable of being contested. Several of Hugo's works are motivated by causes and concerns which Rand would disagree with. Another example: Rand's admiration of Quo Vadis. Seinkiewicz imbued the novel with intense pro-Christian themes (his motivation for writing the work).
  12. Yes it does. I provided the reasons above. The painter is exercising judgment according to his values and expressing it through his representation of the "something" in "some" way. Yes, it would be art. Whatever arbitrary distinction you are drawing between art and non-art in your head, you should move away from. The only line between art and non-art is representation. Art as representation (which has its philosophical roots in Aristotle's Poetics) is the only qualification. What is typically referred to as art as form (which has its philosophical roots mainly in Kant) is not art, because it is generally not concerned with the representation of reality. You can trace its development from the Realists of the 19th century through the Impressionist, Cubist, and Dada movements, to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock. Actually, you're not seeing the fundamental idea behind the painting. The image is imbued with meaning. As I assume you read, the French text translates to "This is not a pipe." This is a somewhat profound statement, because there is quite obviously a pipe above the text. Magritte's point is that what he has portrayed is not actually a pipe, it is only an image of a pipe. Hence, even his still life image of a pipe involves some sort of process of selection on the part of the artist. In other words, some bias. For more analysis of Magritte's meaning, check out Foucault's book on the subject. Foucault thought that Magritte also offered a profound thought on the nature of language. He talks about, for example, the use of the word "this" in Magritte's sentence. The term can be interpreted as referring to several things: 1.) the painting, 2.) the sentence, or 3.) the word itself.
  13. I think that the painting of a loaf of bread and a streetscene are indeed art. Regardless of how dedicated he is to depicting reality truly and accurately, the painter will inevitably have to make choices about what to include, how to represent the objects he perceives, etc. More importantly, as Jackethan pointed out, the artist is making a choice by deciding what scene to represent in the first place. This cannot be totally random, as if the artist spun a wheel and landed on a streetscene or a loaf of bread rather than a sea otter. Instead, the artist must have paused on the relevant street/intersection at one point in time, pondered it, considered it interesting, and then decided to portray it as accurately as possible in a painting. This is a selective judgment of reality according to the artist's values. Lastly, it is crucial to note that the artist will not be able to portray reality exactly as it is, without any sort of embellishment. He necessarily has to make some sort of selective value judgment about reality, because his palette and brushwork will never properly match the color and texture of the objects he is painting. As a pedagogical example of the content of this post, take a look at Rene Magritte's Treachery of Images here. Read about the painting here. I think that Magritte's picture illustrates one of the most important lessons in the study of art.
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