Funny to see that France is only 134th while French refer to their country as "The Exagon" (metropolitan France) - 3 ground borders and 3 sea borders. The expression was coined in the 1860s by school reformists and got popular after the Franco-German War in 1870 when Alsace was lost. To my knowledge French are the only ones to define their country with a geometrical form
It is weird to see Techcrunch faking the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg with GAAP, "Street" and earnings per share expressions. Really not what I expect from TC... I can't help but think that good old days when TC used to explore new ideas and technologies are gone. Today almost all their writers just post update about a funding round, a developer conference or a new product feature. I wish I could get more in-depth articles about major topics like open AI, future telco/messaging networks, etc.
Maybe they're trying to edge out the Journal for this kind of news. If I recall Bloomberg and the Journal both have some kind of pay wall up, which at least has kept me from using them.
Fascinating study. It really triggers questions around how animals' memory work - short term vs long-term, trauma vs joy, etc. I have a 2-year French shepherd (Beauceron) who, while being smart, has a very limited long-term memory. I am almost convinced that he cannot make the difference between waiting for me 5 minutes and 5 hours. At the same time, his trauma or joy memory works incredibly well: he perfectly remembers people he only saw 2/3 times when he was 2 months or objects that hurt him. I always feel like animals are trapped between an absolute lack of time and space consciousness and an incredibly sharp conscious of feeling
What you are talking about are two different things: memories, and sense of time. Most things aside humans, as much as I'm aware of, live in the here and now. So 5 minutes and 5 hours do not make a difference when waiting for something that is NOT here NOW.
When reading the article I was remembering the words of Dominique Vidal, former Yahoo MD Europe, quoted by Criteo's cofounder Rudelle in his book: "Yahoo had everything to be Google. But when we reached a peak of users, we stopped investing in R&D to focus on other expenses. That is the most terrible mistake we did". When you look at Google or Facebook and their R&D investments in non core-business projects, I am definitely thinking that someone got Yahoo's lessons right
Interesting timing: we have the same debate rising up in France with the acquisition of Medtech (Rosa medical robots) by Zimmer Biomet [1]. CEO and founder, Bertin Nahum, said he had to sell as he couldn't find the right funding in FR/EU. Real shame and also a sad day for France (med)tech
It's simple. Europe has no money. The middle class has no savings and the investment sector is far too regulated, confined and incapable of looking at a multi-year timescale.
I think SoftBank/Masayoshi Son is enough of an outlier that you can't make any extrapolations from this investment. This is the guy who was crazy enough to buy Sprint
Japan's inflation has been hovering around 0% for a decade. Unemployment is low too. The problem is a shrinking working population and low productivity growth.
The investment sector is simply too conservative, for historical and cultural reasons. Regulation is mostly an excuse, a fig leaf for a spiritually-bankrupt upper class.
The English Upper Class does have a long and storied tradition of rent-seeking. If you can extract so much value out of something like housing, it's difficult to see why you would get involved in anything risky and technical.
Real estate investing is not inherently rent-seeking. The fact that the word "rent" is in "rent-seeking" and we pay "rent" for an apartment seems to often cause some confusion.
Rent-seeking involves seeking out regulatory or other non-market protection for a stream of revenues. Taxi medallion companies lobbying city governments to restrict the supply of medallions is a textbook example.
That said, a real estate investor certainly could engage in rent-seeking behavior. For example, they could lobby a city to restrict new development, thereby reducing competition and protecting or increasing their revenue. In practice, companies that invest in stable real estate assets (e.g. REITs) typically don't do this. The incentive structures in the industry don't really support it. I'm sure it does happen in some cases though.
Now, to be fair to the GP comment about the "English Upper Class" it's not entirely unreasonable to accuse them of rent-seeking for their land holdings. With very broad brush strokes, there are a lot of "Upper Class" English people who own a lot of incoming-producing real estate who also push very hard for historic preservation laws that restrict new construction - e.g. Prince Charles and his friends.
> For example, they could lobby a city to restrict new development, thereby reducing competition and protecting or increasing their revenue.
You don't have to be the one to create a rent-seeking opportunity to be the one who benefits from it.
The fact that many desirable locales have strict zoning regulations to restrict development absolutely turns homeowners there into rent-seekers. They're exploiting a stream of income which only exists due to government intervention.
For sure, homeowners are very often rent-seekers. In fact, I would be willing to wager that there are a lot more rent-seeking homeowners than professional real estate investors.
I took the question in the thread to be more about real estate investment firms than individual homeowners.
The tech company wins or loses based on innovation (unless it goes the monopoly route, in which case it's back to rent-seeking).
Real estate is scarce, inherently exclusive by location, and limited in supply by planning law. The amount of money returned by real estate is totally out of proportion to the work involved in its maintenance.
> The amount of money returned by real estate is totally out of proportion to the work involved in its maintenance.
And what is the work involved in building a housing unit? If you build one in most of the EU capitals today you can expect to get your investment back after 30-40 years if you rent it out. (that's why most just sell the housing unit)
Would you make an investment in a company expecting to get your investment back after 30 years? I certainly wouldn't because I want to make profit while I'm still alive.
If housing units would grow like trees without human interaction then you'd be right, but each one of them had to be built in the first place.
The returns aren't in the rent, they're in the capital gains. More gains than the stockmarket. This is why people are buying the units, especially from overseas. Sometimes they're even left unlet.
FYI, the vast majority of rental real estate is owned by investment firms who buy and sell entire buildings, not people buying units.
In general capital gains in an otherwise depreciating asset are tied to outsized increases in the revenue stream that asset produces. To put it another way, the increase in value is fundamentally driven by an increase in the number of people who want to use the building or the neighborhood - it's driven by a real utilitarian value that the asset does provide, or has the potential to provide for people.
If you think that real estate always goes up in value (above inflation) I would wager you've spent most of your life in the big cities where an increasing number of people want to live. I also have some lovely properties in Buffalo and Detroit that you might be interested in.
Of course, sometimes, in a frothy market, both professional firms and random individuals speculate on real estate, looking for capital gains disconnected from any underlying fundamental increase in utilitarian value. There are plenty of half-finished subdivisions in rural Florida that show how real this phenomenon is. However, it's an aberration, and it's fundamentally unstable so it doesn't tend to last for long.
Drawing conclusions about real estate markets in general from speculative bubble conditions is similar to drawing conclusions about technology companies from day trading on the Nasdaq in 1999.
Sorry, but this can't possibly be true. Since the 2008 crash the Dow Jones for example tripled in value while the San Francisco housing market gained 40%.
It is very rare that the real estate market outperforms the stock market.
So if I have, say, a machine that makes t-shirt more cost-effectively than my competitors, your claim is that I'm 'rent-seeking'? Do you think that because it's not innovative, or because I'm the only one with such a machine?
(This is a trick question. Before you answer, please make sure you actually know what 'rent-seeking' means, because it's obvious that most other commenters don't.)
Because owning a piece of property and charging for it is just extracting value out of something static. If investing in a company building or producing something you're helping create value.
Yes, the property has to be maintained, but generally the cost and effort of doing that is minimal, and the usual things that break need to be fixed by the person living there, not the landlord.
I think you might be comparing apples and oranges when comparing investing in a company and investing in real estate. There are different ways to invest in a company and different ways to invest in real estate.
Investing in a company to help fuel its growth, like VCs do, is analogous to investing in a new development project. There are lots of firms that provide equity investment to developers for new construction. Much like VCs these firms are interested in helping to create something new to meet market demands. Also like VCs they are typically looking for an exit event, where they benefit from the sale of the recently developed property.
The tech analogue for being a landlord - holding on to a stable asset and maintaining it - is holding on to an already profitable business and just maintaining it. For example, there are lots of SaaS businesses that have a decent number of customers and the owners are happy to just do the minimum needed to maintain the code and handle customer service requests. You can buy and sell these businesses as an investor much like income-oriented real estate investors buy and sell fully-leased apartment and office buildings. These investors are not helping to create something new in a direct way.
However, those income-oriented investors do create a market for stable assets, be it a Midtown Manhattan office building or shares of GE. They aren't directly investing in growth, but they are providing the incentive for growth. After all, while an early stage growth investor might be happy to know that they can sell their stake to another growth investor, as a company gets bigger and bigger its room for growth tends to diminish, and growth investors become less interested in buying it. But the market for its shares doesn't disappear. That's because there are investors looking for stable cash flow, even if it's from a static asset - be it an apartment building from the 1970s or Oracle.
It is not something that I feel or believe, it is factual. I know this because I am both a renter and a landlord. I inherited a property which I am now renting out, and except for a few major fixes, I have left the property pretty much as is while collecting quite a bit in rent from the occupiers.
In the same vein I could just purchase a property and rent it out, in doing so I have not created it - it already existed - but now I am just extracting value from it. Same as the bank will do to me with the mortgage.
How is this a problem? You don't save to hoard, you save to use that money later. Delaying the urge to consume in favor of investment is very much correlated to the growth of an economy (afaik, not an economist but a somewhat interested layperson).
You say it yourself: Saving to use that money later. Which is an issue as economic measurements are based on what the economy is like at the present moment. If a large amount of people's capital is sitting dormant in bank accounts it can't flow through the economy. This used not to be such a huge problem because banks were allowed to re-invest savings (fractional reserve lending), but this changed after 2008. The problem with Austerity is that it doesn't encourage people to spend. It damages consumer sentiment, which makes people more inclined to save for a rainy day, which has a knock on effect in the shops and restaurants, and ultimately the tax take that these businesses bring in. Of course, if all people were rational, and self-interested this may not be a problem, but this is counterbalanced by Keyne's "Animal Spirits" or the irrational behaviour of people en mass. I'm not saying that either style of economics is 100% right or wrong, but that it is a delicate balancing act between the two.
No, these savings are just offsetting shrinking retirement and welfare provisions from the State. They do very little for investment (pension funds are naturally conservative) and nothing for immediate consumption, grinding the overall system slowly to a halt. Japan historically has a similar problem due to cultural elements, Europe is getting there because of prolonged austerity "reforms".
In a modern economy "savings" equals investment. Even using a bank deposit account transforms one persons savings into another's business loan or mortgage.
This seems to be a widely held misconception - that savings are economically inert - a bit like a squirrel's nut hoard.
Nah, between "firewalls" and rock-bottom central bank rates, money invested (or rather multiplied, through fractional etc etc) by banks today is not coming from savings. Which is why returns on savings are basically non-existent; but it's the only wealth accumulation available to everyone, and in times of "austere" frugality with uncertain job prospects, people keep accumulating them anyway.
The massive accumulation of capital to the top 1% means competition for investment opportunities... aka capital is really cheap as investors hook up the money funnel to anything that smells like yield. That encourages malinvestment.
Businesses don't need loans when they don't have customers with money to spend.
I am really amazed by the comments I read so I am voluntarily going to "defend" VW while I would not in other circumstances. To make sure this is understood: yes VW is guilty, it has violated customers' trust, they are a shame for the entire car industry and should receive strong punishment for that.
Yet, how can everybody forget about all other car manufacturers - especially US? They pretty much all lie about their gas emissions as proven by different experts and agencies [1] [2] [3].
Why? Because we have improved our gas emission limits to a level that most car manufacturers couldn't reach over the short run. Take the example of European car makers. The European Commission started to really regulate car emissions in 2010. At that time, car makers were faced with dropping sales (double crisis 2008 and 2010), stable/slightly increasing costs (wage inflation and poor labour market flexibility - German is an exception in Europe) and stable/slightly decreasing prices (due to competition and few new vehicles). In this context, how can you expect car makers to invest in "traditional cars" to reduce gas emissions and in electric and autonomous vehicles to fight against the competition of tech car companies like Tesla or Google. That is just not possible.
So who is responsible? Of course VW and other car makers are all responsible for that mess and the disastrous consequences on environment. But WE are also responsible: we want safer, cleaner, cheaper and stronger vehicles from traditional car makers but but you can't have everything all at once. Tesla can do it because that they start from a "blank page", with no turnaround costs. For VW, GM, Toyota, that's another story. Maybe we should just keep that in mind before charged them with a "corporate death penalty"...
We need transparency and clarity about the damage that individual cars cause, both for the drivers and the public. Something as simple as displaying the numbers to the driver with an obvious statement about the health impacts would help. Maybe even create taxes based on actual emission values for individual cars.
Surely those toxins are much more containable than gas released into the air? A mobile phone is also horribly toxic, but I am not going to go onto the top of a skyscraper and blend it into tiny particles for the people below to breathe.
Obviously they won't force the UK into staying in the EU but that's definitely not what's important here. They are just starting UK's internal discrepancies which could seriously damage the union and Westminster won't be able to do much about it. England is already a well developed country which can't accept to be under the EU's power, while Scotland and others know that they're path to economic prosperity leads to the EU and its package of regulations and standards. As they France, Germany and the EU Commission likely to be tough on the UK, they are doing everything they can to stop the future bleeding.
All this in one brilliant graphics: http://i64.tinypic.com/1zdu79u.jpg
I find it really problematic: when you fill the US borders paperwork, you are supposed to give objective admin/personal details while on social media you are supposed to speak up your mind. Where do you place the limit between somebody that publicly criticizes the US foreign policy and somebody that can be a threat? How are they going to handle people who posted something like "The US knew about the 9/11 attacks"?
There is already precedent for criminalizing dissent -- Turkey, for example, considers online criticism of Turkey as equivalent to damaging national security by spreading propaganda with the intent to provoke attacks towards the Turkish government.
It would be fair to assume the US would be open to such means to improve security.
No, it wouldn't. The US has a long, deep tradition of not criminalizing dissenting views. Exceptions like the Alien & Sedition acts or the "Red Scare" are remarkable because they're so counter to that tradition.
From the article you cited, it appears that the law in question prohibits investment by the State of New York, not by individuals:
> WHEREAS, the State of New York will not permit its own investment activity to further the BDS campaign in any way, shape or form, whether directly or indirectly;
Is there more to it than what the article mentions?
In reality they likely already know this information about you, at least some level of a government agency does, and simply want a way to confront people about it. However when you cross the border I don't think most people are looking for a conversation on whatever beliefs they currently hold or may have held in the past.
Indeed Israel does it, but only for Arabic or Muslim tourists that present certain characteristics - political engagement for instance. So it does exist but it's really not mainstream
> Israel does it, but only for Arabic or Muslim tourists
Arabic is a language and speaking it is absolutely no guarantee that you are a muslim. Lots of non-muslims speak Arabic both inside and outside Israel, including a significant number of Israeli Jews who routinely engage in good mannered and friendly commerce and friendship with fellow Israeli citizens who are Muslim or Druze or Bedouin. Being bi-lingual Arabic & Hebrew is quite common in Israel. I visited a school in Tel Aviv where Muslim and Jewish children were taught together in Arabic and Hebrew; they were all fluently bi-lingual and completely integrated. They are part of a long term plan for the future Israel by removing barriers and segregation and building an integrated country together.
Having visited Israel multiple times, I know for a fact that speaking Arabic does not get you refused entry nor does it single you out for prejudiced treatment.
However, a track record of making anti-Israel statements - not the language you speak nor your religion - will get you questioned and may lead to refused entry. Most people refused entry this way are not Muslim, they are white westerners from left-leaning Christian or secular groups who are active in BDS. That's exactly the same as a track record of making anti-America statements will get you questioned at US borders and quite probably refused entry (see other comments in this thread for examples of that). Israel are doing nothing different from what America or Canada or the UK or Turkey or Saudi Arabia or any other country does.
I see what you did there. You're suggesting a moral high ground by insinuating you are against prejudice but are really being prejudiced against Israel for doing something that every country does. I just don't know if its through ignorance or if it's an intentional slur.
I said Arabic OR Muslim because they are different. Maybe it would be useful for you to start reading properly what people write.
I said Arabic people and not people speaking Arabic because that is completely different. Most of my friends in Tel-Aviv speak arabic or understand it because Arabs represent a significant proportion of Israel's population/residents.
I said "only for Arabic OR Muslim tourists" because they are treated differently at the borders. Just go to Ben Gurion airport or the Wall and you will see that Israeli soldiers are asked to pay special attention to Arabic and Muslims. That has nothing to do with racism or anything like that: they just know that there has never been a terrorist attack conducted by a white Christian guy.
What I said is based only on facts [1] and what my friends in the army told me. Because, yes, I lived in Tel-Aviv for 2 years so: yes I know a bit about Israel / no, I'm not really the guy who is going to discriminate Israel.
Next time keep your mouth shut. Really.
And terror attacks would go down if the government always knew exactly what everyone is thinking.
But that still doesn't justify that kind of surveillance. And if one claims that a piece of land belongs to them and refuses to let it go independent, but also refuses to recognize the people living there as citizen, then one has to expect an uprising.
Terror attacks are a barbaric way for the palestinians to protest, but protest itself is justified.
Ok how's this? Every (almost every?) mass-casualty attack inside Israel borders in the last say, almost 70 years, have come from ethnically/religiously similar people. These attacks happen at an alarming rate. You would like them to, for the sake of making you feel warm and fuzzier on the inside, not profile the people most likely to carry out such attacks in the future? That would be ridiculous.
Edit: before I get downvoted into oblivion, and I'm sure I might, I'd like to add that reality is almost always uglier than anyone - especially me - would like it to be.
At entry, Israeli border police check the online presence of a few people. This includes people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, identified as possibly being anti-Israel activists.
The social media check cannot be automated.
Border police at other countries also check online to follow up on the stories of a people who they stop as potentially not admissible.
It's not as simple as that: they would still need to make the case but you lying at the border just gives US authorities bigger evidence. Couple of years ago a French tourist answered "yes" to make fun of US borders and ended up in jail for a couple of days - not years as obviously he was more a dumb tourist than a real terrorist
> Couple of years ago a French tourist answered "yes" to make fun of US borders and ended up in jail for a couple of days - not years as obviously he was more a dumb tourist than a real terrorist
I get the sarcasm, but given there are hundreds of millions of US border crossings annually, a policy of taking everything seriously regardless of size probably does make the US safer.
I'm sure that there are lines somewhere between 'taking things seriously', 'overreacting' and 'making examples of people'. Ask a stupid question, expect a stupid answer. It's a stupid question because nobody in their right mind would answer 'yes' to the question which just leaves people with a language barrier (which have a high incidence rate at borders), people that are nervous and/or tired (ditto, probably including some of the guards) and people that are trying to relieve the situation by attempting to be funny (stupid, but understandable since humor has been since time immemorial a natural release for tension).
I don't think it's necessarily a stupid question, because of the psychology involved with lying.
This question would likely weed out any wanna-be small time people intent on causing harm to the US. Something similar to how many criminals in the US are arrested due to routine traffic stops.
If asking this "stupid" question prevents 1 single undesirable person from entering the US, then it's served it's purpose.
You're completely right. There are serious downsides.
However, I think this question (and a lot of the crappy things about the US) exist to deal with and automate problems at scale. Scaling is hard. Scaling solutions are overkill if you don't have a scaling problem.
In this case, the problem is strong due process protections and allocating court resources. You might not hold a person without involving the courts if you suspect them of terrorist ties, but you can if they lie on a form or tell you they're a terrorist.
I don't know the specifics, but one could imagine a concession of due process if, say, the person held for their answer on the entry card is guaranteed to appear before a judge within three days.
Automate the process and you get silly situations like the one above. Don't automate the process and somebody eventually screws up and denies due process or lets a suspected terrorist through without scrutiny.
And again, yeah, the entry questions could be handled better, but it's a serious juggling act scaling it up and fitting it into our legal framework.
He's not necessarily dumb because he made the mistake of thinking your border drones had a sense of humour. And given that English is probably not a native language for him, it's entirely possible that the sarcasm did not get through.
Quaking in fear in front of authority figures might be the norm in the USA, but it is not the norm everywhere.
Border guards aren't supposed to have a sense of humor.
Imagine how many non-resident/non-citizens enter the US daily. Now imagine if everyone of them were allowed to jokingly answer these questions. It would make doing their job that much harder.
It's much easier to treat all declarations as serious, rather than try to weed out the jokes. And because of the nature involved investigating, anyone who willing makes false statements are punished.
In that case, at least he received a gentle warning in the form of a few days in the cooler, as opposed to wandering into the US where his attitude could have easily (depending on his skin color and other factors) have gotten him a sucking chest wound for his trouble.
Best to learn not to argue with people with guns at the border.
(Somewhat tongue-in-cheek here but I actually do think this is the purpose of aggressive border authorities. As someone who traveled around old, pre-EU, pre-Schengen Europe, you used to see it quite a bit there as well. Hard to say if it was intentional or just the product of different training, though.)
I don't really have anything constructive to add to this, but the idea that the government is setting up bullys on the border to educate foreigners on how to deal with its citizens in a way that doesn't end in death, is beyond fucked up.
