What is there to say about Facebook?
Why would anyone buy a company’s stock when they have no real profit pedigree? When their advertising profit in 2011 came to just over $1 billion, and their book value is the region of $100 billion, how can that really make any sense other than to the kind of nutcase zombie trader who takes Jim Cramer seriously? The sad truth is that people are just not clicking the ads; Facebook ads receive far fewer clicks than competitors such as Google’s AdSense.
If Facebook was floating with a book value of $5-10 billion (or around $2-4 per share) we would be talking about a serious business proposition, albeit one which is already rather saturated (given that there are 2.3 billion internet users, and Facebook already has its claws into 900 million of them). But at these levels? What are people paying for?
Some say the name recognition and momentum (but that’s just paying for hype) as well as the infrastructure and data that Facebook owns. Certainly five or six years of a big chunk of humanity’s likes and dislikes is a valuable database. But how do they monetise that? Does Zuckerberg have any credible plan?
The most under-reported piece of news of the day is surely that Zuckerberg does seem to have a plan. But it’s not very credible.
From the BBC:
Facebook has started testing a system that lets users pay to highlight or promote posts.
By paying a small fee users can ensure that information they post on the social network is more visible to friends, family and colleagues.
The tests are being carried out among the social network’s users in New Zealand.
Facebook said the goal was to see if users were interested in paying to flag up their information.
That’s their plan? That’s Zuckerberg’s big idea? Get users to pay to post premium content!? Did the well-circulated hoax that Facebook planned to get users to pay for use just turn out to be true? If they proceed with this (unlikely) it seems fairly obvious the world would say goodbye Facebook, hello free alternatives.
The truth is that Facebook is a toy, a dreamworld, a figment of the imagination. Zuckerberg wanted to make the world a more connected place (and build a huge database of personal preferences), and he succeeded thanks to a huge slathering of venture capital. That’s an accomplishment, but it’s not a business. While the angel investors and college-dorm engineers will feel gratified at paper gains, it is becoming hard to ignore that there is no great profit engine under the venture. In fact, the big money coming into Facebook just seems to be money from new investors — they raised eighteen times as much in their flotation yesterday as they did in a whole year of advertising revenue. For an established company with such huge market penetration, they’re veering dangerously close to Bernie Madoff’s business model.
On the other hand, they have plenty of time and money to try out various profit-making schemes. Eventually, they may hit on something big; Apple didn’t start out producing huge cashflow or sales, they got there the hard way. But it all seems like a big gamble on an outfit with big dreams but little moneymaking pedigree. I’d consider buying Facebook at $2-4 a share. But current valuations are a joke — and I don’t think the market is falling for it.
Even the NYT notes:
The company’s bankers had to buy shares to keep the stock from falling below its offering price, raising questions about how the stock will fare next week.



OT, but for all those who say the USD isn't good for anything, I present to you this:
http://tbsilversoap.web44.net/O/DSCN4236.JPG
http://tbsilversoap.web44.net/O/DSCN4239.JPG
And some nice silver porn to go with it:
http://tbsilversoap.web44.net/O/DSCN4244.JPG
Facebook does a faceplant (couldn't resist)
After looking at Zukerbergs disgusting face, it is definitely an improvement.
Absolute ego flattery. If what you're saying doesn't organically rise to the top because it is interesting to your "friends", push it on them.
Nevertheless, considering how many people think the number of "friends" they have is important, considering the addiction to that cortisone rush the ego gets from logging on and seeing many notifications and so on, I'm sure there'll be lots of useless self-righteous posers paying for that service.
Especially if they make it secret when you pay for a post to be premium and nobody can figure out that you paid to make it appear on their front page, making it appear organic.
This just goes in the same way that a meta-market already exists for fake friends to add you and pretend to be interested in what you're saying.
As much as I think FB is grossly overvalued -- I think this Azizonomics tripe is a gross oversimplification of what Facebook has planned.
Let's not forget that the introduction of paid listings is what sent Google through the earnings stratosphere. (When all is said and done, it's basically the only real profit center for Google to date -- and it's a *huge* profit center. For all of Google's other endeavors from Android to online office apps, the money is still in paid contextual links).
The idea isn't to get "everyone" to pay as this post pretends. (Of *course* that would be dumb). It's to get those who are willing to pay, to pay. And that's proven to be a singularly successful model on teh interwebs so far.
If (and I say this as a very big "if" because I don't actually think they can pull it off due to the nature of click-through-rates on social networks, which are abysmally poor), if they can pull off what Overture and Google AdWords pulled off -- then that absurd P/E ratio could actually start to make sense.
Will it work? Again, I don't think so -- not because of user-attrition, but because of advertiser attrition because the cost-benefit analysis won't work out like it did for Google. But articles like this one don't even understand what the play is before they criticize. Silly.
THIS. And it is not about private individuals paying for higher visibility for posts; its about Public Figures and Companies that people subscribe to. 6.6 million people are subscribed to Abercrombie and Fitch. A&F Pays to have their post upped, so it shows up not only on the 6.6 million people's feeds it was going to anyways, but on the 50 million friends of the 6.6 million people's feeds.
Random banner ads are not the future; having people voluntarily share posts from companies, and having Facebook get paid by the companies for this, is the future.
I still say Facebook is massively overpriced and am sure the stock will take a dive, but it is a company with revenues and actual profits that will be here for sometime. I think that so far, as long as they don't do anything to really piss people off, the vast majority of people will not jump ship.
MySpace made the mistake of letting people edit their own pages to their hearts content, and it turned into geocities. Facebook has done far better at restricting people's abilities while allowing customization, and steadily introducing new features. Each time they force a major change, people complain and threaten to cancel, but they rarely actually go through with it.
I can't believe Zuckerberg got married today.
Don't you guys think it's a little over-the-top to become an instant billionaire on Friday (with all the media worshipping your every step), and then get married on Saturday? Seems like someone is really starting to enjoy his narcissism a little too much.... the guy is taunting Lady Fortune.
MF
yeah the timing is hella fishy
Seriously, this, of all companies, from 0 to 100 Billion in 8 years.
Two Lips and a mania.
ori
And what FB faceholders got out of the deal, one like button and a stream of useless updates from faces they would probably hate to see on daily basis. And that's after they got monetized at 100+ bucks per active face.
I'll consider using Facebook after they let me pick which finger I can use for a "dislike" (hint: it isn't a thumb...)
This is the first comment of yours I'm not going to junk, seeing as how I am a dumb libertarian and all.
That being said, I appreciate your contrarian view MF. Ive always wanted to know what the fuck your avatar is though. Do tell.
One may be a complete fucking imbecile if they compare FB to Madoff.
There are many variations on the ponzi, but all ponzis inevitably end the same way.
It's the lead character in the extremely overrated movie Rushmore, directed by the extremely overrated Wes Anderson and starring the extremely overrated Jason Scwartzman.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128445/
Smug, trite, obtuse, facile but disguised by self absorbed arcane hipster esoterism. I think he's supposed to be in character.
Two insightful comments with which I agree
Quote "MySpace made the mistake of letting people edit their own pages to their hearts content, and it turned into geocities. Facebook has done far better at restricting people's abilities while allowing customization, and steadily introducing new features. Each time they force a major change, people complain and threaten to cancel, but they rarely actually go through with it"
But this, is one of the worst aspects of Facebook. The entire look and feel is bland, boring to go along with the drivel of feeds and updates I guess that makes a little sense, bland graphics for bland content. Tumblr, which in my book is much more graphically rich and easy to customize, is much better on this front. Yes, it reminds us of Geocities and Myspace. But to have everything look like "Facebook" is also incredibly boring. No personality when its all skinned the same.
These are minor issues though, the major issues are still going to be how to monetize to meet that valuation, and how to stop attrition when the next big viral thing comes up, because it is so much a fad. My 9 year old son grasps the concept of lack of privacy on Facebook and won't use it. Any attempt at monetization using the data make it a spam platform. But who wants that? How long will people hang around if there is any nag factor whatsover, and it starts with a nag window saying "Pay to increase visability", I mean even that one extra step will be annoying enough to some people to start the attrition.
And a side note, check out the listening crowd in this video: http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-mark-zuckerberg-speaks-before-ringing-the-nasdaq-bell-2012-5 I mean are all those people FB staff or what? I hope they are not "fans", because if that's all they are than what a spooky cult that guy has following him around, I mean guys with hoodies on at a 100 billion IPO? Weird as heck groupie scene that's for sure.
top because it is interesting to your "friends",
Does anybody, at any moment in life, ever really ever have more friends than can be counted on the fingers?
Reality bites the weak and feeds on thier fears. Friends? Who has more than 5 or 6 outside their immediate family? It's kind of like authors writing narrow agenda books for book stores whose job it is to promote the agenda. No one buys the book except the communities benefiting from the author's agenda so they will back trucks up into a ACME Book Store and buy all the books ACME has. Later, a new star appears in NYT best seller list titled "The Terrible Tribulations Forced Upon the Ghouls". The author gets Oprah face time, CNN face time, maybe even CSPAN time in front of a congressional panel to promote DESPITE THE F*CKING FACT that all sales were bulk sales, still in the boxes. The walk ins were unaffected.
All the noise about JPMs 2 Billion (a lot more than that by orders og magnitude to be sure) prop losses. Yesterday, institutional buyers, that most likely lacked the benefit of their very own HFT price fixing and "offer" leaning spammer, were buying billion buck blocks of F*ckBook. THEY DIDN"T EVEN CONSIDER THAT THE ONLY REASON THE STOCK FLOATED ROUND THE IPO PRICE (and didn't fall on its face) WAS THAT THE STREET'S BIG HOUSE WHITE SHOE BOYS' HFT MILLS WERE HOLDING THE PRICE UP. EASY TO SUSPECT HFT MARKET PSYOP strategy included DOS sludging of execution "sell" pipes.
HFT's so what the Plunge Protection Team used to do - what the FED's QE pig in a pokes - they manipulate the market. Need to make the economy look good - pump up the indexes by inflating the currency. Need to feign a little exchange volume or put a little lipstick on a recently placed pig. Push up the vol and box in pending sell orders.
Media said retail investors were back. If they Grampa or Johnny DayTrade, they full of it. It's happened before, a portfolio manager for a large fund gets a bag of green delivered to him by a masseuse with 50 psi lips and a T-shirt slogan "I'll do anything". First he has to liquidate the good stuff already in the portfolio, and then buy the "recommended bribes" pick,
Other than 3 or 4 institutions, all the other players were the Street's HFT Consignment Mills.
After the market closes on what could, or should, have been a catastrophic IPO were it not for the well intended money centers' low return HFT divisions, news breaks the f*ckbook had a class action privacy suit filed the same day as the IPO.
So - given a declining "click" revenue, the fact that f*ckbooks 2011 revenues were down by almost 90% over 2010, and the class action suit, the question is as to "Why so much hype over a lame stream 'Web Blog' for The Shamelessly Vain, Hopelessly Inferiority Complexed and the Terribly Misguided" data harvester, Why did institutional buyers eat this turd - and why did the underwriters print their buy stops? Everybody wants to see themselves and show others the glitterball page published on the net. But still - if the penny clicks drop a half the ad purveyor be in deep doo doo! If this be the biggest IPO ever (and infinity), show the market where the f*cking money is. Well, maybe f*ckbook is "not just about click revenues".
All lame stream info flushing pipes are purposed for one thing. Accept it.
Maybe the Ben needed some risk spread around as an argument for more counterfeiting?
What happened Friday will take a toll Monday. F*ckbook was a sham wow from the get go! The smart one was Zuck's co-founder (Sayin?). He ASAPed an Israeli citizenship just in the nick of time - just like them Russian Oil Oligarchs - he'll never have to pay for lunch again.
Good news is the Street's ponzi projects are increasingly of shortened durations. The WOT, Housing and Debt bubbles took years to execute! All the tension in the "main spring" is gonna totally unwind real soon. It gonna get sticky.
BTW, Dr Pauls Money Bomb target was 650,000$. The campaign beat that target. A Pitch fork or Dr. Paul, you decide,
Not much disagreement here. They should never have taken Faceplant public, but it's all part of the game--pump and dump. The only problem is, there aren't enough sucker left to dump, which you would have thought that these brilliant people know given what JPM just went through where the hedging desk became the market because there's really nothing left.
I totally agree that what fAcebook is thinking about doing has totally been tried by other free services and failed miserably. The only way it could possibly work is if you have a pay service where on your facebook page you pay to put adult pics and material if you want. And if people come to your site they are warned that your facebook page has adult material so yes or no via your online age. But that wouldn't go anywhere either because there are adult meet places and blogs that do just that. Zuckleberg is going to see his stock tank big time on monday.
And yes the banks that had major facebook shares had to buy shares to keep the stock up, and thats not all that happened. You know that many orders that where placed to buy or sell this stock wasn't showing up until late in the day. It's becauce the banks where frontrunning the trades and trying to see how much they would have to buy to keep it positive. Because if the sold orders hit early and the stock went under the 38 dollar a share marke, it would have started a momentum of selling.
The IPO raised $16 billion and, according to Forbes, the lead underwriters had bought more than $10 billion last Friday. It's not known whether a huge part was on behalf of clients but if it's solely to prop it up above $38, then the likes of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs et al will be staring at huge losses when the price goes down. How long more can they keep supporting the price?
I agree with everything you said, except the comment about a cortisone rush. You are correct in showing that a lot of Facebook is based off of an addiction, but you got the neurotransmitter wrong.
It's not cortisone, it's dopamine. Dopamine is the reward seeking NT that tickles the same receptors as cocaine.I still up voted you, because everything else you said was spot on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
You're totally right. Cortisone is the stress hormone, of fight-or-flight fame. I was at work and forgot the name of the right chemical, and while I wrote it down I knew it was wrong but didn't have time to try and remember my biochemistry. At least you got my meaning. I should totally have remembered dopamine receptors!
Cortisone? I think you meant cortisol? Cortisone is the cream you put on your ass when the Fed is done ramming its giant rod up there. It's also the shot you get in your knees after having to hold up the world-wide weight of all these finance billionaires who blew themselves up in 2008 but who won't take their own medicine.
I ignore Assbook and feed my Cb-1 receptors with primo THC occaisionally accompanied by a lovely single malt with a wee drop of soda water.
I see no reason that the Global Economic Apocalyspe shouldn't be an enjoyable event as much as possible.
i've red triangled you for the soda water in single malt. bad form. :)
ICEBERG = Huge chunk of ICE
Bilderbergs = Huge bunch of crooks
Zuckerbergs = Huge bunch of suckers
Someone should start a new free service called ABOUTFACE as an antidote to the facebook and start paying customers to click on ads. You click 1000 adds and you make 100 dolars and ABOUTFACE MAKES 1000 (Just a rough example you get the idea). So then you have thousands of Indonesians and Thais clicking out all day and night and make a month's salary.
And I hope that Zucker-burger uses this idea so I can sue him for a gazillion shares before they collapse to $2.
Brilliant except that it is trivial to write software that will accomplish the same thing. Ever since 2000, I pretty much figured all clicktrhough numbers were either made up or mostly bots juicing the numbers. That's what the botnets are really for.
All the people living in reality have known this IPO was going to flop. Way to go Facebook. You FAIL!
http://silverliberationarmy.blogspot.ca/
be interested in seeing info related to the "knew the IPO was going to flop" knowledge if you have any
thanks,
r
No shit man- So tired of seeing that mug
Really when I see that buggeyed bedwetters face, I want to grab the back of his head and wipe my ass with his face.
Wouldnt be as good as a corn cob, but pretty darn close.
Actually the plan is EXACTLY OPPOSITE of what it needs to be: companies should pay users for posts that pertain to ads and other click-through rewards.
I agree. "First they steal all our personal data then they tell us we should pay for that privilege." HUH? I did take note "they're being sued for 25 billion."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU
...Same as it ever was...
25oz CML's = silver porn? More like silver D-tease -lol
Fair enough... LMAO... Many people don't have any. "Every ounce counts" is my motto!
Indeed. In the country of the blind the one-eyed are kings.
Joined facebook years ago with a couple of pals to mock it together. People did not grok to our mock. Haven't been on it much since then but yesterday I deleted my account. Finding out how to do so is difficult, and they will not delete it for 2 weeks...I guess to give you a chance to change your mind.
Delete Facebook. Be cool. Ditch it.
http://www.lowbird.com/user/Slimalex/view/2011/06/tz56t5t546erg
Had to do it.
Hey, where's the FB like icon for this post? Oh, there it is ^
methinks one of the Tylers is short Facebook...;-)
(sure its overvalued, but its like complaining about the price of cocktails on the Titanic)
I am buying $15 puts as soon as they come live
Cough, May 29th … coughs again
How To "Like" Facebook With Options
Facebook finally gets a "dislike" button.... in the derivatives market.
Fuck Facebook.
They fuck up a simple easy timeline of recent posts with sorting algos to bury all but the most viewed friend posts. Now they charge money for those buried posts to be viewable by friends paying.
All this means is 1. Fuck you Facebook. 2. Anything friends what to shill - businesses, products, scamway will be forced to viewed (and will later defriended).
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Nice "Idiocracy" quote.
Now we know how Facebook will die, sponsored posts means 'spam conduit' and other hijinks. That should be fun to watch, FB users raging at how products are being shoved down their throats.
We can only hope Facebook will be sentenced to one night of rehabilitation at the hands of the Dill-Dozer.
If users are made to pay, $FB will capitulate
I can tell you how the stock will fare over the next year:
pummeled
zynga'd
myspaced
pet.com'ed
flattened
pulverized
obliviated
When a stock that hyped up, trades 570mn shares on IPO and gives back a 13% gain, it is not a good sign for the future of this stock. Sure retailers were bidding the shit out of it, but they couldn't get filled. Ironic as it seems, I was following my FB stream during the IPO, and what I saw was a confirmation to be short: people I know who have had ablsolutely no experience trading or financial markets whatsoever, were buying this stock like it was a sure way to get rich....Smart money: "Well take the other side". There are far too many suckers long on this stock, smart money is going to slaughter them. Smart money has already begun exiting equities and commodities.
What you said doesn't make sense in light of the fact that the underwriter was buying the issue to hold it up--there's not enough suckers out there anymore.
zuckerberged
Well, "theglobe.com" is still around twelve years later, you know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdf-jKsKA9k
Sheeit, I'm on Diapora these days. Even I know where Facebook is headed.
tell me about diaspora plz
This dude has started a whole Facebook universe on his own...
~~~
http://www.huliq.com/13303/one-man-30-kids-11-different-women-wheres-child-support?
Oh yes..TANFbook what an awesome start up!
with Gettoville from Zynga
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-tennessee-man-has-...
Hmmm, Why does your story show a white baby??
its good for advertisers posing as users.
I went on an interview and this dude was setting up facebook pages for businesses that appeared to be regular people who just LOVE the business.
He was doing well enough that he was hiring.
Indeed, guerilla marketing at its finest.
More like Social Network CDS 1.0
So True, It has generated a new market sector where you hire yellow pages to write about your business on several sites. I have found cut and paste reviews all over the place. Also, people naturally do not look at banners if they know it is a banner ad. However, if you see an Obama on this site, click on it, that way Tyler gets his money. I think it still works that way.
That just undermines the value of any reviews anywhere. It makes the Internet less of a utility. It makes the Internet worthless, in fact.
Not the exact thing to say the day after the IPO..
Hey Zuck, you nerd, are you ready to be monkeyhammered?
zuckerberg fuks everyone over
never buy what he s selling
Just wait til Zuck starts selling along with other insiders.....that's when the real fun is going to begin.
insiders have already been selling at mulitple times that of normal insiders during ipos.
Facebook is a short as long as Bernanke does not do a Twist or QE then all bets are off... This market is FULL OF FACEBOOKS LEFT AND RIGHT but as long as the free moey flows to the banks, they can buy all the utter wrthless crap out there with no consequence.
Fatcrook
coup de gracebook
twitter allows sponsors to highlight tweets based on user preferences and put them towards the top of your feed...i get American Express and Sprint when i log into twitter.com.
however from my phone and tablet i dont see any of this and i wont with facebook. no ads on the mobile versions. that will be their downfall
keep an eye on Zuckerberg filing a 10b5-1 plan. i think he has to wait 30 or 90 days but the selling comes soon
The paid tweets are what did it for me on Twitter. I don't ever use Twitter anymore. I also don't have mobile devices.
r u sure? you need you legs.
Facebook will go the way of a company like Keen.
Keen used to be about making the consumers pay for the clicks, but over time it is evolved into a Google Ad-sense type model where a person wanted better placement on a page had to pay for that placement and usage.
In time Facebook users will feel like rats tapping a food bar for their crack with Facebook likes being some kind of cyber-cash sent to your smartphone to "buy" crap you never needed. FB will cannibalize its users, because ultimately FB has nothing but contempt for its users who give away their privacy.
Meanwhile understand that all your base is being sucked up by Mossad and CIA on Facebook and those guys are making a predictive model of your behavior to (again) sell you things you don't need.
The fact that the FB placement went the way it did means they priced it right to get out ASAP.
All this work, yet they still can't and won't count a vote toward Direct Democracy.
It will eventually morph into Chickbook. The only way for this to survive (maybe) is focus solely on women. Its 60-70% now anyway. Either that or sell it to Oprah before it disintegrates.
Lol chickbook it is
I done fucked one old girlfriend from thirty years ago Got called creepy by another. Gonna see how many old girlfriends i can screw
Chickbook has value
You mean until a high value security event will require standardized ID (facial recognition, retina scan) across THE LARGEST established global personal database platform for the future of evolved e-commerce (translation: FED ponzi feudal enslavement) to continue to bring people the essential e-governance tech i-toys (translation: e-crack)?
A pimp can't control his whores without fear...and without knowing where and what they're doing...
Like I said on the other FAKEBOOK post. Facebook is dead because my 17 yr old daughter says so. She and all her friends used to love it but now they say it "sucks" because of that type of BS. They are over it. So it is done.
My 12 and 16 year olds say otherwise. Anecdotally.
disclaimer: I loathe Facebook.
Like I said on the FADEBOOK thread, facebook will continue to have that one family member that loves it and tries to force the other family members to use it. Until it doesn't.
+1 for keepin' hope alive. ;)
Zuckerberg was the first to know that, that's why he went IPO to get out on the highest valuation possible.
Farcebook.
Digital totalitarianism won't work any better than old school totalitarianism.
The Jerry Springer model is NOT a 100+ billion pretend money toy.
Epic f'ing fail.
Facebook is already the 'fonz.
Shallow is for dummies.
On the other side of the argument? People are merely stupid 'social' creatures. Like monkey's, we will gladly accept 'the banana' if massa makes it available.
Who is right?
Who is our preznit?
FB might be a reasonable bet.
If you have a low opinion of humanity in general.
Are they gonna charge extra for printing your post in italics or bold also?
I get it, a "Pay to get noticed" button.
FB will go down as just one more failed business plan linked to advertising that is ineffective.
It doesn't help that FB LIED out about its' # of users.
Player Meet Dog
There is the explicit economy and there is the implicit economy, the derivative and the integral, and then there is God. Teenagers “think” that the world is what THEY see, which is just the tip of a growing iceberg, and prove themselves wrong both ways by assuming that others cannot see what they are doing.
The explicit programmers, the legislators and the software engineers, are like teenagers, busy inserting their arbitrary code in the DNA’s derivative, already on its way back to the churn pool. Attempting to rule out the unknown is insane, because the only way to do so is to make your world so small that you rule yourself out, in time, which is exactly what they have done.
To make a very long story short, currency is a DERIVATIVE, of pricks and vaginas in DC, which are now DERIVATIVE of intellects in Silicon Valley, which are themselves DERIVATIVE, relative to time, which is exactly what the relatively impotent legacy corporate families across the pond wanted. Misery loves company, all going THE WRONG F-ING WAY. F-Heads. How’s that for logic and emotion?
Just a ray of f-ing sunshine.
You live in God’s world, whether you like it or not. There is no plan; there are an infinite number of plans. The way to deal with teenagers is not to deal with them. You cannot own children; you are not their boss. Your job as an integral parent is to treat them as an individual, as an example of expectation. They need you on the front end, but you will need them on the back end, as the pensioners who borrowed against the future of other people’s kids are learning now, again.
Set limits on your children as you would have limits set upon yourself, because that is exactly what is going to happen when the poles reverse. If you need help, ask your grandchildren. You have to be smarter than the computer, which is always on its way to the trash HEAP. Have children to have children in God’s time, not yours.
Domesticated critters are notoriously ineffective breeders, in terms of both choosing an appropriate mate and timing childbirth. Investing is not rocket science. Look at the data across an entire empire cycle. They breed on slavery, in a positive feedback loop, while their masters issue just as much as they will take, monetary debt in the case of humans, willing to hold it against each other’s future.
But go right ahead if you like and collect all the money and associated toys you want, and, by all means, don’t share. Only a city cop is stupid enough to create criminals to the end of collecting a pension. Don’t borrow and bet against your children’s future and expect to see the future.
Hierarchy is a self-fulfilling prophesy, projected by fear, but the bullies running it cancel each other out. On the empire side, life begets death and its denizens are the walking dead. Keep your distance, in plain sight. Old dogs do learn, despite the mythology designed to the contrary. Discrimination, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Money is a derivative of time, not the other way around. Spend your time propitiously and the money will take care of itself, regardless of the façade spinning its web around you.
The new economy is always built in plain sight of the old economy. To see it, filter out the noise projected by the old economy, its income facades. Only an empire robot concerns itself with your explicit job, to place you in the empire hierarchy, to step on you or pull you down accordingly. If you do not reciprocate, it will step into the abyss and pull the entire weight of the empire down upon itself.
Go ahead; lay off that out-dated old man to cut costs, after raising prices, to insert taxes. The “thought leaders” are down $17T on $600T derivative. When do you suppose they are going to put down the Ready-Shovel? The economy doesn’t work the way they think it does by design.
What do you do when the common law judges turn marriage into Russian Roulette with all the chambers full? Relay the firing pin to MAD-Derivative.
If someone whispers in your ear, telling you that the elevator man is having a double with breakfast, tell him/her to mind his/her own business, or just keep doing the same, politically correct, but when war approaches, and it always does, who do you think is carrying Trump, up to the Tower?
So, the kid surgeons, physicists, computer scientists, economists, whatever, get out of class and walk right on by the cantankerous old elevator man everyday, up and down the stairs, following their fat pontiff leaders, but occasionally, just occasionally, a kid stops, temporarily mesmerized, lost in thought gazing at the top of the elevator car through the open door, impervious to the university crowd passing by...” hey kid, you wanta go for a ride,” says the elevator man.
The Basset Hound, retired from hunting and lying in the sun on the porch, wouldn’t jump through the hoops with a fashionable hat, so the salesman kicked it, ignoring the kid at the door. The kid fed his kitten raw hamburger after weaning, and every dog in the neighborhood was now afraid of his cat, except that dog on the porch, which was surprisingly quick and accurate. No dog, Doby, Shep, or Rot ever entered the perimeter of the yard and escaped unscathed, one way or the other. Likewise for salesman who appeared with decreasing frequency.
The empire fears the unknown, which intelligent parents seek, making the latter the enemy of the former, and the former irrelevant to the latter, leaving the empire behind to rule itself out. Without you, the municipalities like their parent States, are always helplessly under water. It’s in your purely municipal interest to act accordingly.
The pieces are all there; you just have to put a subset of them together to meet your community’s economic interest in individual liberty, and reboot the currency accordingly.
Long, bizarre, and mostly unparsable. However, +1 anyway.
In a similar vein, stream of consciousness, but much better:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/18/blown-up-election/
+10. Who could junk this post? Seriously.
A green for soapbox bodacity if nothing else
Where I come from, Pretty much every truth worth listening to must contain this token lie. Same concept in humor where a joke is only funny if there is some truth in it.
Wow, markov chains and Eliza-like AI really has come far. You should really push this article to a science journal, I'm sure it would get published.
hobbies might cure that
Short the shit out of Zynga on Monday. $6.
i bought a bunch of zynga puts early last week. does anyone know what exactly happened with the trading halt(s)? did they halt trading twice?
Zynga was halted several times to keep the streaming HFTs pair trading algo in synch with the sitonmy facebook $38 matches.
raise taxes
May 14, 2012
Facebook Users Offered Membership Fee Or "Pay As You Go Posting"
All THE sheeple looking for some Facebook Hopium.... ZUCKERS!!!
That brings up the reason why Facebook's valuation was so over the place. No one has a clue about how Facebook will GROW profits. After all, valuation of Facebook is INCREDIBLY noisy.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/a-recap-of-our-franco-american-economy-since-mid-2010-escargot-speed/
FADBOOK......................next
It really is too bad anybody bought any of the IPO. It's only encouraging those people.
The fact that the exact same nonsense happened not ten years ago should serve as fair warning to any moron that mistakes an online widget for a movement.
Pets.com is my favorite one, people seriously thought selling 50 lbs bags of pet food over the internet with some insane shipping fees attached at retail to boot. Some odd reason, it appeared sane, until that stock IPO'ed then P.O'ed every poor bastard holding it.
You know what the worst part of every Dot.Bomb/technology bust cycle is? The books.
I have 30 years of this crap in boxes, it's like a graveyard, there are more dead product manuals packed in boxes than used products. Next place I move into I'm asking for a place without insulation, because I already have something to fill the walls with. That alone should scare the crap out of investors. Or just head down to the technology cabinet at a Sally Anne. Scary looking at tech that's less than four years old. Users are so incredibly fickle.
I had so many damn user manuals...
Took them down to the local book-trader store, Bookmans, but they wouldn't give me anything for them. They said the local cops always needed old user manuals because they were hopelessly out of date technology-wise.
So I donated them.
They are the ones doing important work. They are the smartest guys in the room.
Like Enron.
So let me understand this:
Before this new pricing plan, users would voluntarily give up their private information.
After the new pricing plan, users would pay money to give up their private information?
It's hard to see where it could all go wrong.
Same bullshit, different year. Back in 2008, Associated Press wanted to charge bloggers per a word for quoting any excerpts from a story.
http://www.podcastingnews.com/content/2008/06/associated-press-raises-copyrightfair-use-stink/
Ambiguous DMCA provision looms large in AP/Obama poster suit
My humor..
DMCA evaluates authenticity of AP generated Obama Birth Certificate| Files lawsuit against WH for Copyright infringement.
See how easy it is to turn the tables? LOL
Makeup in facebook likes Estee Lauder. Paying for the truth you require is what makes the world go round.
Facebook=facepalm=PC Load Letter
I had people here in the UK asking my opinion on Facebook's IPO. I said no.
However, I am staggered that the IPO was such a MESS, there was at least some opportunity to try to get the retail market interested. Instead, the awareness of the IPO day's events will keep anyone from the retail market re-entering and probably drive more away from the stock market.
DavidC
Fail!
EPIC Failure. How about changing the name. Fuck Facebook. I donlt have an account. Facebook is just another arm of the NSA. Sheeples will beleive anything u fucking put a lipstick on. Welcome to Inbred USSA.
Isn't it sad that the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet has come to this?
Obsessing about stupid shit?
But I suppose that is the natural end, right. After you have the ability to nuke the entire planet and steal whatever oil you need from the ragheads in the desert, well there's not much else to do but obsess about shit.
Peak narcissism.
www.google.com/search?q=social+media+dopamine
I saw that. There goes Facebook. Look at what happened to Nflx.
ROFL! Only the most narcissistic MF'ers out there would want to pay for a service like that. Or someone desperate to get hits on their services.
If you're right, it will work.
Here's their plan...
Use their newfound fiat, i.e., grossly overpriced publicly-traded FB stock -- and use it to buy real, established & PROFITABLE companies.
Yes, you'll prolly overpay.. but who really cares? The stock price is a joke, so why not??
That's the only way I can see the stock becoming worth anything.
I'm so cheap I'd rather masturbate rather than take a girl out and they're going to ask me to pay for using Facebook. Better start putting up some scratch n sniff if you ever expect that to work.
Google has teams of mathematicians working out the statistics which allow adsense to target adverts as precisely as it does, thereby getting higher click through rates.
Facebook has....
Very true. However, if you use a certain program imbedded in your browser. You'll see the AdSense mathematicians workings has be blocked. Someone is scratching their ass, not me.
AdBlock was a fat tail event for the bright minds at google.
<Buzzer sound>
I’m not mocking you, just educating you. They have a civilian version. Tried it 2007-2008 for one year, it became a pain. Your always fine tuning it to filter and avoid blocking the things you want to see. That’s why the Government uses it, and has no accountability for finding out where Mr. Corzine lost the MF Global funds.
http://www.fortinet.com/solutions/government.html
SonicWall is the other member to the puzzle.
Google also has software that spies on you, then targets specific ads for what it hears through webcam microphones, or sees you searching for.
Maybe we could secretly pay the Tylers for extra greenies?
Gotta be a way to monetize zerohedge
Ok tylers heres a buck for ya to erase my red lol
;)
This timeline thing is terrible enough. How could the users even stand it? Google is smart enough to not change its simple interface over the years.
So, instead of Facebook, its really ADBook.
Yeah, this is going to the trashbin in short order - grab those puts on the 29th my friends, assuming it isn't trading on the pink sheets by then.
My son's a software designer/ engineer, he said all the IT people he's contacted say clicks on Farcebook do NOT lead to sales, they are NOT advertising on there, "if you go to Google you usually want to buy something...", he said..."people just want to talk to their friends on Farcebook, even a good local pizza shop got no business off it..."
chelsea wins euroleague; Abraham wins ham sandwich. Day of the oligarch. Bayern not happy.
awesome match
In other news :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9276164/...
Read the comments, everyone is pulling their funds from Santander. The bank run has begun! Once it begins, the fraction reserve system fails and 2008 repeats itself all over again. I'll be happy to see Santander gone, useless bastards.
here is a video that explains everything you need to know about the FB ipo failure from morgan stanleys' trading,uh, training room.
http://vimeo.com/42209600
If I can buy friendships now, it will be counted as revenue of a corporation. We don't have to fight Krugmans non-existent aliens, we simply sell frendships to each other and that will boost our GDP. Zuckerberg is a genius and he should get the nobel prize in economics.
They can sell the info to the government, who can pay it with tax money and close one of th 16 spy agencies.
That's a bussines model
There you go. Taxpayers buy up the loss, they actually do not get stock. Then the goverment declares that a FB account is mandatory to log your movements and run all your govt services through(like taxes or foodstamps). It's FREE! The government pays FB for the "services".
HFT algos gently float up the price like clouds shaped like puppies playing in sky blue field.....
Nirvana is declared on Earth, with the epicenter of Love being the Fukishima plant in Japan... Excess population (poor with a darker skin tone and having accents) is given free flights to visit.... The price crackers falls... All is good..
I would not buy it but with 1 billion users, if they can come up with a way to get 1% of them to pay for music, video, books, magazines, etc through FB, it might work. I thought Google and Apple were way overpriced 5 years ago and they keep chugging along...
Fuck all this shit.
I stood behind an avid Facebook user this morning as she went on the site, signed on, and used it.
A member for 3 years, she loves the site. She knows little of stocks or the market
After 35 page clicks, I did not see ONE advertisement - not one.
This woman is on the site daily - sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. Says she clicks on at least as many pages as she did when I was hovering. She told me she rarely sees an ad, and I asked her if she would click on one if she did.
"Oh no, those are annoying".
How about the stock, I asked. Would she buy some.
She laughed and said; "Why should I - it's free."
When I told her Facebook may be charging for use of certain features in the near future, she then said;
"Well, then I'll stop using it - and wait for the next Facebook thing - I loved Myspace, but that died too."
Sums it up.
Facebook = no value.
fickle aren't they
Often when I write about stuff here I have to go to Google to fact check, or see how to spell certain proper pronouns like that Norwegian mass murder I commented on this morning, or paste my post into an e-mail at Yahoo to spell check it because TD has never given us back that function, so when I go to Fbook I get the creepiest ads "tailored" to my interests. I don't even go there that often since I am annoyed by all the "friends" who bombard me with Farmville requests and other game bullshit that they seem to be able to afford to waste time and money on, but which I want nothing to do with.
I did not go to Fbook for almost a year and I did not miss it.
IF I WILL NOT spend money on internet porn I sure ain't spending it on bullshit like Facebook.
Hear! Hear!
The management talent isn't there. Forget the statistics and marketing hype. It still goes back to that. That's alpha. Worse yet the management team is at odds with each other. Sheryl Sandberg always looks like she can't even stand to be around Zuckerberg. It's a marriage designed to fail.
They don't have any ideas of their own. They think they can just buy up everything that users do value and call it theirs. You can burn through $16 billion very quickly at $1 billion per acquisition and still not end up with much to show for it.
I think they'd make more money if they had the READERS pay to STOP others from posting their useless shit. Much more money to be made in that area I think.