Business Pundit

I have great respect for Garry Tan. However, I find the key quote on "how profitable Hollywood can be at best" a bit strange, and want to correct his statement below based on specific data. Here's the quote "...11X return on capital. That's the highest grossing film ever made, and a good proxy for how profitable Hollywood can be at best." Since 3,800X return on capital for Peter Thiel's FB investment is an obvious outlier/best case scenario, let's compare apples to apples and take the best case for Hollywood-type investments: "Paranormal Activity With just $15,000, the visionaries behind this project created a movie that took in a worldwide gross of almost $197 million." That sounds like 13133X return to me, which is even greater than 3800X... See http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-profitable-low-budget-movies-of-…

Sorry. It's a startup term, and has nothing to do with Chinese people. It's not meant as pejorative. The idea is that you look at some market -- say in this case the people in China -- and say something like "Gosh! If we could only get 1% of that market, we'd all be rich!" Of course, it's downright impossible to get ten people to buy your product, because it sucks, but because you are multiplying these huge market numbers by tiny percentages and still getting big numbers, you think you have a good idea. Startups have a tendency to do this with anything, but for a while the favorite example was China: "If we could only get 1% of the Chinese to buy our hotdog painting machine at ten bucks a pop, we'll all be millionaires!" etc, etc. http://www.businesspundit.com/please-stop-with-your-chinese-math/

Business Pundits "Top 10 Biz Collaboration Web Tools" http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative-web-tools-for-…

I find logos like the following somewhat confusing: http://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/brand-union-logo.jpg http://www.businesspundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/eaton.gif

Here's another one taking it apart: http://www.businesspundit.com/why-good-to-great-isnt-very-good/ > ... For instance, Collins says good-to-great companies practice "First Who, Then What," which basically means "hire good people." I'm willing to bet no one read the book and said "Eureka! I've been hiring slimy weasels when I should have been hiring top performers. That is why we aren't a great company." ... It's really one of the business books I liked least when I did a bunch of summaries for Squeezed Books. The "research" is a very small sample that, as the other posts point out, is not a very good sample at that. The only quantitative research seems to be picking the companies. The rest of the "research" is interviews and subjective stuff like that.

When the employees benefit, the shareholders often do as well. http://www.businesspundit.com/good-work-environment-higher-returns/ I don't know if the data is significant, but it's certainly worth nothing.

Here are Warren Buffett's recommendations. I hear he knows a thing or two about investing... ;) http://www.businesspundit.com/10-investing-books-recommended-by-warren…

> Easily overcome by simply having reasonable minimum wage laws. Whereby corporations are required to provide a living wage. You are proposing fixing a negative externality caused by government policy with more government policy, which also happens to actively harm citizens. Minimum wage laws add barriers to entry into the labor market for citizens. It ensures that laborers whom cannot provide utility at or in excess of the minimum wage cannot get a job in the first place. It also actively prohibits private citizens from making voluntary, private transactions that pose no harm to third parties. > Failing to provide support for citizens _does_ actively harm citizens. The choice you're proposing is between "maybe harm" and "we know it harms". They're not equivalent. My point was that there was harm induced, definitively, upon Peter when you rob him to pay Paul. The only "maybe" about it was in the event that Peter wanted to give Paul the money anyway. But we know that is a specific case and not general. > For the third and final time - Where? I don't have a good charity to recommend. I do most of my giving through the local church and it's partner organizations. They release spending profiles, and I can see the difference my dollars make in the local ccommunity. It appears you are correct about SA, which I didn't know https://www.businesspundit.com/10-infuriatingly-greedy-charities/

>[Citation needed] As I stated I am working with them, so I have some non-public information regarding specific store numbers which I can't disclose under NDA, sorry. However, here is some public data, the average WM shopper is a 50 year old white women with a household income of $53,125. [1] Another article showing 10% of WM shoppers make $75k-$99k and 15% of WM shoppers making $100K+, though this is based on a survey of 4,000 shoppers, so I don't know how accurate this data really is. [2] You can find other odd facts about their demographics floating around, such as a greater percentage of $100k-$150k households shop at WM than percentage of <$15k households. [3] 100,000,000 customers/week is obviously a ridiculous amount of people and reflects a giant cross section of society. Annually 80% of American shoppers will shop at WM at least once this year, see [3]. Anecdotally, I would say the newer model Walmart Neighborhood Markets are nice and clean, and I would say on par with groceries such as Publix, Meijer and Kroger. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-shopper-2014-… [2] http://www.businesspundit.com/heres-a-breakdown-of-walmart-shoppers-by… [3] http://brandongaille.com/41-interesting-walmart-shopper-demographics/

I remember this as well but can't find it via searching. Was a fallacy along the lines of 'we only have to sell to one percent of China to make billions, anyone can sell anything to one percent of a country', but in reality it never works out due to factors like shipping and getting a foothold among the many established companies. If someone could cite the name of the economic theory it would be super appreciated. Edit: so I was thinking of this one[1], which I believe speaks to where this theory originated, and was known as 'Chinese Math' which is apparently re-invented every year by someone, but glad you found the one you were thinking of GP. [1] https://www.businesspundit.com/please-stop-with-your-chinese-math/

http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-notorious-money-laundering-cases… over half are not about drugs. The US also puts a lot of effort into freezing assets of people violating human rights.

Regalii seems to be using the GovWorks (now defunct) logo. http://www.businesspundit.com/25-internet-startups-that-bombed-miserab… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GovWorks

Yeah, you hard working suckers, who will never see a dime from social security and medicare. Pay your taxes. Oh, btw: 25 Corporations That Pay Less Taxes Than You Do 1.) GE - 0 taxes, actually gained 3.2B refund 2.) Google - 2.4% 4.) Goldman Sachs - 0 taxes. actually gained 800B refund 12.) Amazon - 4.3% 18.) Microsoft - 5% http://www.businesspundit.com/25-corporations-that-pay-less-taxes-than…

Yet-another-post-about-chinese-math: http://www.businesspundit.com/please-stop-with-your-chinese-math/ Sigh. If only 1% of bloggers stopped re-hashing old ideas, then we'd have something actually good to read on HN.

Rob May* wrote this three years ago about the same topic: Is Concentration the New Competitive Advantage?: http://www.businesspundit.com/is-concentration-the-new-competitive-adv… He goes onto saying how reading every Digg post, or looking at every new Web 2.0 startup is basically a complete waist of time. You feel like you're actually learning something, but in reality the info you're learning is "junk" knowledge (unless you're a VC looking for an investment opportunity - but by the time it hits TechCrunch or Digg, it's probably too late to invest anyway). *Rob no longer writes for BusinessPundit.com. He's at CoconutHeadsets.com now.

This is wrong. A burger is bread, meat and vegetables, maybe with some cheese or another meat. Between carbohydrates, protein and some vegetables an all burger diet is unlikely to lead to any noticeable health effects compared to a normal Western diet. Fries are vastly worse for you than burgers or pizza, whether you’re looking at macronutrients alone or tracking vitamins and minerals as well. http://www.businesspundit.com/the-mcdonalds-weight-loss-program/ > A US woman claims to have lost 33 pounds by eating nothing but McDonald's for 90 days. > Merab Morgan, of Henderson, North Carolina, began her diet because she found the Super Size Me film insulting. > In the documentary, film maker Morgan Spurlock put on 25lbs after eating excusively at McDonald's for just one month. > Ms Morgan, 35, memorised the calories in almost every menu item, and limits herself to 1,400 calories a day, reports the Detroit Free Press. > "It's kind of like the poor man's diet," said Morgan, who has tried Weight Watchers and Atkins but failed because of the time and money those plans required.

It's questionable how directly Versailles caused WW2. WW2 was caused in no small part by the Wall St Crash, which was a direct cause of hyperinflation in Germany, and by delusional industrialists who thought that financing Hitler would be a good way to avoid a revolution. At least one of them - Thyssen - ended up in a concentration camp. So that didn't work out so well for him. The others have never been held accountable. Weimar could easily have been rescued if the Nazi party hadn't received literally millions in external funding and other forms of corporate support. In a counterfactual reality, Europe would probably have united more quickly and peacefully. Technology wouldn't have developed as quickly, but there would have been an arms race and perhaps a war with the Soviet Union sooner or later. Some background: http://www.businesspundit.com/10-global-businesses-that-worked-with-th… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Thyssen

Look, you were just wrong, and you know you were wrong. The substance of your comment was that multinationals just consider tax a cost of doing business, and that new taxes alone wouldn't motivate them to consider moving operations overseas. That's flatly wrong. The distinction between US and Irish tax code is and was indeed highly material. And one you were not aware of, despite being an "international tax lawyer". Moreover, the Double Irish is by no means the only workaround. Microsoft has a pretty sweet thing going with Puerto Rico: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/28/microsoft-tax-havens-profit-b… And there's a lot more where that came from: http://www.businesspundit.com/25-corporations-that-pay-less-taxes-than… Clearly there actually are a myriad of strategies which multinationals can use to minimize their tax bill by exploiting differences between countries, and even more clearly those countries with the most favorable tax regimes are the ones chosen as places to expand. Which is exactly the phenomenon whose existence you denied: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3565426 So tell me this: why anyone would want to engage you as an "international tax lawyer" if you don't have the knowledge to actually, y'know, help them minimize their tax bill?