vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
The QuikTrip business model is an interesting one, I'm looking forward to seeing its long term stability. Every business has to offer value to its customers and it needs to bring unique value in order to take off at QuikTrip's rate. IMO QuikTrip's value is their large footprint combined with clean, organized stores carrying a wide variety of products.   This value is only unique in comparison to the general shittiness of their primarily regional competition. Most convenience store chains are regional on a city by city basis and they generally do a poor job of ensuring consistency in the areas I listed for QuikTrip. That's the general trend including good chains, there are plenty of bad ones where you would have to be insane to try one of the hotdogs or tex-mex tube things that have sat on the rollers for 3 months.  The problem is that maintaining a convenience store isn't hard, it requires competent management and employees who give a half-ass effort. QuikTrip can afford to pay for excellent management and employees who give a whole-ass effort because their geographic footprint affords another unique advantage. How long will that remain unique? I know of several equally decent, growing chains that offer better prices and if the market is large enough we're likely to see oil companies giving a shit about the convenience store side again like they did in the 90's after the rise of 7-11.   I'm more than likely wrong somewhere in my analysis of QuikTrip's list of advantages. However, if I'm on the right track I'd be hesitant to call them a long term winner when they operate a high cost operation in a heavily price sensitive market.
&gt;Vice is a broadcast company worth over $4B.  lol wut?  Vice is a media company, not a broadcasting company.  HBO charges premium prices to access HBO not Vice.    &gt;You've falsely equated them in quality to buzzfeed  Go back and read what I said.  I am equating them to buzzfeed on the quality of their content.  &gt;Correct.  If you agree with me then why are you defending Vice here so much?  Every article by them is shallow like this one and at that with a very noticeable liberal bias.    &gt;The problem with your logic is that I actually am exposed to its content while you self-select not to expose yourself to it.  How exactly is that a flaw in my logic?  I've seen enough from Vice to know its content is crap so why would I bother to read it?  &gt;the reality is that my perceptions are broadly based considerations based on a much larger sampling of their content while your perceptions amount to an opinion derived from a first impression glance.  More like the reality is you are making a grand assumption here on my end.  I'ved watched their documentaries that aired in the 90's, and read various articles and watch various Youtube video's from them.  They use to do high quality work, but now its crap.
We feed money into a company as investors; the company uses that money to buy assets (e.g. Machines, inventory) at book value; the assets are made to work in tandem to produce goods/services that have more value than the sum of their parts; those goods/services are sold at the now higher value for a profit, and cash flows are returned to investors for an annual return on your investment (sometimes dividends aren't paid, but are reinvested with the expectation that reinvestment will lead to far larger dividends in the future). As such, the money investors feed into a company is turned into more money at the other end, and thus the company has produced more value than it's inputs alone. It has done so through the combination of resources (assets) in a way that makes their value greater than the sum of their parts. A company fundamentally is a logical investment (barring doubts about management's ability to create this value). It is like a black box that prints more money over time than you feed it. Purses do not; gold does not; oil does not. Don't invest in purses. Collect then if you love them, but don't bank on a payday."
(Plus or minus all the other things that affect the value of a stock, which in many cases would totally mask this effect.) But this does not mean that the dividend is worthless. Just the opposite. The reason the stock price fell was precisely because the dividend has value. BUT IT ONLY HAS VALUE TO THE PERSON WHO GETS IT. It does me no good that YOU get a $1 dividend. I want ME to get the money. So if I buy the stock after the dividend was paid, I missed my chance. So sure, in the very short term, a stock loses value after paying a dividend. But this does not mean that dividends in general reduce the value of a stock. Just the opposite. The price fell because it had gone up in anticipation of the dividend and is now returning to the ""normal"" level. Without the dividend, the price would never have gone up in the first place. Imagine you had a company with negligible assets. For example, an accounting firm that rents office space so it doesn't own a building, its only tangible assets are some office supplies and the like. So if the company liquidates, it would be worth pretty much zero. Everybody knows that if liquidated, the company would be worth zero. Further suppose that everyone somehow knows that this company will never, ever again pay a dividend. (Maybe federal regulators are shutting the company down because it's products were declared unacceptably hazardous, or the company was built around one genius who just died, etc.) What is the stock worth? Zero. It is an investment that you KNOW has a zero return. Why would anyone be willing to pay anything for it? It's no answer to say that you might buy the stock in the hope that the price of the stock will go up and you can sell at a profit even with no dividends. Why would anyone else pay anything for this stock? Well, unless their stock certificates are pretty and people like to collect them or something like that. Otherwise you're supposing that people would knowingly buy into a pyramid scheme. (Of course in real life there are usually uncertainties.
The operating margin deals with the ability for a company to make a profit above the costs of running the company and generating sales. While ROE is how much money the company makes relative to the shareholders equity. I'd be willing to bet that if a company has a small ROE then it also has a quite large P/E (price to earnings) ratio. This would be caused by the company's stock being bid up in relation to its earnings and may not necessarily be a bad thing. People expect the high operating margin to help drive increased revenues in the future, and are willing to pay a higher price now for when that day comes.
I agree that to take the money from the defined benefit plan you are saying that you can get a better return than the plan. You are taking all the risk if you take the lump sum. But there are two more risks that you are taking by keeping the money in the plan even though you are decades from retirement. Funding risk: companies and state/city/county governments have underfunded their pension programs due to budget pressure. In some cases they have skipped payments when the market was good, because they felt they were ahead of their obligations. They also delayed or skipped contributions when they had a budget shortfall, and wanted to not end the government/company fiscal year in the red. The risk is that they can get so far behind that they change their promises to current and former employees. This was one of the issues with the city of Detroit this year. Bankruptcy: even though their are guarantees regarding pension benefits, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation does set a maximum benefit. If the company goes bankrupt or the plan is terminated  you might not get all the money you were expecting. While the chances of taking a haircut generally impacts people who have a long career, because they are entitled to a large benefit, it can impact people who don't expect it.
You are omitting how the company made 120 million in the previous year and may be facing a shrinking market and thus have poor future prospects. If the company is shrinking, what will the shares be worth down the road. Remember companies like AOL or Blackberry? There was a time they had big profits before things changed which is the part you aren't considering here. If the company has lost something big on its earnings, e.g. the oil wells it owned have run out of reserves or the patents on its key drugs have expired, then there could be the perception that the company won't be able to compete in the future to continue to deliver earnings. Some companies may well end up going broke as one could look at GM for a company that used to be one of the largest car companies in the world and yet it ended up going broke.
"I'm not sure that malice or 'bad people' is the true problem. Surely it will exist in small samples, but that will be the exception. I think the problem norm is boring, routine work.   I'll explain: Given mundane tasks, people unconsciously start to shortcut. They begin taking normal things for granted and they lose the care they originally put into the work. When these employees first started this job, it's likely they were very ""kind"" to the turkeys and put extra care into the details of their job. They were probably also very slow and compared to seasoned employees, their throughput was low.  Over time, they begin to shortcut. Their throughput increases and they start to match seasoned employees. But they've lost the detail.  They get a little sloppy, they treat the turkeys a little rougher. The minute detail continues to erode with enough repetition that you wind up with employees doing tremendously cruel things to the animals, simply because they are so overexposed and desensitized to the work. The turkey is no longer an animal, it's now become a widget. A widget to move, process, and package.  I won't get into solutions because there's a great number of them that'll work, but I'm not convinced that terrible turkey tyrants are running farms. The type and layout of work has evolved normal employees into this."
"As other responders said, you can certainly roll over multiple 401(k) into a single account. An added benefit of such rollover (besides the ease of tracking) is that you can shop around for your Rollover IRA provider and find the one that gives you the specific mutual funds that you want to invest in, the lowest expenses, etc. - in short, find the best fit to your priorities.  There are also ""lemon"" 401(k) plans and if you are in one of them, get out!  And rollover is the way out. There is also one possibility to keep an eye on as it happens rarely, but it does happen - rolling a 401(k) over into another 401(k).  I've done it once when I started a job at a company that had a great 401(k) with a good selection of low-cost mutual funds.  I rolled the 401(k) from one previous job in to this 401(k) to take advantage of it.  At the same time I kept a Rollover IRA, combining the 401(k) from all other jobs; it had more investment options and provided some flexibility."
The fund should be reporting returns net of expenses, so your interpretation is right; it made something like 0.42% (which sounds plausible, based on current yields on short-term securities), and the 0.05% is what's left after expenses. I've never seen a regular mutual fund report raw returns before expenses.  If one does, the my personal opinion would be that they're trying to snooker you, as that number isn't actually representative of anybody's actual returns.   If you look carefully, you should be able to find a table that reports several kinds of adjusted returns for the fund: As to what happens if a fund can't earn enough returns to cover its expenses, in that case the value of the fund shares will decrease.  This happens from time to time with riskier funds.  It shouldn't happen with a money market fund because both the returns and the expenses are fairly predictable, so the fund managers should be able to avoid it, unless they get caught up in a major crisis like the 2008 banking crisis.  In ordinary times, a money market fund managers who couldn't keep expenses below income would find themselves looking for a new job fairly quickly. Finally, for what it's worth, 0.37% is a really high expense ratio for a money market fund.  If you were to shop around, you could easily find comparable funds with expenses less than half that.
"While I totally agree with you, talking to free market people, you have to address it this way.   Their point is that they should pay what the market bears, not what you want to make.  That is fair.    But that market has shown they need to pay more, but they ""can't do it"".     Roofing is a perfect example.   Charge $6000 for a roof, materials cost $2000.   Labor costs $800.   The rest is additional expenses and profit.  Even if you have to give your roofers a 25% raise that is $200.  You aren't going out of business even if you have to absorb the increase and you can't tell me you can't raise your prices by $200, when your competitors are all over the board.  I guarantee that if the cost of shingles go up, the cost of a roof is raised, no second thought.   The problem is that they think their competitors are still paying the old rate.  They are no longer competitive if they give a raise, they are no longer competitive."
This article is misleading in it's universality of its findings. It does have a control group, which is a good start, but the findings are based on call-center employees whose functions are almost perfectly suited for remote work. In a way, we already knew this because of how much call-center work is outsourced and outside of provincial management (in other words, most companies don't bother housing customer service call centers at company headquarters). Let's see them try to replicate those results with other industries.   Treating the ability to work from home as a panacea is just as foolish as believing that workers can't ever be remote. The truth is that individual personalities and, more importantly, an individual's work functions are better suited for remote work than others and it takes good management to understand why they take the strategy they take with regards to remote work.   All in all, the study might be a good case study for encouraging remote work among call-center employees, but any further extrapolation of that for other industries is going to be a baseless claim influenced by personal agendas.
See I believe that it's pretty in the open. A shell company whose only purpose is to license out some intellectual property to an affiliate company should be easy to spot. A company with 5 employees and a tiny office should not be claiming millions of income that originated in an affiliate company. My point is that these things are not clearly defined in the code and should be, not that they are necessarily being hidden. I've seen at least 5 articles in the last year similar to this one about other large companies, so I wish congress and whoever else would do something about it.
"I do not agree with your assumption that people fully understand ""standards"".  Perhaps without government intervention, an aircraft company may build planes that cost 25% less, but have a 3x more likelihood of crashing. Perhaps the company does not disclose that information about the crash incidence to its buyers.   A discount airline may look at this company's planes and decide ""hey, they are 25% cheaper, let's use them"". Maybe they even know that the crash incidence has dropped from ""once per 100 years"" to ""once per 30 years"".   Consumers now shop their air fare, and they repeatedly choose the discount airline because that airline can offer seats that are 10% cheaper than the other airlines who are using the more stringently safe planes.   The other airlines say ""hey, look what is going on here, we should probably switch suppliers"". They do so - or perhaps the company that they used to buy from now relaxes their standards to ""compete"".  Now, instead of a plane crashing every 5 years, one crashes every 2 years.   Consumers have no idea that they are flying on planes that have a 3x crash rate than before. The airlines are not going to publicize this information. The aircraft manufacturers are not going to publicize this information either. It's going to be attributed to ""that's just the way things are"".  Ultimately, people may stop choosing to fly, putting the industry into a death spiral, but that's a long-term drawback, and something that most short-term thinkers - which includes everyone in both the airline and manufacturer industry - will ignore.  This is the problem with free-market libertarianism - it assumes that everyone has perfect information, and that people are capable of making reasonable choices between long and short term impacts. It also falls victim to the prisoner's dilemma because there is no coordination between actors - everyone chooses the path they believe to be most beneficial *to them and them alone*.  Regulation levels the playing field in a way that benefits the entire system, and solves the problem of people being unable to process the impact of ""standards"" that have no immediate visibility.  Here is a great example of how ""no standards"" work.   http://nypost.com/2017/02/13/parents-recall-day-son-was-decapitated-on-water-slide/"
The most likely answer to your question regarding what the 'market expects' is perhaps that the market expects that currently Linked-In like a lot of other startups has been plunging almost eveything it makes into building the business and brand.  So right now the net profits are pretty low percentage of income (roughly 1.5% of revenue)  Given the size of the other numbers, it doesn't take a lot of movement in the right direction to get a big change in that tiny final number.  The other factor is the gap between their Net and the Income Available..  I think (but I'm making a logical guess here) a large part of that gap was paying off the losses of the prior two years.  If that's the case, and everything else is static, then next year's 'available' number ought to at least triple.  In order to grow the net, all LI needs is to either continue current trends of growth in expenses relative to costs,  keep expenses steady and experience a slight growth in income, or find a way to reduce expenses without having it impact income. Or something in between those three.   If we take the first case as an example, income has been roughly doubling every year, but expenses growing less than that.  if they were to continue that, but manage to get some economy of scale and have expenses grow at a slower rate, then the jump in net income ought to be substantial. most of the trends you could project end up with a big growth in the bottom line.. but yeah I gotta admit, none of that gets you 117X growth in a single year.  So the conclusion I would draw is that the market is trending a few years out and being pretty optimistic given the current PE ratio.  Of course you could also conclude that the market is 'social network happy' and LNKD represents one of the few opportunities for the average investor to get in on that given that facebook and myspace are not trading on the open market
I guess they are overpriced but usually their stuff has  what no one else has or is more advanced then anyone does. Atleast in some way.  Like look at psp  Their phones are well priced and many vaios are too like check out the vaio s series.  Say the vaio z is alot? Yet its still cheaper then a macbook pro. the z is a world class laptop fitting so much into such a thin and light package.  Yet a $1000-1100 vaio s packs a wholeeee lot of punch for that price.  Their products usually have at least a few features others dont. Such as their point and shoots have had the night vision mod since.. Forever.  Their sony nex mirrorless camera? state of the art technology.  Who is going to pay for all that reasearch andd development?  Look at many other companies, they barely ever have new industry leading or future leading features.  They have made mistakes in the past such as the proprietary memmory cards...  But what else?  Ps3 controllers use mini usb Most of their laptops have both vga and hdmi  I think people love to hate sony but they have arguably done more for technology then almost any other company.  I would sure as hell pay a bit more for that then pay 2x more for apples new product that is more shiny then the last.....
&gt; The CEO of Canada’s largest grocery and drugstore chain has warned his shareholders that minimum wage hikes across Ontario and Alberta will cost his company an additional $190 million in expenses next year.  &gt; “We are flagging a significant set of financial headwinds and the organization is mobilizing all of its resources to see whether or not it can close that gap,” said Loblaws Companies Ltd., CEO Galen G. Weston earlier this week.   Is that really so bad of a quote?  He's saying it's something they need to be aware of and address...  I don't get the headline.
"&gt;The guy still gets his.  If you have 10 cars, and the government takes 4 cars. For most people with 1, 2 or no cars, they'd say, SHIT! You've still got 6 cars!!  But if you could sell the company, reduce liabilities (there are certain liabilities beyond a certain size, so say above 5,000 employees you must pay a certain amount additional in medical insurance costs, that incentivizes reducing employees from 7,000 to 4,999.) and move to a tropical island and keep your 10 cars, What would you do? Still Give the government your 4 cars? and then what if you think and know the government is notoriously inefficent at distributing those cars to those who ""need them"" and you know 2 are lost in transportation and 1 is lost to administrative costs so only 1 of those cars is given to people that need it--- how would you feel that the government took your 4 cars? You'd be upset.  &gt;Real CEO's figure out how to make more profits under given circumstances.  You mean like offshoring and setting up tax havens in other countries? YAY! GM and GE!    &gt;Whiny children complain about it not being fair and fire all their staff out of spite.  It's not in spite, it's purely a business decision, just a lot more frank and honest than most companies are who bullshit and white wash serious issues they are facing.   &gt;If I was a shareholder I'd be worried.   That's what you don't get, he is the sole principal of the company, he is the shareholders. The buck stops with him.  &gt;Not about Obama but about the loose cannon CEO that is threatening to devalue my stock out of spite because he doesn't know how to run a business properly.  Being the principal he is the sole decision maker--- you think he'd screw up his 40+ year old company that has been his life's passion over spite?"
Eh. It's what Walmart will do. The real question is, will they do it quietly or make a splash about it? Because the last thing anyone wants is Walmart butting heads with its employees in an election year, but those crazy bastards running the show in Bentonville aren't above being confrontational when everyone thinks/believes/prays they'll just back down and wait for a saner time to drop rocks on people's heads.   That's what the source of entertainment is going to be here; how will Walmart handle this and will the politicians stick their noses in it too? And is this a union-organised thing or an informal affiliation of employees that covertly agreed to do this? Also, will it spread?   That's about the sum-total of stuff we have to think about, since they don't actually change any unemployment numbers around by firing experienced employees and hiring people they have to train up and deploy again. Hell, they do it so often it probably doesn't really cost them any extra either.