vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"What does ""points"" mean In any stock market, there are certain stocks that go up and certain stocks that go down. Hence if we want to find the generic health of stock market, i.e. on an average is it going up or down, we have no means to find out.  A practise that has evolved over the years is take a set of companies and find if on average they have gone up or gone down. In very simple terms say in 1970 I take the Market Capitalization of a set of 50 companies, lets say its value is ""X"". I would now call this index as value of 100. Now after a month if the Market Capitalization is 2X, the index value would be 200. After another month if the Market Capitalization come down to 1.5X, then index value would be 150. So essentially now one is able to get the general trend more easily. S&P is an index of Select 500 companies based on various parameters. So in isolation 2000 does not mean anything. However as a comparison it does give quite a bit of insight. Note there are various adjustments made to factor, i.e. certain companies go bankrupt or are not doing well are removed from Index, share splits, mergers, etc. This ensure that the Index is neutral and does not show unwarranted spikes."
Starve the beast in practical terms means end government. That is really the goal of the right establishment. Without government, there will be no force to regulate or even prosecute the companies and individuals who fund republican elections. That is the endgame.
I work in corporate finance at a large bank. Here's my opinion.  I'd say learn SQL, Tableau, and OBIEE first in that order.   I do know Java but have never personally used it at work. I know some people that do and Java is usually the language of choice for banks. It's really good to know but it's rare that a company would expect an accounting or finance person to use it.  But almost every team in corporate finance will use at least one of the other three. Most finance / accounting people don't take the time to learn these. So most teams have one or two hot shots that do most of the work.  Also, you can learn those three easily over the summer if not sooner. They aren't very difficult. Java is more complicated so maybe take your time learning that after the other ones.
In the US, expense ratios are stated in the Prospectus of the fund, which you must acknowledge as having read before the fund will accept your money to invest. You never acknowledged any such thing? Actually you did when you checked the box saying that you accept the Terms of the Agreement when you made the investment. The expense ratio can be changed by vote of the Board of Directors of the fund but the change must be included in the revised Prospectus of the fund, and current investors must be informed of the change. This can be a direct mailing (or e-mailing) from the mutual fund or an invitation to read the new Prospectus on the fund's website for those who have elected to go paperless.  So, yes, the expense ratio can be changed (though not by the manager of the fund, e.g. just because he/she wants a bigger salary or a fancier company car, as you think), and not without notice to investors.
"Title touted in the press: ""LCD makers will pay a $538 million penalty.""  Actual terms of settlement: ""LCD makers will pay a $37 million penalty, and set aside $501 million to partially reimburse those consumers who hear about the settlement, can find their receipts, and bother to fill out and send in a form.""  I bet if every single consumer affected filled out the form it would cost the companies $501 million.  Seeing as only a fraction of affected consumers will actually do so, the companies will end up paying a far smaller penalty.  [Source](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203479104577124863769347498.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)"
I'm talking about the seed industry, not industry in general.  As I said, I don't know how it is at other stations in the U.S., but here even the most poorly educated field workers without a G.E.D. or the ability to speak English get better starting wages than Costco offers.  The work is hard and requires attention to detail and knowledge, but they train on the job.  As for educated employees, after 10 years my wife makes 6 figures with a masters degree.  From the inside looking out the seed industry has done wonders for our world, both economically and agriculturally.  Food is (too?) cheap and plentiful because of the work done by these companies, just like inexpensive smart phones have become the norm because of the work of tech companies.  Do you want to go back to an LCD flip phone?  Likewise, would you like to go back to when we harvested 25 bushels of corn per acre when today we harvest more than 140?  That's 6 times as much food from the same acre of land.
It's also a function of location.  Let's use an example of where I live in Eastern Tennessee and a skilled HVAC Tech with two years of tech school certifications.  The starting pay locally to me is roughly $15/hr but if you move 100-200 miles away you find starting pay jumps to $22/hr. With minor cost of living increases. Certainly not $7/hr worth of CoL.  Companies locally are simply preying upon a small skilled labor force they hope cannot afford to move.
H1B visas are not terrible, and I am not against all H1B visas. However, it is a bald faced lie to suggest the number 1, if not only, reason companies use them is to cut labor costs. These companies are not advertising they could have hired local talent, but chose to provide the job to someone from a poorer region.  I think whatever city everybody in the world wants to work or go to school, like Tokyo or London or Paris or Boston, that is going to have the world's best talent. Also, if those people go back to their homelands, they don't bring with them the ideas from the city they worked or matriculated, but rather the best ideas from all over the world.  That isn't at all what is happening in technology. There are plenty of computer science and electrical engineer majors in the USA out of work, and some making six figures with a BS degree and 3 years experience, but so many are out of work. Many of those jobs were outsourced, but the talent used was so poor, the cost to upkeep or update was so expensive, that many companies brought back the jobs to the USA. Those companies still want to hire the same low cost workers, but want them working in the USA for reasons I will spare, here. The USA talent pool is so full, and jobs so scarce, it drives down wages; not actually, because what really happens in the company is toxic to work for, and demands 16 hour days, 7 days a week, for the same great salary that may have once been 40 hours a week with fun puzzles and entertainment and space and a gym on site, etc.  Stopping H1B visas would force companies to bring back their on site gyms, large break rooms, increase work life balance, etc.  Stopping H1B visas mean a lot of billion dollar tech companies would have to pay their shareholders and executives *less* this year than last year, which is outrageous in the **race to the bottom**
From the article:  *counterfeiters' profits are often enormous because they haven't had to fund the R&amp;D work undertaken by the pharma companies*  No.  R&amp;D amounts to about ~~5%~~ 10% (NSF has it at less than 10%) of the average pharmaceutical company's budget.  Most pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on R&amp;D.  The huge profit margin in counterfeiting in-patent drugs is due to the huge profit margin that pharmaceutical companies make on in-patent drugs.    I'm not saying this is good or bad; I'm making no value judgement at all.  It is simply not true that the cost of in-patent drugs is driven by R&amp;D costs.  The issue is much more complex than that.
Not true. Obviously it's the end goal but right now the priority is clearly to grow the user base and make reddit more accessible. Do you think companies like Uber who absolutely haemorrhage money are thinking that profit is their top priority? No, it's about growing the user base. There's arguably more value in that these days for tech companies.
lol you do know our tech is built on importing highly educated immigrants.  homegrown engineering is at an all time low.  go to any corporate campus in the silicon vally, apple, facebook, google, all you see are indians and asians.  with the invention of the internet knowledge has been democratized and american companies are slowly losing the lead in tech.
I think other US companies are starting to wonder where the cost savings are.   Moving to China is starting to look like a fad.  A couple of big companies went to save a buck and the rest jumped on the wagon to keep the stock holders happy.
Everyone thinks this is so Amazon can keep you from comparison shopping while in an Amazon brick and mortar, but has anyone considered the other reason most companies patent things? Maybe they're trying to protect that so other companies, like best buy, can't use tech like that. I'm pretty sure Amazon benefits more from people looking stuff up at every other store in the world than they would from blocking you in their own store.
In less than two decades, more than half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared. There were 7,355 U.S. stocks in November 1997, according to the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Nowadays, there are fewer than 3,600. A close look at the data helps explain why stock pickers have been underperforming. And the shrinking number of companies should make all investors more skeptical about the market-beating claims of recently trendy strategies. Back in November 1997, there were more than 2,500 small stocks and nearly 4,000 tiny “microcap” stocks, according to CRSP. At the end of 2016, fewer than 1,200 small and just under 1,900 microcap stocks were left. Most of those companies melted away between 2000 and 2012, but the numbers so far show no signs of recovering. Several factors explain the shrinking number of stocks, analysts say, including the regulatory red tape that discourages smaller companies from going and staying public; the flood of venture-capital funding that enables young companies to stay private longer; and the rise of private-equity funds, whose buyouts take shares off the public market. For stock pickers, differentiating among the remaining choices is “an even harder game” than it was when the market consisted of twice as many companies, says Michael Mauboussin, an investment strategist at Credit Suisse in New York who wrote a report this spring titled “The Incredible Shrinking Universe of Stocks.” That’s because the surviving companies tend to be “fewer, bigger, older, more profitable and easier to analyze,” he says — making stock picking much more competitive. Consider small-stock funds. Often, they compare themselves to the Russell 2000, an index of the U.S. stocks ranked 1,001 through 3,000 by total market value. “Twenty years ago, there were over 4,000 stocks smaller” than the inclusion cutoff for the Russell 2000, says Lubos Pastor, a finance professor at the University of Chicago. “That number is down to less than 1,000 today.” So fund managers have far fewer stocks to choose from if they venture outside the index — the very area where the best bargains might be found.
"The problem with your math is that your assumptions are all sorts of fucked up. You have him living in a 700 sqft apartment in Sunnyvale but paying $1400 in Indianapolis (I live here). $1400 in Indy is enough to rent a 3 bedroom house, or a 3 bedroom luxury apartment downtown. And a front end dev isn't going to be making 70K in Indy with 5 years experience. That's the average of salaried employees in Indy, web developers make more, my friend's starting webdev job out of a no name local college here was 70K. With 5 years experience you can find a job paying a lot more than that. Your salary scale is automatically going to be skewed since tech pays more and a greater percentage of the population is going to be in tech in SF than Indy. The dude would probably be making more like 90k if he was competent. And paying $500 a month for a 700 sqft apartment. If he had some money for a down payment, for $1400 a month he could afford the mortgage of like a 300K house, and could actually be putting that money into an investment rather than sinking that money into rent. Good luck buying a house in SF for less than 1M. But for sport, let's assume he doesn't buy a home and is renting a small apartment. So he is now paying only $6000 a year for housing and is making 20K more than your estimate which after taxes is like what, at least 16K in take home money, plus the 11K he is paying less in rent than you assumed? So he is actually making 27K more than you are assuming in your math, and now instead of making 20K less a year than he would in SF, he is making 7K more. Again, if he was smart and bought a house, which isn't possible for 99% of people in SF, the monetary gain isn't even close.  And don't get me started on the ""perks"" of California. People from Cali all seem to be under the assumption that things like nature, restaurants, and entertainment only exist in California."
"Seattle is one of the fastest growing city in the USA http://www.king5.com/news/local/seattle/seattles-population-growth-leads-nation-report/442879395, and increases than 1,000 people per week on average in 2017. Hardly ""everyone is escaping""...  And it's way more than Amazon: the tech sector in Seattle has added more than 100 companies in a few years, some very big, and has created a real alternative to Silicon Valley for a lot of engineers (as in: once you are in Seattle, you have a lot of choices now. In the past it was either Microsoft or Amazon, now it's at least 5-10 big companies like Facebook and Google, plus a lot of mid-size ones and a variety of startups)  It's true that most of that growth is in the high end and that causes real problems everywhere, forcing some people to live"
I see, thanks for the link. My initial impression is that there are probably more considerations than the theoretically optimal way to lever the company. The two tech companies I named have a fear of insolvency baked into their DNA. I would imagine their CFO's are aware of this theory and have either decided protecting against insolvency is more important -- or they've been unable to persuade the CEO/board to do the theoretically optimal thing and distribute that cash to shareholders and put the company into debt.  It's an appeal to authority but I'm still going to assume that if all the tech giants are doing it this way, it's probably the right decision for them. Even if it does conflict with this theory.
Yes, I agree on that and it would have been a better lead. It’s a better story saying tech companies are having a hard time hiring because of the high cost of housing than trying to hammer in the idea that the bay area is losing jobs.
"The article states that Boise is trying to build a tech ecosystem and is making it harder to leave to keep that human capital at the firms they're currently with.  The logic behind this: smarter people will produce higher revenues for companies thus higher revenues for the state. Firms are lobbying for this.   They're essentially keeping people at their jobs, to help the firms keep a competitive industry, while ignoring the other impacts it may have such as lower wages because workers can't leave.   Trickle down economics can refer to other benefits besides gains and breaks. The human capital not being able to leave is the benefit, and firms are attempting to justify it for the betterment of Boise's future ""tech eco system"" aka passing it off as benefit to be enjoyed by many later on.   Alex Labeau, president of Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry trade, a group that represents many of the states biggest employers countered: ""This is about companies protecting their assets in a competitive market place""  How is it not trickle down economics when firms are receiving a benefit (that negatively impacts citizens) under the guise that it will keep Idaho's tech hub relevant, thus economically benefitting everyone?"
I have no problem with H1-Bs, though if prefer the government open immigration up more generally all these folks wouldn't have to essentially be indentured servants. That said, having worked for years as a consultant doing tech-related projects at many of the world's/America's largest corporations, they are all using H1-B tech workers as cheap labor. This isn't being done in small pockets here and there. It is on a massive scale. In some companies, there are probably 5x more H1-B tech workers than there are citizens and permanent residents. These H1-B workers don't have any skills that are impossible to find otherwise (in fact, much of the time they are lower skilled). They are simply cheaper.
S&amp;P 500 are a relatively small portion of the entire American economy. Any number of things could cause them to increase in value at a greater rate than total output.   For example, distribution of total spending could shift from the public sector to the private sector if government tax receipts and outlays were decreased. It's also possible the economy is becoming more centralized towards tech and industrial giants, with an increasing market share in the hands of fewer, larger companies.
That's always been the case, though.  In fact, it might actually be *less* the case now.  In the past there was basically no way for small companies to know what was going on in the world, consumer trends, etc.  they couldn't afford the data big companies rely on.  Now that data is much more accessible.  Yes, big companies can burrow down into it more, but small companies have more than they ever did before.  At the end of the day, though, big companies are definitely going to be able to trample small ones - but then, they always have.  The real difference now is one of control.  50 years ago if you had stores in different states, they had to run almost independently.  Now, not only can you directly control everything they do, but you also have your internet store selling everywhere, that you directly control.
The segment only briefly talked about the economic aspect of this.   I feel a lot of this has to do with the fact that tech companies are IP heavy as supposed to capital heavy. This makes them more flexible to enter new markets. It is somewhat unthinkable for a non-tech company to go into a market in a different vertical (e.g. Amazon going into movie making).   Also I much rather the government tackle cable/utilities monopoly first, as that market is already anti-consumer even on price. Tech is still pro-consumer on price, just anti-consumer on choice.
&gt;This whole article sounds like it was paid off by cable and internet providers. Don’t get me wrong these web companies definitely need to be hammered down on specially after what happened this past election. &gt;However this article is trying to make a point that getting rid of net neutrality is the right thing to do. Net neutrality is the rule that prevents cable/internet companies to charge you more for access to certain websites than others, in a similar way they do with television today. The same cable/internet companies that lobbied and won the right to sell your browsing history the same way these web companies do. &gt;And if we talk about monopolies we should also be looking at AT&amp;T, Comcast, Verizon and various other companies that have a strong hold on today’s consumers. To me, the article says nothing that you assert... &gt;The FCC is right to revisit the illogical “public utility” rules imposed on broadband companies by former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, who seemed eager to do The Web Trust’s bidding. Unlike search or social media, connectivity is an innovative, fluid market with competing wired and wireless options that have continually improved consumers’ ability to reach anybody or anything, anywhere. We now have not just companies, but whole systems and technologies like cable, fiber, satellite, cellular, DSL and other options that compete for your attention. The FCC is right to reject obsolete Ma Bell era regulation that denies this basic fact. &gt;But the more pressing question is: **What obligations should be imposed on the Web Trust giants as they embed themselves ever further into our lives?** How do we assure ourselves that the “users” they connect us to are human or that the search results they feed us are based on merit — not pay for play (or worse, algorithmic racism). &gt;It’s time to consider whether to break up the Google search and advertising functions, or to deny safe harbors that protect the tech platforms if they turn a blind eye to sex trafficking or commercial piracy.
"P/E ratios for the whole market are rising to levels generally only seen after crashes in the market when low earnings push up the ratio.    A lot of people in the market recognize the artificial effect of government easing and low interest rates have had on prices. Basically, there's more money sloshing around and there's nowhere else for it to go that earns a good return.  I agree that outside of tech the rest of the economy is doing fairly well and will probably be resilient against any shock. But tech is a bigger part of the market than ever, and we could still see a big market correction and a small real world downturn on the back of it.  &gt;There were people prior to 2008 sounding alarm bells about the real estate market. I haven't seen the equivalent today.  You said it yourself: overvalued tech stocks that nobody can justify the high prices for. We have big IPOs on companies that don't actually make money. Huge market caps on ""disruptors"" that are only very niche parts of their industries (e.g. Tesla). Companies like Uber that still lose money but command huge valuations.   Is that enough for a crash? Hell yes - that was what caused the 2001 dotcom crash and recession."
Actually, total return is the most important which isn't necessarily just price change as this doesn't account for dividends that may be re-invested.  Thus, the price change isn't necessarily that useful in terms of knowing what you end up with as an ending balance for an investment. Secondly, the price change itself may be deceptively large as if the stock initial price was low, e.g. a few dollars or less adjusting for stock splits as most big companies will split the stock once the price is high enough, then the percentages can be quite large years later. Something else to consider is the percentage change would be based on what as the initial base.  The price at the start of the chart or something else?  Carefully consider what you want the initial starting point to be in determining price shifts here as one could take either end and claim a rationale for using it. Most people want to look at the price to get an idea of what would X shares cost to purchase rather than look at the percentage change from day to day.
"What part of finance does he want to get into? Investments, Equities and trading, derivatives, finance as a whole, corporate finance? Most academic textbooks are ridiculously priced so if he is looking to learn technical skills he might have to look at splashing out or looking elsewhere...  Fundamentals of Corporate Finance 7th is a good one. Covers a lot of the core parts of finance which then extend to all the other areas of finance, starting at the basics of Time Value of Money (though it does gloss over some of the more complex parts). However, it is pretty expensive. This is an academic textbook.  On the non-technical side, there are a number of books with which he could get started. Benjamin Graham's ""The Intelligent Investor"" is a popular and affordable one, but it won't teach much about the technical side of finance."
Invest in solid companies, not in esoteric products built on sand. The problem is with finance, not with real economy: oil companies make money, mobile phone companies make money, airlines make money...