[wordup] Moving back to NZ (and Why the stock market keeps going up)

[Adam Shand]

Sorry for the recent silence, I've been working more and more on my 
wiki/blog so that's where I've been spending the majority of my time.

  http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/AdamShand

I'm am planning on setting up a blog to mail gateway so those that wish 
to continue to keep up can do so.  In the mean time I suggest you check 
out the above URL occasionally. :-)  There's even an RSS feed if you so 
desire.

In other news, I'm moving back to New Zealand.  I got a job offer from 
Weta Digital which is the company which does all the special effects for 
the Lord of the Rings movies.  It sounds like a pretty fun job helping 
run their (huge!) Linux cluster, though it's gonna be crazy as I'm 
arriving in the middle of them being crazy busy finishing up the third 
movie.  The downside is that I got the offer last monday and my start 
date is the 7th of July, so Teresa and I have been mad ass busy selling 
our cars, selling our furniture, packing up etc etc.  Things will be 
more lively once we're there and settled.

Adam.

From: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/06/21#a601

Saturday, June 21, 2003
Why the stock market keeps going up

Americans are out of work.  Factory orders are sluggish.  The economic 
news is grim yet the U.S. stock market keeps going up.  Can this be 
consistent?  Sure!  It is possible to believe simultaneously that the 
American people are getting poorer and that the largest American 
corporations are going to get ever richer.  How could this happen? 
Group A and Group B can get richer if they work together to grow the 
pie.  Alternatively, Group B can get richer by transferring wealth from 
Group A.

We've discussed this already in this blog in the context of airline CEOs 
who managed to take $billions in taxpayer money and transfer quite a bit 
of it into their personal checking accounts as salaries, bonuses, 
guaranteed pensions, etc.  But there are more subtle ways in which 
corporations can acquire property formerly held by the public.

For example, movie studios (notably Disney) and other corporate 
copyright holders recently purchased a federal law that extended 
copyright out to 100 years (the Founders had it at 14; it was 75 years 
until recently).  There was no way for them to argue that this law would 
provide an incentive to authors because it applied to works that were 
created in the 1920s, i.e., whose authors had been dead for half a 
century or more.  The effect of this law was to transfer public 
average-Joe property (public-domain works) into the hands of large 
corporations, i.e., the companies whose shares are going up.

Disney figures in another corporate property transfer.  Ever since the 
dawn of aviation it has been held that airspace belongs to the public 
and is to be regulated for the benefit of all by the FAA.  This is what, 
for example, prevents the owner of a farm in Missouri from demanding 
that Delta Airlines pay him a tax every time they fly over his farm.  In 
May of this year that changed for the first time.  Disney essentially 
now owns the airspace over Disneyworld and Disneyland and they can 
exclude anyone from overflying.  They'd been trying for years to exclude 
planes towing advertising banners but Sept. 11th gave them a security 
rationale (though neither the TSA or the FAA felt there was a security 
risk or wanted to transfer the airspace into private hands).  Background 
story: http://www.aero-news.net/news/sport.cfm?ContentBlockID=9601

Let's hope the comments section will fill up with other examples of this 
trend.  But the bottom line is that the time seems ripe to invest in the 
S&P 500.  Look around you at stuff that you believe to be public 
property.  Very likely it will soon be given away to America's largest 
corporations and consequently their stock will go up even if they don't 
innovate.

# Posted by Philip Greenspun on 6/21/03; 7:45:38 PM - Comments [21]