Study Journal #4

Finance

October 27

Frontline: Dot Con

• IPO: Initial Public Offering - This is the process that many internet based companies went through to take their companies public and sell shares on the stock market.
• During the "Dot Con", analysts and investment bankers would start to fund start up tech companies and get quick profit off of them. The scandal behind it is that they would give the first sells the stocks to their "good clients" and guarantee them a profit before their clients would sell the stock within hours after the stock went up.
• Many of the people running the Dot Con relied on the "Greater Fool" theory, which is that you will make money as long as you can find a greater fool than yourself.

October 29

• One student's comment really caught my attention today. A company he worked for creates email filtering technology to protect users from scams like phishing and malicious software. To find new customers, they send out their own phishing emails and then sell their products to the people that fall for their attacks. While they don't take any money from the people, I don't know if this is a very ethical thing to do. The problem is I like this idea too. I just feel like it is in the murky, dark gray area in the ethical spectrum. I don't know what I would do if I worked in a company like that.
• I don't like the idea of financial kickbacks. It seems like dirty trades that steal money from the people that want the work to get done. As with the example Dr. Dougal gave in class today, the interpreters and the software contractor are making extra money with the 15% buffer of translated words, but the people that want the work done are losing out on extra money for superfluous work that doesn't help at all.
• A key contributing factor to why technology companies are so popular to fund and invest in is due to the very low overhead compared to other areas of industry like automobile production.

November 3

• Does culture really pay a price for new technology? Shouldn't we consider the new technology part of that culture, rather than something that destroys it? I feel that culture is something that evolves over time, not something that is defined by our ancestors and is then set in stone.
• I never really thought about how movies can affect different dialects and accents around the world. I guess it really is amazing that there are still so many different accents that can be found.
• Dr. Dougal - "What would my life be like if I didn't have ___________?" (insert technology in blank). All of the things I think of first to put in that blank make me shudder to think what life would be like without it.