Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Wikileaks and BofA

Big investors step in to buy BofA as the stock plunges on Wikileak information.

Well, this Wikileak stuff is getting mighty nasty. Anyone with a grudge can tank companies and government information by just copying files up to the internet.

A couple of forces converging here -

1. Technology of copying and how easily everything can be copied and disbursed these days.

2. Grievance-mongering and the culture of indulging every single little petty grievance

3. Piracy and the overall erosion of intellectual property value

I remember a couple of years ago being at a New Years Party in San Francisco and getting into a big 'ole argument with some dude about how all movies and music ought to be free over the internet. I'm no stooge of the movie studios or the music studios - but I was like - obviously someone needs to be paid for their work - otherwise no one would make movies or tv. He argued people would still make it. I was like - yeah - but it would suck. I mean, do you watch Youtube? That's what the whole world of entertainment would become - Youtube and Facebook.

Fact is, most young people have never created anything of actual value. And so they don't really have any idea about the sheer amount of work that goes into these things. And they don't want to pay for it because they don't have much money. This is obviously short sited and can be ascribed to a folly of youth. The greater problem is this youthful naivete is lasting longer and longer and being indulged into middle age. This cycle is problematic. You get older people behaving like teenagers - entitled, selfish, etc. There are no jobs for our 20-30 set, so they have no money, no responsibility, and like teenagers, are reliant on largess from parents or government or loans or something other than their own sweat to get by. So perhaps it should not be a surprise that piracy and grievance-mongering is more widespread. Couple this with the EASE of it -- and yeah -- now we have national security leakage and Bank of America stocks tanking.

So what would a smart person do? Buy the stock.

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