Address your e-mail to
the editors to [email protected]. Please include your address and daytime phone
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Lax
Hacks Lack Facts on Paks
I'm glad to see you finally
printed something about the nuclear arms race in South Asia ("The Week/The Spin"). I'm
not sure why you waited a week. So much for the Web's unique potential for
timeliness.
How
typical that the piece was not something more educational. You could have given
us a piece on the roots of the conflict, a discussion of how previous wars
between the countries got started, a discussion of how the British supported
the Muslims, etc. It's clearly more important to you that your magazine never
be considered outside the spin than that your magazine be informative. By
pursuing spin over context, you join much of the rest of the print media in
reducing itself to the level of TV talk shows like Crossfire . But in the
case of
Slate
, we not only get no greater context than we'd get
from television--we actually get it in a less timely fashion. This is
especially foolish considering the Web's capacity for instantaneous
dissemination of information.
-- J. Levy
The editors respond:
William Saletan's piece "Cowboy Indians" first appeared in Slate May
18.
The
Dividend of the World as We Know It
Please
inform Clive Crook ("Dialogue: The Stock Market") that dividends are not the only
"payouts" to be considered when valuing a stock. An investor can receive
payouts beyond dividends by ... selling the stock. No valuation formula for
stocks uses dividends for the future cash flows. That is not because everyone
"implicitly assumes" companies pay out all their earnings. It is because
everyone assumes that the value of the company, and hence the stock price,
rises with earnings and that investors can capture this increase in value by
selling. Crook mentions "capital appreciation," saying that his method will
reflect it because "dividends are themselves growing along with the worth of
the company." But companies take any number of different approaches to
dividends, and their relationship to a company's worth is very inconsistent.
Intel, for example, pays a token 12 cents a share. Imagine a company that paid
no dividends but had $1 billion in earnings and expected growth of 20 percent a
year. Would its stock be worthless? Of course not. This is all elementary, the
financial equivalent of saying that two plus two equals four.
-- Jim Collins
A Man of
Substances
In David
Plotz's "Assessment" of Hunter S. Thompson, he superciliously states:
"There's something unbearably sad about a 60-year-old man who still takes
drugs." Would it be as unbearably sad if he drank espresso or enjoyed a good
bottle of wine? The worst part of the war on drugs is its hypocrisy. I was
surprised to find it in
Slate
.
-- Gary Meyer
Address your e-mail to
the editors to [email protected]. Please include your address and daytime phone
number (for confirmation only).
