That's 'cause you probably never built a business from scratch. Believe me, not one person who has labored to start, launch and run their own business would make the comment you have. Not ONE.
These kinds of statements only come out of a certain place and this is the same place that confused revenue with profit.
This is also the place that doesn't understand that a company has to have a financial buffer in place in order to survive the many variables in business that hit you each and every day. What do you think happens when you have a bad quarter and you still have to make payroll for a couple of thousand employees? And pay leases, rents, power, insurance and other expenses?
Have you ever had the experience of having to use your personal credit cards to make payroll because you had a bad month? Do that and maybe you'll understand why the comment that doesn't "register" with you "registers" 1000% with those of us who live a different reality.
Doesn't mean you were guaranteed success. Doesn't mean you didn't have to pay bills or take risks. Doesn't mean you did nothing. Does mean you are not a heroic John Galt pulling himself up by the bootstraps in spite of the rest of society being parasitic.
It was your choice to start a business, don't complain at other people if they have not taken the same risk. They also don't have the business.
I never signed the social contract; and food to slave does not entitle ownership. My use of the roads, or benefit derived from them, is defensible.
Else I ask; in what manner may I make myself free? Is there a way out of the perpetual claim against my livelihood?
Further, if social responsibility is so great for my common man, what right do you have to demand my efforts go towards local healthcare when others a bit further away starve? What makes a fellow countryman more due for grain than a differing skinned man in a land far away? Is it not indefensible to claim ownership of my resources for your health, but hold firm against the claims by others against claims of ownership against your wealth for nourishment.
Yes. Leave.
Every minute you spend still here, you're re-signing the social contract.
If you don't want to support the upkeep for the society you've chosen to participate in, and continue to choose to participate in with every action that isn't making for the door, then don't participate. You don't get to reap the benefits of living in a society without sharing some of the weight of keeping it running.
You're free to disagree with how it's kept running. I certainly do. You're even free to take action (within the limits of the laws of the society you're part of) to change how it's kept running if you disagree strongly enough, and can present a better alternative.
But to begrudge the fact that you ante up some of your livelihood in order to make sure that the laws and services and such that protect and support your continued participation in society, which includes earning that livelihood, while continuing to participate, is selfish beyond reason.
I'm not against working and helping the needy, those born mentally handicapped to the poor, for example; what I'm against is what I consider to be the false: Benefit begets claim. I am happy to help the poor, and I do help them beyond the actions of the state.
The collective and violent claims by others stop my ability to leave since all habitable land is claimed. Furthermore, maybe I want to live in a collective much like Canada, but since not enough others hold the basic views that I hold, there is not yet a stateless society with voluntary order, including lifelong agreements to pay a portion of gross personal revenue to the collective.
Not true, Bir Tawil [1] is an 800 sq mile territory unclaimed by both of the countries which surround it - Egypt and Sudan. However I'm sure that after a short while there the infrastructure, public works, etc referenced by one of the parent posters will be sorely missed.
> It is not accurate to pretend that you are 100%, solely responsible for your own success, without any other contributing factors.
I don't know of any entrepreneur who thinks this way. Not one. Your success as an entrepreneur depends on a myriad of factors external to you. The roads? The power grid? Transportation? Banks? Please. Stop it. It hurts.
How about we all stop and thank Spain then? Without the Crown investing in expeditions that led to the discovery of the American Continent you wouldn't be enjoying that cup of Starbucks Coffee.
Oh, yes, let's also thank our governments for starting wars. Without WW1 and WW2 you might not have penicillin, radios, planes, cars and a bunch of other things you enjoy today. They were brilliant! Too bad they had to kill a hundred million people in the process.
Crazy, right?
Right.
My advise to anyone buying into this kind of thinking is simple: Go start a business. Learn what it takes to actually earn your keep from scratch and even create jobs and be responsible for the livelihood and well-being of families besides your own. Succeed. Fail. Learn. Rise-up and succeed again. Then come back and see what you think of these ideas. I'll bet you a donut you will not think very highly of them. That's the power of reality.
Are you implying that there's some kind of a cultural or educational element in France that might bias your views?
I am genuinely interested. I've spent a lot of time in other parts of Europe but, sadly, never visited France so I don't have any first-hand impressions to go by.
Self-determination and the myth of pre-disposition are core values of protestantism which largely influenced the way Anglo-Saxon societies approach self-enterprise and self-reliance in general. Luther was quite insistent that each individual should have direct relation to God through scripture, which promotes the idea that one gets to decide things for oneself and should not rely on middlemen. Protestantism also doesn't promote self-castigation as much as catholicism, which creates an atmosphere where people are actually encouraged to acquire wealth, thrive as entrepreneurs, etc.
In France on the other hand, our culture, due to the aforementioned mostly Catholic culture, success and the amassing of riches is seen as something you should not boast about and almost repent for.
I'm talking general religious influences on the collective unconscious of a nation as a whole here, particular cases might of course be much less coarse in their specifics. The other very important difference is the fact that France has traditionally tried to preserve a strong social safety net and government involvement in most matters (education, transportation, health care, roads, investment in research, major companies, national defense, etc) is still strong and has wide support among the population, which as you know means that everyone and businesses in particular have an obligation to give back to society as they grow (through high taxes), to ensure that we can then try our best to share the benefits with everyone for the greater good.
As a result of all this, there is much less of an incentive for self-entrepreneurship and much less possibilities for the likes of Google, Facebook, Enron or other American business behemoths to emerge, which creates an atmosphere where the emphasis on business is not as strong as it is in the States. We don't have channels as big as Bloomberg or other 24/7 stock market channels here, we don't know the ins and outs of lemonade stands at age 8, we don't read about trading theories, MBAs are not as big, etc.
TL;DR: The emphasis on business and self-entrepreneurship in particular is not as big in France as it is in most "Protestant" societies because we favor a model where everyone is in a mediocre middle rather than having people going through the roof and others down the gutter. Different approaches and I don't reckon either to be inherently superior to the other, they're just, well, different approaches.
Yet I looked the profit for VMWare for Q3 of 2012 and it's indicated that they made some 150 million dollars in Q3 of 2012. Then again, I am not an entrepreneur, sure, I might not understand all the details so this might be a bit naive but 150 million dollars in profit still seems like a good chunk of money and kind of clashes in my head with firing 900 people, the kind of situation I would expect if the company was bleeding money all over the place.
Then I looked some more and found this and it got even more confusing: http://www.eweek.com/virtualization/vmware-q4-earnings-up-bu...
From a noob outsider's point of view, it's almost as if the "value" of the company is not really correlated with its ability to make money and release good products, but on some decision from the market. And I guess this is where I (and most people who are not stock jockeys) completely lose track, where does that projection of what the earnings should be come from? How do people gauge that a quarter is a solid one or a bad one? Real question, any insight appreciated.
"The company projected annual 2013 total revenues to be in the range of $5.23 billion to $5.35 billion." That's a variation of 120 million right there. Those 900 people could mean the difference between making money with the high estimate vs the low estimate.
Note that the stock price dropped not because it was a bad quarter (it was a good quarter), but because vmware said projected future revenue is expected to be lower than predicted.