Anyone not named Tom Crean. Thanks.

He could do for Marquette basketball what he did for Georgia! And he LIKES us. That’s the all important thing around here.

But shareholder capitalism is not new.  It’s been around for hundreds of years and the most successful and stable in that time. And the current system of open and free capital markets is a far more widespread version with less barriers to entry than existed early on.

While it’s not perfect or without faults, there has yet to be a system that both incentivizes innovation and risk taking while offering opportunity and returns to a large amount of people, beyond traditional stakeholders.

Sure sure. All true.

But, as I said, I'm sure all different economic systems thought they were the best until the next better thing came along.

I have to think that eventually something better will replace shareholder capitalism.

Relative to the conversation about AAPL share buy backs versus dividend increase. I would much prefer the dividend increase.

My basis in AAPL is less than $1 per share and as such I have no intention of selling during my lifetime. So buy back does nothing for me. Cash Dividends can be utilized in many ways.

Sometimes corporations buy back shares to offset new share issuances to management.

What did Tim Cook say when you proposed this to him over lunch?

I can't definitively refute your statement.

What I can say is that likely, over the centuries, each new/stable economic structure/system thought it was the best system out there.

But shareholder capitalism is not new.  It’s been around for hundreds of years and the most successful and stable in that time. And the current system of open and free capital markets is a far more widespread version with less barriers to entry than existed early on.

While it’s not perfect or without faults, there has yet to be a system that both incentivizes innovation and risk taking while offering opportunity and returns to a large amount of people, beyond traditional stakeholders.

What jumps out to me is that its not an.immediate release of the hostages

“Alive or dead” is shocking as well. 

“Here is the body of a civilian hostage that we killed, now give us 30 Palestinians who attempted to kill Israelis”.

By my math, this means Israel is holding a minimum 990 Palestinian women and children.
Maybe the reasons are completely valid, but that jumps out.

Definitely seems high, but then I thought about

A) the teen who was shot a month or two ago after stabbing a soldier at a border checkpoint

B) the Palestinian woman, who got released or pushed for release in a previous exchange, who was detained after a failed car bombing at a checkpoint.

I forget the exact number, but my BIL shared a stat of how many foiled/unsuccessful attacks there are on IDF soldiers or civilian targets near the border for every successful attack.  Multiple monthly if not weekly.  And that’s not factoring teenage Hamas/PIJ/etc fighters who get described as children in statistics.

There are undoubtedly some unfairly detained Palestinian civilians, as well as teens who made stupid rash decisions due to bad influence or programming by others, but I can see how the numbers get high rather quickly.