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Is Everything Securities Fraud?

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Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#51

Post by morelisp »

renewiltord wrote: post #45
jjoonathan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Economists like to talk about "utility" and the common good with their theories, but they tend to only measure money Yeah, that's the problem. The economic notion of value weights according to wealth while the moral notion of value does not. It's absolutely scandalous that we let economists conflate the two. Feed a starving kid in Africa? Zero economic value. The kid doesn't have money. Figure out how to merge toge…

This is nonsense. It's not The Market™ or The System™. It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone except to their parents, who have no means to provide commensurate to the child's value to them. The blunt truth is that arbitrary lives are probably nearly valueless and certainly worth less than $1000. I have tested this hypothesis by describing GiveWell's mathematics to people at varying stages bef…

I live nude in a barrel by a river, all I do is trade cryptocurrency on my phone collecting over 8 figures annually, and everything I don't spend on potatoes I donate to GiveWell. How could I save more lives?

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#52

Post by drdeca »

vlovich123 wrote: post #37
gjm11 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't how the various things called "value of a life" are calculated. The Wikipedia article linked above describes some ways to do it, and if you look at them you will see that with one exception they are not estimating, nor trying to estimate, expected future earning power or anything like it. (Though that might affect the answer.) The first approach they describe: take N people and ask each of them how much th…

If you ask a billionaire how much they’re willing to spend to save their life (or significantly improve their health) and you ask someone with a $1000 dollars in their bank account, is the answer to that question measuring the worth of a life or how much that capital is worth? Very wealthy people would be more willing to trade wealth for health/happiness whereas poorer people are less willing to make that trade off s…

I imagine one could, in principle, look at how this varies (on average) with how much money a person has and/or their income.

Hm, if one did, then perhaps one could use this as a basis for expressing how much people value other things?

Though, I suppose there's the question of like, how would someone trade off risk of dieing within N years vs dying within 2N years. Like, if something would increase one's chances of dieing within 2N years by some quantity, but decrease one's chances of dieing withing N years by some other quantity, at what values would people make or not make that choice? (or, in the other direction).

Depending on how that works out, maybe that would mean that this isn't a great foundation for translating between "how much do they value this (in dollars), at their current income level" and "how much do they value this (in some other unit which is hopefully more natural in some sense)".

Is there something else that would be a better basis?

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#53

Post by renewiltord »

morelisp wrote: post #51
renewiltord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. It's not The Market™ or The System™. It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone except to their parents, who have no means to provide commensurate to the child's value to them. The blunt truth is that arbitrary lives are probably nearly valueless and certainly worth less than $1000. I have tested this hypothesis by describing GiveWell's mathematics to people at varying stages bef…

I live nude in a barrel by a river, all I do is trade cryptocurrency on my phone collecting over 8 figures annually, and everything I don't spend on potatoes I donate to GiveWell. How could I save more lives?

Presumably by spending less time on HN and more time on your crypto trading. I kid I kid. You are an inspiration to us all.

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#54

Post by Triv888 »

kensai wrote: post #16

It just happened with QuantumScape allegedly because a speculator posted a negative opinion on Seeking Alpha. After the 40% drop in one day, litigation law offices jumped in.

I was wondering why it was dropping so much 2 days in a row... it went back up a bit today

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#55

Post by naniwaduni »

morelisp wrote: post #51
renewiltord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. It's not The Market™ or The System™. It turns out starving kids in Africa are of no value to anyone except to their parents, who have no means to provide commensurate to the child's value to them. The blunt truth is that arbitrary lives are probably nearly valueless and certainly worth less than $1000. I have tested this hypothesis by describing GiveWell's mathematics to people at varying stages bef…

I live nude in a barrel by a river, all I do is trade cryptocurrency on my phone collecting over 8 figures annually, and everything I don't spend on potatoes I donate to GiveWell. How could I save more lives?

If you wore clothes, you would probably increase your lifetime earnings by extending your useful lifetime by reduced risk of malnutrition, thus directing more money toward life-saving!

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#56

Post by f430 »

kensai wrote: post #16

It just happened with QuantumScape allegedly because a speculator posted a negative opinion on Seeking Alpha. After the 40% drop in one day, litigation law offices jumped in.

as soon as I saw "key advance in solid state batteries" I knew immediately it raises red alarms because to execute a monopoly move in this sector, you absolutely need a vertically integrated corporation with a long experience of mass manufacturing, and there's only handful of conglomerates that can pull this off.

we are living in a golden age of securities fraud. We see fraudsters piggying off hot trends to sell hopes.

when the Cybertruck came out, someone raised billions and rolled a prototype down a hill to claim they were going to start shipping soon.

when cryptocurrency was hot in 2018, many companies like Kodak simply announced they were working with blockchain or cryptocurrency and saw immediate surge in stock prices.

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#57

Post by tomxor »

tynpeddler wrote: post #9
mwnivek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to Levine's piece: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-05/dystop...

A securities fraud lawsuit against a company because the work environment is toxic reminds me of the movie Unforgiven. For those unaware, the movie starts with a cowboy disfiguring a prostitute with a knife because she laughed at him. After the incident, the guy who manages the brothel is financially compensated since he had invested money in bringing the prostitute to his place of business, money which he will presu…

Given this type of scenario, it feels like the opposite should happen: Investors should be blocked from recovering losses and victims should be compensated.

That's a far better preventative measure.. to incentivise investors to be responsible in what they invest in rather than "just letting shit happen" and reclaiming money if necessary because it's easier. If harm comes to people due to their investment, they only get whatever is left over after victims are compensated.

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#58

Post by mdoms »

labster wrote: post #41

I was just thinking, maybe we should privatize the police force. And then when the police kill or maim another unarmed black man, we can sue them for securities fraud, for not providing the promised level safety of law enforcement. It sounds like a lot more justice than we're getting now.

Only for black men?

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#59

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomxor wrote: post #57
tynpeddler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A securities fraud lawsuit against a company because the work environment is toxic reminds me of the movie Unforgiven. For those unaware, the movie starts with a cowboy disfiguring a prostitute with a knife because she laughed at him. After the incident, the guy who manages the brothel is financially compensated since he had invested money in bringing the prostitute to his place of business, money which he will presu…

Given this type of scenario, it feels like the opposite should happen: Investors should be blocked from recovering losses and victims should be compensated. That's a far better preventative measure.. to incentivise investors to be responsible in what they invest in rather than "just letting shit happen" and reclaiming money if necessary because it's easier. If harm comes to people due to their investment, they only g…

> it feels like the opposite should happen: Investors should be blocked from recovering losses and victims should be compensated

This kneecaps the investor-lawsuit mechanism by removing the incentive to discover and pursue problems.

Do we have precedent for employee lawsuits citing shareholder litigation to burnish their case?

Re: Is Everything Securities Fraud?

#60

Post by Spinnaker_ »

notional wrote: post #11
titanomachy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... is a good point. Actually, suing a company for securities fraud seems kind of strange when you put it that way. How could a shareholder derive net benefit from suing a company for a share of the assets they already own? Unless they've already sold the shares and they're suing to try and recover their loss? Is that allowed?

Do you still have to be a share holder when you sue? Or can it play out like, I own xx shares in Y Corp. Y Corp does something bad and share price goes down, I sell my stake and sue Y Corp for securities fraud for making my shares go down during the time period I owned them?

Yes, that's how it works, except you would rarely sue yourself.

I work for a hedge fund. Every year we send a list of all our transactions to a company. They recover money on our behalf from any legal action that may happen.

These things take a long time though. We are still getting payouts from stuff that happened in 2014.

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