Redditors are right about the unfairness of the market

Yes, there are sustainable factors to economic growth, but that is not where the majority of it comes from, and we (the part of the world where some percentage of the population can invest into stock) have hit the point of too much growth a long time ago.

There is an entire non-profit dedicated to calculating the resource consumption of different countries, based on re-growable biological resources: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/

The entire western world is essentially consuming 2-10x as much per person as the planet can provide for that person. That consumption needs to come at the expense of somebody else, in a zero-sum game.

I'm not saying that technology has hit that hard limit per se, but many technologies are at points of diminishing returns where further advances are possible, but so expensive that they don't increase efficiency. E.g. Combustion engine efficiency, Solar Panel efficiency (price is still going down though luckily), moores law (at least in terms of clock speed, and per transistor costs die to node shrinking), crop growth rate.

The things you listed are great, but they have not been the driving factor behind growth.

Look around, does that look like a planet that got the way it is from boring sustainable growth?

Even the Habor process, has resulted in massive nitrate polution, algea blooms, and reduced biodiversity.

You're not gonna get back from consuming 4x too much, from a few percent here and there.

What I'm saying is that our current notion of economic growth and the idea that with a one time investment, you get an asymptotically infinite and indefinite return on said investment, is unsustainable and explotiative. And that we need to apply different metrics to success, than blindly aiming at growth. E.g. biodiversity, individual free time, children above the poverty line.

A more sustainable model for example for retirement saving is a PAYGO system, like germany has. Everybody receives their fair share from the resources available each year, and you don't need to worry about some burst bubble, or crash, wiping out your lives savings.

This skips the problem, again. You can trade a sheep as much as you want, between any numbers of investors. But there is some basic value to sheep, because eventually someone is able to convert the sheep into money, with effort time and process (butcher, shear, etc). Extracted Value dependent on market of derivative products, and efficiency of extraction.

A sheep can be used to produce $20 USD, and traders who never see the sheep are simply trading on speculation (how much value the sheep can be extracted for today, how much it might be extracted for tomorrow, how badly will extractors want it, etc). The traders bounce the sheep around willy-nilly but eventually the sheep has a simple answer to “why does anyone value this object in the first place?” — because it can be used to extract more wealth than it costs.

My poop can be speculatively traded infinitely as long it continues to exist. Anything can — it doesn’t matter the subject. But at some point, someone must actually want my poop for non-speculative trading it to have a value to speculate on.

The question that keeps being bypassed is: who is actually in the position to do something productive with an FB stock?

Note: I’m assuming that stocks don’t draw their value from the ether — no one wants stocks as art, at least no more than USD

Let's say before this large coffee with investment money came in, there was 25 individual coffee shops in the city. Let's call them Starbucks. Then this company comes in with economies of scale and is able to sell coffee for 10% cheaper. Their product is more consistent. But there are individual coffee shops that produce higher quality coffee, and others who produce lower quality coffee, and both are more expensive.

If this is your first time in the city, and you don't have any information from friends about the quality of random shops, your going to pick Starbucks. This is the value of a brand. And while they are still competing, everything is all good.

But 5 years later once all of those individual coffee shops have gone out of business, you're left with just Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. And they don't compete on price. Quality drops.

Each of those 25 shops were doing their own creative thing. They were trying out all sorts of innovations. Some worked, others didn't. Now we have no innovation. The big shops are conservative and move at glacial pace.

As a worker you were helping drive those innovations. You were testing stuff out. Now working at BigCo, you follow orders. You do what the machine tells you to do. If you're working for Uber, you pick people up, follow the route, and drop people off.

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Here's this question asked on quora: How much does soda cost?[0] This is in no way an authoritative source, but it's a neutral third-party that can at least end the slander that you are operating against me.

The answer they give is that it's fair to say that basically the water and sugar is free, cost is right around $0.10, and after shipping it's about a quarter. So was I wrong by 250%? No, because they don't only offer cans of soda. Most of the soda they sell is at restaurants and all they need to ship is the dry stuff. I figure the $0.10 average is right on the money.

[0]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture-3...

Facebook does something productive, but I don’t see how stocks map to that productivity. The only way I really see to take a stock and have it represent actual value, is to plug it into the stock market. But this is just trading between those trading on the potential value of the stock -- not on the value it gives to them (that is, they don't actually want the stock for any purpose but to move it -- they're middlemen).

But if you imagined no stock market existed (you remove the middlemen), then is there any reason for anyone to want stock? That is, at the end of all this stock trading, who actually wants to have an FB stock? It doesn’t appear to me to be the public, or FB itself, or any particular investor. Everyone wants to hold stock, in order to get rid of it later (earning on the arbitrage) — but no one apparently wants it in the first place (it grants no power, potential earnings, and doesn’t really represent anything meaningful AFAICT); this is why the only thing to do with a crashed stock is to wipe your ass with it -- stocks are meaningless without their backing company -- but I'm currently not finding a way to claim that stocks are meaningful even when their company exists!

Currency could be said to be in the same boat, but at least till the gold standard died, at the end of the day USD could be said to be minimally wanted by the Feds — mapping to gold — producing that base value you could further justify trading and speculating on. I suppose I don’t understand what justifies a base value for USD post-gold standard either (it was bootstrapped, and now is self sufficient? Or perhaps because we all assume the feds will always a assign value to it)

Furthermore, because there’s no one who wants a stock in the end, there seems to be no reason for the value of a stock to rise/fall based on company successful — no more reason than my trash should.

AFAICT, its just a happens-to-be — by the powers of god, luck and collective will, stocks have arbitrarily been selected to move with company performance, despite there being no real relationship between the two (the only people who want it more are people who intend to sell it to others who want it more — but you follow the chain through and you can’t find anyone who wants it for any other reason).

And I really want to be convinced “a collective fiction” is not the answer (stocks exist because stocks hold value because stocks exist. Stock value tracks company success, because company success tracks stock value, because stock value tracks company success).

Heh, hi :D

And I just realized why I didn’t get those: Bypass Paywalls Clean [0] removed the subscription nag and all the popups.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...