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What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

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Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#361

Post by BeetleB »

rayiner wrote: post #358
BeetleB wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immigrants make their new country more like their home country This is a more refined concern than "While slowly turning the country into Bangladesh." There's no reason to believe that Bangladesh will dominate the influx. We're talking changes in immigration policy to make up for a domestic population decline. It would be naive to think that the only change would be "Let's just take more people without constraints.…

> The US has in the past put restrictions on who can immigrate, and continues to have restrictions (whatever moral judgement is attached to them is left for the reader). You can restrict the countries they come from. You can restrict the education levels. You can restrict the number entering. You can restrict how long they need to be here before they can vote. And so on. That won't help, and possibly makes things wor…

We're both speaking in the abstract. It could pan out as you state, and there are reasons to think it would. It could pan out differently, and there are plenty of reasons to think so.

Fear can't be a motivator for (lack of) change.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#362

Post by eftychis »

bagels wrote: post #250
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of HN adjacent engineers are going to have a rude shock over the next few years as there are several pressures working against them. The first is that companies that have been trading debt for growth are not sustainable in a high interest rate environment. The second is that the shift to working from home has meant that employing remote teams, be they in other areas of the states or overseas has become…

I completely agree with this. COVID + everyone refusing to go back to the office means nobody needs to be in a specific place anymore. I've changed my hiring strategy to cultivate talent elsewhere and pay 1/3 of what is paid in the US.

Having worked in a multi-area/multi-time-zoned company and teams, and having tried to coordinate all these along with the political games: it is a different beast to be remote some times a week and a different beast to try to coordinate with your own team spread around the world.

P.S. Hope your strategy works, and depends on what you do. I'd say a startup that tries to innovate at ridiculous leap speeds needs proximity and an office -- and that comes from me, who is 100% against the "work from the office or else" mandates...

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#363

Post by fredophile »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #336
fredophile wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few reasons some companies prefer buybacks over dividends. Probably the smallest reason is that buybacks can save investors money on their taxes. A much bigger reason is that buybacks are viewed as one time events. When a company starts paying a dividend investors often expect that dividend to be paid regularly. If the company chooses to stop paying a dividend or decreases the dividend the share price dro…

I agree that a smart CEO holding options would favor to dividends but don't see how this is an argument against it. It seems that it benefits stockholders and CEOs alike. Stockholders get the same value as a dividend without the immediate taxable income, and CEOs and other option holders like employees get some of the value when their options mature.

I wasn't arguing against buybacks. I was just giving some reasons buybacks are more popular with some companies than dividends are.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#364

Post by rayiner »

BeetleB wrote: post #361
rayiner wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has in the past put restrictions on who can immigrate, and continues to have restrictions (whatever moral judgement is attached to them is left for the reader). You can restrict the countries they come from. You can restrict the education levels. You can restrict the number entering. You can restrict how long they need to be here before they can vote. And so on. That won't help, and possibly makes things wor…

We're both speaking in the abstract. It could pan out as you state, and there are reasons to think it would. It could pan out differently, and there are plenty of reasons to think so. Fear can't be a motivator for (lack of) change.

The cultural attitudes I’ve observed among high skill Asian immigrants isn’t abstract. And it’s had tangible impacts in northern Virginia, where I grew up and where there’s been a large demographic change over a short period of time. There’s also historic precedent. The cultural imprint of Italy is hard not to notice in NYC for example.

I disagree that we should “move fast and break things” when it comes to culture. If you look around the world, there are more examples of dysfunctional societies than functional ones. More ways to go astray than to be on the right path.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#365

Post by aeternum »

salawat wrote: post #259
aeternum wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by your line of reasoning, a stock split should leash a company and hold them accountable since the cost to acquire or require shares is now much less than before. We don't need the SEC, we just need to force companies to perform stock splits!

Voting shares + people active exercising and riding management like no tomorrow. Point I'm making is that you can't declare a mechanism where you gain money but must exit as equivalent to you gain money, but no effect on your position as equivalent things.

The company purchases the shares from the market so you don't have to sell.

What if a company buys back 50% of the shares and simultaneously performs a 1:2 stock split so that there are exactly the same number of shares available?

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#366

Post by llanowarelves »

miguelazo wrote: post #351
llanowarelves wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also over $4 trillion between CARES Act and the "American Rescue Plan". Do you feel Cared about and Rescued?

I wouldn’t call those true social programs, although the direct payments to taxpayers comes close. The programs you cite were designed to prop up the economy, and they mostly succeeded, albeit highly skewed towards big businesses. It accelerated trends already in place.

Yes I was just trying to come up with trillion dollar examples of programs other than the ones already provided ("Green New Deal"), because there aren't many it could be referring to afaik.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#367

Post by miguelazo »

qaq wrote: post #359
miguelazo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Wants to reconstitute the USSR”. LMAO. Ok, thanks. Here’s Putin’s propaganda: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

He literally said he wants to reclaim all lands of Russian empire not just USSR.

Laughable propaganda. Find me the video. And not the MSNBC interpretation on it. Putin didn’t even want to annex the eastern oblasts of Ukraine until very recently, after his hand was basically forced. It’s well-documented that he even told the representatives not to hold referendums on joining Russia prior to the most recent ones, when it became clear there was no other way to protect the Russian-speaking citizens there from their own country’s aggression, which killled over 10k of their civilians before February 2022.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#368

Post by [deleted] »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #335
erwincoumans wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they use hypothetical yield (of over 5%). It applies to savings accounts, that had negative interest rates... See my reply above.

Looking at your links, it says that savings are taxed at 0.01%. What am I missing here

[deleted]

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#369

Post by BeetleB »

rayiner wrote: post #364
BeetleB wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're both speaking in the abstract. It could pan out as you state, and there are reasons to think it would. It could pan out differently, and there are plenty of reasons to think so. Fear can't be a motivator for (lack of) change.

The cultural attitudes I’ve observed among high skill Asian immigrants isn’t abstract. And it’s had tangible impacts in northern Virginia, where I grew up and where there’s been a large demographic change over a short period of time. There’s also historic precedent. The cultural imprint of Italy is hard not to notice in NYC for example. I disagree that we should “move fast and break things” when it comes to culture.…

Your point is not being disputed, nor is your experience. That it can be managed is the claim, and preserving culture is important, but only to an extent. And plenty of people in the US have seen positive change due to these influxes. That something may not have worked as you desired in Virginia is merely a data point.

As to the "abstractness", I think you misunderstood. The example you've seen is merely one place, with one set of immigration rules, with a certain set of immigrants, etc. There are a lot of variables, and the majority of the search space has not been explored. That's why this is an abstract discussion.

> If you look around the world, there are more examples of dysfunctional societies than functional ones.

And in most cases, the dysfunction is not due to immigration.

> More ways to go astray than to be on the right path.

There's no right path. Only opinions on what is the desirable path.

Re: What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?

#370

Post by erwincoumans »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #335
erwincoumans wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they use hypothetical yield (of over 5%). It applies to savings accounts, that had negative interest rates... See my reply above.

Looking at your links, it says that savings are taxed at 0.01%. What am I missing here

The 0.01% is temporary/new, due to the wealth tax declared illegal by the European Supreme Court. This link explains the situation around the "Box 3" wealth tax better: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/magazine/supreme-court-net...

“In 2001, the legislature assumed that everyone could easily earn a 4% return on their assets in Box 3 – regardless of how they were invested – without taking any risk, but this has certainly not been the case since 2008. Savings rates have yielded much less interest, as have bonds, with interest rates as low as 0%. At the moment, we’re even seeing negative interest rates. But the legislature never adjusted that assumed 4% return. This resulted in a situation where, for many years, the wealth tax people paid far exceeded their actual income from wealth"

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