161–170 of 182 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Texas ruling doesn’t (as far as the coverage I’ve read) require that level of separation. Rather just selling to “the market” is enough to insulate you from fraud charges.
Do people actually direct sell stock? At least retail investors
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Texas ruling doesn’t (as far as the coverage I’ve read) require that level of separation. Rather just selling to “the market” is enough to insulate you from fraud charges.
Do people actually direct sell stock? At least retail investors
15 (or let’s say, 21yo) me would use $800k very differently than current 40yo me. 21yo me would make a beeline for the local Porsche dealership. 40yo me would not.
Why porche when you can lambo /s But really, you don't get to have $800k by buying Porsches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly wrong or ambiguous parsing, but, any employee of a billionaire also works, at least as well as any other sloppy natural communication.
Would the janitor of a company that has a share owned by a billionaire count? Surely a billionaire in this case is just a share owner.
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The third thing is just the second thing. TurboTax lobbying to avoid free tax filing is obviously rent-seeking. It might even be more accurate to call this category rent seeking through regulatory capture. Fossil fuels would have been trounced by nuclear except that they lobbied to require nuclear to internalize all of its costs (and then some) but not their own, extracting undue rents by handicapping the competition…
I was going for extreme examples to make the point, but look at any modern advertiser: their products are used to target segments of society such that we can be encouraged to either turn against one another or to make some kind of decision which is bad for us and good for whoever is doing the advertising. The perspective you're describing doesn't seem to have a way to classify this activity as unhelpful without going…
If you're stuck with a machine you don't like that shows you harmful advertising because it has no viable competitors, the problem is with the law, because it's propping up that institution or otherwise failing to enforce anti-trust laws.
If that machine exists, even though there are plenty of viable competitors that don't do that, and then you freely choose that one on purpose, it's not obvious that the company is doing anything wrong. You apparently like that kind of advertising.
The exception would be for some kind of information asymmetry, like the advertiser is lying to you and you don't find out until it's too late. In which case we're back to needing a law, in that case against false advertising.
Now I can tell why you're choosing this one, because it's a sticky one: What happens when they're lying about politics? We can't have the government enforcing a law against "lying" about political issues, because the very thing that makes them political is that people disagree and don't find the other side's evidence to be credible. We can't have whoever is in power at any given time censoring the opposition.
The solution we use for this is to put the determination in the hands of the public. The marketplace of ideas. If someone is full of crap, you prove them wrong in front of everybody, and then they lose credibility. This isn't perfect but it works pretty well in the absence of the aforementioned anti-trust problem. Because then instead of a handful of megasites that people get siloed into and fed content like livestock, you'd have a million blogs that intersect like the web. There would be no walls between sites, no way to prevent someone you're trying to mislead from hearing from the other side just because you're in with the site's operators, because none of the sites would be big enough to exercise that kind of power when the average person is getting their information from hundreds of separate sources instead of only one or two.
Sometimes companies have bad incentives. Those either get curbed by laws, or by free market competition, or... what's your alternative?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would the janitor of a company that has a share owned by a billionaire count? Surely a billionaire in this case is just a share owner.
Question does not seem to apply. What point are you trying to make or what mystery baffles you about the concept of an employee of a billionaire?
There was a recent decision out of Texas that pump and dumps are legal if you do them without directly selling stock to the victims. So I guess that according to Texas what this guy did is totally fine! [PDF] https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rmMOgPQg... or coverage from Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-21/pump-a...
Wouldn't that mean that you can have a friend do the pump, and you do the dump? Sounds like the guy in the original article did both and therefore wouldn't be saved by that Texas ruling.
How is this any different than meme stocks on WallStreetBets?
Not defending the sub but don't they have a market cap minimum for posts?
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Why porche when you can lambo /s But really, you don't get to have $800k by buying Porsches.
Lots of Porsches tend to increase in value, some older models, spectacularly so.
But 21yo me would not be stupid enough to go for a Lambo too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going for extreme examples to make the point, but look at any modern advertiser: their products are used to target segments of society such that we can be encouraged to either turn against one another or to make some kind of decision which is bad for us and good for whoever is doing the advertising. The perspective you're describing doesn't seem to have a way to classify this activity as unhelpful without going…
There are only a finite number of possibilities here. If you're stuck with a machine you don't like that shows you harmful advertising because it has no viable competitors, the problem is with the law, because it's propping up that institution or otherwise failing to enforce anti-trust laws. If that machine exists, even though there are plenty of viable competitors that don't do that, and then you freely choose that…
As for the incentive problem... Imagine that I'm a grocer and I live in a place whose ground water is being poisoned by a nearby mining operation. The mining company employees are showing up in my grocery store and expecting that they can exchange their salaries for food. But it's not in my interests to give them that food because it's going to enable them to stick around and continue poisoning my tap water. Maybe their behavior is illegal, but I can't really wait the years that it would take for the legal system to get around to doing something about it. Or maybe I live in a place where I don't trust the legal system to actually do that, I dunno.
Pardon the contrived scenario, it's just easier to talk about hazards like this if you've got characters to reference.
So I'm this grocer and my tap water is now poisonous, and there's only so much bottled water in town and I need immediate recourse which ideally doesn't involve violence. So I get together with the other people in town and we track down the entity/loan which issued the money which these miners are trying to use to buy groceries with, and... here's the answer to...
> what's your alternative?
...we disable that money for all uses except getting the hell out of town. We just collectively refuse to accept it. It would be like how nations wield sanctions against each other, except anybody can do it. It would be like, a wallet setting or something.
It's sort of like how we currently ship operating systems with a pre-populated list of certificate authorities, but maybe we could instead leave it to the user to populate that list based on who they actually trust. Except instead of the validity of SSL certificates we're talking about the validity of money. Instead of certificate authorities it would be governments or banks or publicly traded companies, or cryptocurrencies or issuers of collectible playing cards, I don't know... assets.
Being sanctioned by the masses would be a disaster for such entities, so this would create incentives against issuing money-like abstractions to people who are going to use it for evil. It's a way to get the banks to take some responsibility for their actions which does not create incentives to find things that should be illegal but aren't yet and exploit them asap.