Live data from Hacker News

Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

bloomberg.com

411–420 of 560 posts

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#411
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not true. We don't know if we would be able to be were we at. There is also no value in this. If we owuldn't known about progress through oil and gas, who would say that we would be unable to get to the same point just a 100 years later? No own would be hurt if we would have achieved this 100 years later but healthier. It was also ignored on purpose. Oil companies knew very well, researchers knew. Apparently th…

How would we do the whole industrial revolution thing on whale oil and lumber? Whales would most certainly be extinct by now, thats for sure. 100 years later is an immense amount of extra human suffering, not to say that reaching current level would most certainly take much much longer than 100 extra years. Im sorry but this whole tirade is just delusional. Its cheaper and better to replace all use of fossil fuels wi…

Because people didn't care that oil and gas is breaking our planet 100 years ago. Or didn't knew and capitalism made the people in power very very rich very fast.

At that time we still lived and heated normally. For sure the brits destroyed a lot of their trees but you know? They could.

What do you think would have happened if we had a small population collaps at that time and HAD to consume sustainable? We would be less people for sure, but we wouldn't have killed the missing people, they would have not been created in the first place.

We created the first solar panel 1883. The first EV in 1884.

China is still using coal because they are in the same dilemma as we all are: we ignored the impact and keep the status quo. But China build a lot of coal plants for renewing aging ones and they are massivle building out solar.

So why are my neighbours not doing it? Man i talked to sooooo many people about this, are you ready? Because people don't care. Or they don't like new things. Or they don't understand why it would be better.

Yes thats the conspiricy. People can't do the math, don't care about climate change or just don't want something to change.

Everyone i know who has solar panels on the roof, a small battery and heat pump literlay saving money and would never switch back. Every single one of them.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#412

(Apologies for the bad grammar, my son was born a little over 24 hours ago. I’m choosing not to use a LLM, so you are getting the real me) Even sovereign funds (example Norway) are invested in American tech, funds, and indexes. It is interesting to think about (from the perspective of an immigrant to Norway) how I moved my life’s savings from the US to Norway. I’m now fully invested into Norway (real estate, savings,…

Realistically, as World War 2 demonstrated, Finland’s independence rests on America’s will to protect it. And after it, Norway and Sweden as well.

Strategically modifying one’s pension fund choices to prevent having sub-prime companies bundled into a possible success is not a sign of anything. The Nordic nations will attempt to stay allied to the US because survival depends on it. They are much closer to the frontier and Western Europe’s ability and desire to protect them is substantially weaker.

In the event of a fall of NATO far western countries like Spain or Portugal will likely free-ride by virtue of their geography. The Finns get no such benefit.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#413
If you do not like Elon, you can simply move your assets to a direct indexing fund, there are plenty of them at reasonable cost, including from the large brokerages.

If you believe SpaceX is overvalued or do not like the way it is being handled by the big index funds, again, use direct indexing.

akademikerpension is pretty decent fund, it is about 50/50 asset allocation, losing out by only .9% per year compare to a US equity/bond portfolio. Better than many active funds:

https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions... https://testfol.io/?s=h8azNZvMICk

You do not like the valuation ? What should a company that launches 98% of the world's non government tonnage to space (80% if you include the Chinese government) be valued at ? The only company that has figured out how to very reliably launch at a sustained and rapid pace ? Pioneered and is perfecting rocket reuseability ? The only thing we can can say with a degree of certainty is that $2T is either very overvalued or very undervalued. If you believe that space will become a huge part of our economy in the future, and believe that SpaceX will play a significant role, $2T is cheap. Dirt cheap. The only way to prosper is to be bold.

For all those who come here to say that they do not like Elon or that the valuation is ridiculous, or that SpaceX will not succeed, that is perfectly fine - you are just a few clicks away from making it happen. Sell your assets and buy a direct indexing product, simply buy the stocks you want, buy ex-US, or any other number of options you can do on your phone with a few clicks. Less clicks than it takes to virtue signal on this forum.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#414
post #350

Apologies for the naivety, but, why is SpaceX valued so high? Starlink? Are rockets really a lucrative business? Don’t get me wrong, being able to send objects up into orbit is cool, but is it $1.8T cool?

No. Space is not lucrative or profitable. The SpaceX profit story rests entirely on Starlink. Starlink has a plausible moat servicing ships at sea and extreme remote areas. The big problem for Starlink is that they are trying to grow into a shrinking TAM, as terrestrial wireless expands with ever cheaper equipment ever farther into the countryside that Starlink is counting on for their TAM. Elon's visions border on s…

> No. Space is not lucrative or profitable

Yet.

To be clear, I don't support SpaceX specifically, but the amount of resources available to us from beyond our planet are quite literally infinite, only bounded by our ability to move fast enough to get it.

Comets that routinely pass by our planet have rare-earth metals in quantities that we don't even have on the planet at all. Hell, that's where our rare earth metals came from in the first place. Getting access to 100 million tonnes of platinum could totally change how we use the metal, right now it's most effective use is probably within catalytic converters to reduce emissions from cars.

Helium-3 and Deuterium in high quantities can be used as clean fusion fuel, basically clean atomic energy.

I struggle to see how these can't be lucrative in the long term.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#415
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slavery part doesn't seem like a rational decision to me. Why are we pretending that slavery doesn't provide an immense amount of value for humanity, and that it's horrible to invest or support building out any slavery production whatsoever? Lets not do produce it ourselves, lets just instead outsource it to Africa... ___________________________________ Snide comparisons aside, I'd just say that we can accept tha…

Slavery is evil. Fossil fuels is actually still a net good for humanity. E.g. the consequences of removing access to these energy sources, would be overwhelmingly more negative for humanity right now, than the consequence of global warming. The transition is moving ahead, it just takes time, and we need more technological breakthroughs and innovation. Trying to attack production instead of solving demand, can cause s…

Oh sorry, I forgot to look at my D&D alignment charts before making my comment, I didnt realize that slavery was evil and thus impermissible. I guess there's no possible comparison to be made with other economic practices that cause massive harm to some people, but benefit others in the short term.

For the sake of argument though, what if we lived in a situation where a very large portion of our agriculture, and other vital forms of economic activity were reliant on slavery? What if there were alternatives, but they weren't quite as economically entrenched, and an overnight banning of slavery would cause an economic collapse that'd cause large scale suffering.

In this hypothetical scenario, would we say that slavery is a net good for humanity? Wouldn't it be okay for our pension funds to invest in more slave production?

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#416

I think European countries need to get serious about investing money locally. The UK is a particularly egregious example but it’s taking begging and pleading with the mansion house accord to even convince pensions to try to invest in the UK economy. Every country should make a portion of local (at least within Europe) investment a prerequisite for whatever favourable tax treatment pensions and similar products get. S…

I partially agree, but if my private pension needed to invest into the underperforming FTSE250 by law, I’d just opt out of that system and put my savings into a US/Emerging-markets index myself. I’m not patriotic enough to spaff my compound interest opportunity on a bunch of dying tobacco, oil, & mineral extraction companies to put any of it to work in the FTSE250.

I don't think regular people should have a say where their pensions are invested. It should automatically be in what's best long term for the country they live in.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#417
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they are not. The amount of military spending europe has, is already higher than russia. Russia clearly showed how incapable they are, they are not even able to present modern war technology at their freedom parade. And china we don't fight china.

we have about 30 years of catching up to do, better defense spending: 1) Saves our lives in Europe, by having access to better training and force multipliers. 2) Seeps into the economies of every country in the union through research spending. Defence is unambiguously a good thing, it becomes a problem if you put an expansionist cunthead at the helm of it.

We can discuss if a society should have a certain amount of GDP invested into defense and i'm not necessarily against it.

I would think educating people properly is good, I also think the swizz model is good in sense of everyone learns to handle a gun and can have it at home (as long as high security standards are set and its taken very serious).

It could be used as a tool to strengthen societies responsibility, communication and combined with what the THW is doing (technical help org).

But my statment is still true:

We do not have to catch up. We are absolutly capable of defending ourselfs against the current biggest threat which is Russia.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#418

If you do not like Elon, you can simply move your assets to a direct indexing fund, there are plenty of them at reasonable cost, including from the large brokerages. If you believe SpaceX is overvalued or do not like the way it is being handled by the big index funds, again, use direct indexing. akademikerpension is pretty decent fund, it is about 50/50 asset allocation, losing out by only .9% per year compare to a U…

That strategy would be a taxable event.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#419
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is pretending fossil fuels are not producing value, if they did not nobody would bother using them in the first place. The argument is about the fact that they produce relatively short term value for the person using them, at the externalized expense of polluting the atmosphere and causing long-term environmental instability and destruction for every subsequent generation for the foreseeable future. Coastal re…

I think a lot of people actually dont realize the value it gives humanity. Lots of people think we would have been better of in an alternate universe where we never discovered oil & gas. How is this short therm value for people using them? They are drivers of the most fundamental stuff in our day to day lives. Either enabling billions of people cheap efficient transport, efficient agriculture producing cheap food, ch…

If oil and gas would not exist, then liquid fuel would be produced from coal. With the latest processes the cost of production is like 80 dollars per barrel, but with processes that Germans developed during WWII it was probably like twice of that in modern money.

In alternative universe that would be cheaper due to massive scale, but the era of very cheap liquid fuel would never happen. So electrical cars on big scale will happen much earlier. And given that coal is much more evenly distributed on Earth, one can speculate that there would be much less reasons for conflicts.

Post reply on HN