511–520 of 638 posts
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Shorts can go down to -1000% and beyond.
Not true: Depending on product and regulatory regime, for distinct trader/customer groups there may be distinct rules. And if you are buying an instrument where you can lose more than you invested, the approach maybe wrong? :-)
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The USSR's main problem was not that it was socialist or communist, but that it was Russian. Russia is run by people who are adept at coopting revolutionary movements into a corrupt, authoritarian core. When left-wing libertarians say "true Socialism has never been tried", this is (along with China) what they are referring to. The theoretical arguments against socialism (or, more specifically, centrally planned state…
I would not put empaphis on some sort of ethnological mythos to why the USSR was like it was. It is a weak argument. > Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control. Monarchies had to please the aristocracy, etc. I would say that "democracy" happens on party level not voter level. Party members are way more into the details than even the most engaged voters. You need to be at the meeti…
Think things like right-to-repair, or data centers. A lot of people want right-to-repair, but a lot of politicians think IP law is untouchable and don't want to burn political capital on a battle they know they will lose when they can just sop up donor money to strike down or water down R2R bills. Same with data centers: they're unpopular with the electorate but politicians will do the scummiest tricks in the book to try and get a data center built. Eventually these kinds of issues do get some political wins, but they're swimming uphill both ways.
The problem isn't that democracy does not happen anymore, it's that our democratically elected representatives are unwilling to yield to democracy when the people wish to overrule them. The point of representative democracy is that the representative is supposed to do things in my best interest even if I don't particularly understand all the nuts and bolts. But a lot of representatives just think they got elected king and that my voice doesn't matter the moment I exit the polling place. This is, in effect, a deliberate attempt to disengage voters.
There's an old political cartoon from the post-Brexit era that goes something like, "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane"? The obvious joke being that no, randos are not qualified to fly the plane. But at the same time, the people who bought tickets are the ones who ultimately deciding where to fly. If the pilot said, "I know you bought a ticket for Miami, but I don't like Florida weather, so we're flying to Houston", you'd be right to be pissed off. The fact that you don't know how to fly the plane is not a moral vindication of the pilot's decision to override your travel decisions. Or, in this case, the fact that party leaders can out-organize their members does not mean they should overrule them.
As for the USSR, I had written a whole explainer on the French Revolution and how it neatly mirrored the Russian one before I realized it was distracting from my main point. It's easier to say "Russia is good at resisting change and coopting economic systems".
But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves. The infighting proceeds to burn through and kill all the true believers, leaving a hollow shell of people who played the power game well enough to survive. Thermidor[0] comes, and a coalition of surviving old guard and revolutionaries enjoy the spoils of a system whose dead wood just got killed off. And Russia did this twice: first, the Bolsheviks turned Communism into a dictatorship; second, the oligarchs turned "liberal" capitalism into an aristocracy. Inferring anything about the properties of the underlying economic system from how it was coopted by Russia is useless.
[0] The French Revolutionary Calendar month that covers late July through early August. Since nobody uses that calendar anymore, "Thermidor" generally means "the moment when the revolution is coopted".
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Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings. Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).
I can't see any system where people are treated fairly (equally and able to reap benefits of their labor aka not slaves) that won't lead to inequality. People are just different, and will have different production rates.
Even if they perhaps work the same number of hours a year, Maria has more training and (maybe) some kind of rarer aptitude and as a result we have a lot more house cleaners than neurosurgeons (in america and other places there a whole bunch of other factors like who gets access to the training and so on that causes some of these imbalances, but that's a whole 'nother comment).
The people, in general, are probably considerably less happy with the idea that jk rowling the ultrarich author gets to use her money to try to pass laws taking rights away from people she doesn't like.
Look at the difference between Ellison and Musk. Ellison is probably has similar levels of power to Musk, but he (afaik) mostly uses it to buy giant yachts and annoy other fortune 500 companies, and as a result most people don't really care that he's a billionaire.
Musk, on the other hand, tries to use his power to screw with government services and publically attack minorities and so on.
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You and your broker have to be pretty damn brazen to iron grip a highly liquid stock all the ways down to -95%.
Shorts can go down to -1000% and beyond.
The risk of a stock like spaceX gapping up 10x in an instant is virtually zero.
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I would more simply define that as "wealth inequality" rather than capitalism (or more broadly, power inequality) and perhaps go on to say that the real problem is that, while you can't realistically prevent/remove all inquality, most systems do a poor job of preventing the people with more money/power from using that to consistently increase their own share.
TIL: The bad parts of a system are some other isim, the good parts are the system.
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So, the inclusion rules are basically "these are the hard limits that specify which stocks are eligible, unless someone really big and lucrative comes along, in which case it's whatever and we'll just adjust the rules to make them eligible"?
I think the rules are there are hard limits unless a multi-trillion dollar company IPOs with a significant absolute float, in which case tracking the "market" obviously includes said company.
We are now at the point where companies can game the system of indexing. Investors need to wake up to this fact and realize this is likely a paradigm shift.
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I would not put empaphis on some sort of ethnological mythos to why the USSR was like it was. It is a weak argument. > Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control. Monarchies had to please the aristocracy, etc. I would say that "democracy" happens on party level not voter level. Party members are way more into the details than even the most engaged voters. You need to be at the meeti…
In American politics at least, there is a phenomenon of political issues that happen to have high popular support but also high political opposition. I call these "antipartisan" issues; and one interesting feature of these antipartisan issues is that they tend to get politically disengaged people to actually show up and lobby their representatives like nothing else. Think things like right-to-repair, or data centers.…
Yeah this is a big problem. Essentially I feel there is to few "the child in Emporors new clothes" that can call out obvious BS.
I.e. somewhat emotional members that don't know the unspoken rules.
> But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves.
Sure. You could generalize to violent brutes should not run things if you want a nice society and they are let loose in bloody revolutions.
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History.com says: > Feudalism is a term often used to describe the social, economic and political conditions that existed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At its core, it was a system in which a landowner, or lord, granted a piece of land called a fief to a subordinate known as a vassal. In return, the vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, providing labor, military service, payments—or a mix of these. And then…
plows and mill stones and spinning wheels are excellent examples of exactly what a feudal lord owned. They owned the land, the major structures on that land, and the major implements on that land. If you wanted to use them you paid the lord in fees via goods, labor, etc. It's basically the gig economy - you will own nothing, your labor will be for his benefit, and if you want to keep participating you'll make it wort…
That being said, if we're talking about the lord owning the mill you labor at, how is that different than tesla owning the car factory you work at?