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Honestly what would happen if the stock market didn't exist. It seems like these days the price of stock is so disconnected from lived reality that genuinely confused if it would be all that catastrophic

Well we’d go back to an era where private capital owns the world. The public would not be able to participate or benefit from the ownership of companies and share in the prosperity.

Yes, hard to imagine this crazy timeline where private capital rules the world. Totally inconceivable.

"It's not good so let's make it worse"

Cryptocurrencies everywhere.

Private capital doesn't own the U.S.?

BREAKING: Countries other than "U.S." found to be members of so-called "world"

Although I'm not sure what he's on either. Capitalists definitely own and exploit pretty much the entire world, with few exceptions.


I should of used the term "equity" instead of "capital". I meant that the worlds largest companies would no longer be able to be owned by public equity and would only be available to those in the exclusive club of private equity.

I mean the average person already barely has any participation at all, and certainly doesn't benefit from it when their money gets dumped down the toilet because of some widespread financial scams and grifts that repeatedly happen over and over again.

62% of adult Americans own stock.

Not by choice. Stocks are pushed onto Americans (as well as Europeans, and most people in the West) via their pension funds, advanced savings accounts, and sometimes even their salaries (via options). If normal savings accounts in their local credit union would offer adequate interest rates (and if paying in stocks was outlawed by their unions) stock ownership would plummet. I would be surprised if it would even exceed 2%.

And how many of those people are actively making decisions about what companies they are investing in instead of blindly putting money into a black box 401k account because they are financially punished for not doing so?

Does it matter? They could blindly buy an SP500 index and benefit greatly (as most Americans do).

It's not disconnected from reality. You just don't understand it.

If the stock market didn't exist you would have less opportunities to invest in well priced companies and people would be manipulated in investing in opaque, often ridden with accounting shenanigans things like private equity.

The more companies are public and subject to price discovery done by sophisticated players the better it is for uninformed players like normal investors but also less sophisticated informed players like pension funds.


> people would be manipulated in investing in opaque, often ridden with accounting shenanigans things

This happens even with the stock market. See every financial crisis.


Like which one? 2008 crisis was caused by reckless lending by banks as a result of silly regulation (government guaranteeing loans), implicit promise of bailouts and you could argue corruption. What does it have to do with the stock market?

It's a nice dismissing soundbite but you're just missing the broader point and real issues coming with people's money being invested in non public entities.

Besides, just because some problems also happen with solution A doesn't mean they wouldn't be worse with solution B. You are not really making a point just dismissing the idea of a public market without understanding the value of it.


I hypothesize all dividends, no share value. How would that world look

that makes no sense. companies need capital, that's why there is a stock market. dividends are paid from past earnings, never capital (earnings are only a %age of the value of the capital) and not from higher expectations of the future.

In a perfect world… reality is different, however.

Plenty of companies take on debt to pay dividends, e.g. just before going public.


growing companies generally have capital needs that exceed retained earnings, so paying dividends would by definition increase capital need.

Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!

Because one of the facets of the New World Order is treating mere mortals as guilty by default.

Might be time for "public-facing" bank accounts in the same way that people have public-facing social media accounts.

(I'd say "refuse" but I recognise you're not in a strong bargaining position here and you have to choose your battles).


This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.

What region is this in?

Yes, i was thinking just this. Having been prescribed multiple immunocompromisers, turning up my immune system sounds terrifying. There's all these supplements and things that talk about boosting your immune system and i get probably most are unrelated, i don't have the time to get a degree in immunology to find out. Zinc does well enough for me, thanks. But if any immune boost started to increase my tnf-alpha or il-23 i'd be on the long and painful road to a terrible death. Or yet another high side effect medication.

Sure you could, just don't tell them. The fast food burgers are already part soy and no one is yelling. If they replaced that with lab meat people would probably like it better.

I believe that is what adnauseum does. Fake clicking ads and things like that


What do you mean noise? American people pay 96% of them with an average cost of $1000+ per family over the last year. To the vast majority of people that's waaayyyy above the noise floor.


[flagged]


Do you really intend to make such a blanket statement? If taxes are evil then it follows that any public service (police, roads, airports, hospitals, public education, libraries, publicly funded research) is evil since they are funded by taxes.


Ok, only tarrifs.


> Taxes are evil

I've got some shocking news for you but we live in a society.


What do you mean?


Honestly, just cause it's easier if you've never done any kind of container or virtual os stuff before. It comes out of the box with windows, it's like a 3 click install and it usually "just works". Most people just want to run Linux things and don't care too much about the rest of the process


I do understand your sentiment. But also, this isn't a party


Oh my God, are you serious? I don't know how to feel about this


Yeah he says so in a Q&A episode.


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