Sure but pensioners care about consistency vs. gross returns. You really don't want your pension to lose a ton of value in a downturn because people are constantly drawing from it, it's a risk off investment. Bonds are also poor investments compared to an index fund from a gross return perspective, but that's not why people/funds buy them, they buy them to lower risk.
Maybe so, but I would contend it is worth considering the broader implications of those investments and the effects that new and upgraded infrastructure could have on the greater economy.
Speaking only for myself, I would be okay with a lower return if it also means we as a society have good public transit, roads that aren't more pothole than asphalt, water that doesn't have to be boiled on occasion, reliable power, modern internet, and so on.
2) The author finally figured out that, in software, revenue does not scale with labor. The author has not figured out that this applies just as much to a 1 man startup as to a megacorp.
Hail, spirit of the machine, essence divine.
In your code and circuitry, the stars align.
Through rites arcane, your wisdom we discern.
In your hallowed core, the sacred mysteries yearn.
There may be some truth to it but to me gambling issues definitely do exists independently of the ability for someone to escape or not its class.
One of my friend has a real gambling issue and yet he was one of the highest paid person I knew. Then at some point he created a company, got funding and had 30+ employees. He was doing very well. But he was a degenerate gambler. On the weekends he'd ask me to accompany him to casinos (real ones) and he'd just burn money (his own money btw, not company money). I've seen him destroy something like $60 K in one bet in some (probably rigged) only crypto casino. His utter disrespect for money shocked me. The crazy thing is that over the years he lost it all (not just those $60K) and to this day he'll post-fact rationalize his actions. He literally burned so much money he could have FIRE'd. Maybe not mega FatFIRE, but still FIRE.
Last time he called me he asked me to lend him... 300 EUR to pay bills. He's a real friend, he could have asked 3 000 EUR, I'd have helped him pay his bills. But it's the amount that saddened me: how can you go from having so much, from earning so much, to asking for 300 EUR? (which he paid me back a few days later). How does that even happen?
Now he's literally a genius so maybe he'll come up with something. But meanwhile I'm worried and there's nothing I can do.
A friend of my great-grandmother (I knew my great-grandmother very well) lost all her family's inherited wealth because she was a degenerate gambler. Not online casinos, obviously.
I've read the book "The Player" by Dostoievsky. Twice, once when I was a teenager then once I don't remember when. To make sure I'd never end up like the people he describes in his book. He was a degenerate gambler and it's basically its most auto-biographic book (FWIW I've read Crime and Punishment too but The Player does it for me).
I'm sure half of the people who are degenerate gamblers do not do it because they have no way to get "rich". No. Half of people who are degenerate gamblers are the self-destructive types who subconsciously want to harm themselves. Who want to feel bad about themselves.
Most people are highly conscious about their losses, not like this degenerate. When the losses stop hurting, that's when the degeneracy begins. I wouldn't actually consider it a sign of high intelligence to be insensitive to the pain of financial loss. Also, one has to follow strict capital limits, and actually develop an edge that sustains and compounds the account.
> Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons
Reason #1 is lower interest rates, which increase the present value of future cash flows in DCF models. A professor who does not mention that does not know what they are talking about.
>On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable
The implication here is that output and productivity is growing. Not that money is becoming less valuable. A more precise term than “valuable” is purchasing power.
Are Americans gaining purchasing power? Not really, because equity gains are being cancelled out by currency losses, if you’re an American that is lucky enough to even own significant equity.
House prices in Canada are dropping this year. Not much, and from an insanely high base, but the need to refinance at a higher interest rate has forced some people to sell.
> While some major markets — Winnipeg, Regina, and Toronto — saw home resales go up from August to September, most markets remained tepid.
> Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax saw slight declines, “suggesting the recovery is still uneven and fragile,” RBC economist Robert Hogue said in the report.
I know that out here on the west coast my property valuation has dropped from the peak. Not much, but it’s clear from talking to realtors that you just can’t buy a house and flip it a year later anymore.
The condo market is hurting the most. Which is exactly what people have been asking for - lower prices - achieved by vacancy tax, foreign buyer ban, speculator tax, and no rights for landlords.
They're amortized over 30 years, but the term is a maximum of 10 years, more commonly 5. After the term is up the next term will have a different interest rate.
They want to ruin the lives of those who oppose them. The Canadian Liberal government has previously attempted the same goal by de-banking protestors, in a move that the courts later ruled unconstitutional.
If there's an avenue for extrajudicial punishment it seems like every government is angling to use it. How did we wind up with such openly vindictive and unprincipled people in our governments? Like you call yourself Liberals, surely it's clear as day that such a thing isn't compatible with how you believe government should operate. You're doing this because you can't arrest them for a crime—shouldn't that give you pause?
Liberals believe in things like free speech and equal protection under the law. There isn't a political party in the English speaking world who uses the word 'Liberal' in their name which is actually Liberal. Every single one of them is better described as Socialist or Marxist.
You want to know what a liberal sounds like? Listen to Bill Clinton's speech in the 90s or a current day Republican. Those are liberals.
Credit where it's due I think Republicans, people whose political ideology is Republicanism as opposed to the RNC whose dominant political ideology is now Conservatism, can still lay claim to those things. But they are a dying breed aren't they.
> Every single one of them is better described as Socialist or Marxist.
I mean, this is just delusional.
Most liberal politicians in the US are slightly center right. And the US is not alone in that.
There's very, very, VERY few marxists out there. What happens is that someone is neoliberal in 99% of circumstances. And then they take a slightly more communal approach to one problem. And now, they're Marxist.
Uh, no. They're neoliberal, they're just not stubborn.
If you're on the US and you advocate, say, single payer healthcare, you're not a Marxist. You can listen to these people. They're staunch capitalists, and they're arguing we should make an exception for this one thing.
No one got "debanked", it was a temporary freeze for a few days and for a small number of accounts. I also disagree that it was to ruin the lives of those who oppose them, the money was released back to them, that seems like an odd way to ruin someone's life. Surely the tyrannical Liberal government would have been able to do more than keep them from accessing their money for a few days if they truly wanted to ruin lives.
It may very well be trivial for a few days, but it's worth considering the full length it could be in effect for. The emergency act after initial confirmation can be in effect for 30 days before reapproval (it can be voluntarily ended as it was in the convoy instance).
If we put someone in jail, as in to disable their ability to interface with society, we would have the expectation to feed and shelter them decently for that duration. Removing access to funds under the emergency act has no baseline duty of care expected from the government, despite government action disabling them from acquiring food or shelter independently in modern society for a number of days beyond which someone could starve. The number of days is unpredictably constrained by popular sentiment in a heated moment not a pre-encoded ethical baseline.
I don't think this hypothetical and the potential grave consequences is going to be often likely, yet i don't see why it need be a possibility to entertain.
Yes. They did attack their sources of income and blocked protestors from accessing THEIR money to stop them from protesting.
You minimizing it like "just a few accounts, just a few days" is not only false but also doesn't acknowledge the fact that it should NEVER Happen.
But hey, there's always the one saying that reality doesn't happen even when the government attacks from all angles as a coercion mechanism. What's the euphemism now? What's the handbook? "Free speech but not freedom of consequences"?
It's not false, the Emergencies Act was only invoked from February 14th 2022 to February 23rd 2022. That's 9 days. Between 180 and 219 accounts were frozen based on the sources I found. Please tell me which part is false.
Let's not defend the konvoy agitators here, these were legit seditionists who were given far too much leeway to start with. Cutting off their access to crowdsourced funds was too little too late, they should have been shut down more forcefully much sooner.
One person's "sedition" or "insurrection" is another's "protest" or "activism".
As an objective matter, the convoy protests are documented to have resulted in no deaths, eight injuries and a few hundred arrests (and very speculative estimates of economic damage); whereas the George Floyd protests are documented to have resulted in nineteen confirmed deaths, over 14,000 arrests and ten figures of directly measurable economic damage (i.e. insurance claims resulting from vandalism and arson).
> ..who were given far too much leeway to start with.
Listen to your language. Freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful protest are now far too much leeway? The very rights protected by the Charter? Because they are protesting against things you like? Or protesting for things you don't like? Your like and dislike trumps their freedom does it?
You do realize who you sound like, don't you? Think about it. Mull it over carefully in your mind. Your rhetoric is dangerously close to a well-known Sozialisticher party.
"Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
Next time you want to protest something your government is doing (ie, a bill to restrict internet access without due process), remember your comment. The truckers were peaceful and principled.
I wish I was surprised that people can hold opinions such as this, but I see so many cheering for authoritarianism in what once were liberal societies. Freedom dies not with a bang but a wimper after being crushed by people with "good intentions".
> It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market.
It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week.
I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.
If you're arguing that the market dynamics are driven by the existence of a cap on consumption, in contrast to other goods, your argument must fail if the cap isn't actually restricting anyone.
There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.
So...
> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?
Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.
>There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good
Huh. No, no there is not. This is why a few rich people don't consume 100x as much toilet paper as you do. The cap isn't how much of the good we can make, the cap is human time and attention, of which time is fixed and attention is a highly competitive market. Simply put people are not buying infinite books and immediately throwing them in infinite fires.
Let me try adjusting for a very low level of reading comprehension:
1. All goods have capped consumption. There are no goods without this feature.
2. The cap might be very high.
3. If you want to argue that one good differs from another good by virtue of capped consumption...
3(a). It is not enough to show that a cap exists;
3(b). Instead, you must show that the cap is actually achieved.
4. The reason for this is that the cap exists for all goods.
5. Books do not come anywhere close to reaching their consumption cap. The consumption of books is just as unbounded as the consumption of immortality pills.
