The trick is to acknowledge the market as the main mechanism at play, and have the sense to work around the margins. When the tinkerers get too enthusiastic, they tend to do more harm than good.
I think you're both right. Those were great opportunities, but the proportion of such opportunities which are made available to retail traders has greatly diminished over time.
There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.
"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.
I suspect that the reason those "newer" companies were able to have the majority of their gains reaped pre-IPO was that during that time period, it was easy to acquire capital from investors without resorting to public market IPOs, where as the era of google and apple have not got the same level of private investment.
And i think it has to do with low interest rates. During the google early years, it is difficult to obtain low-cost loans (for private investors that is). Therefore, public markets look like an easier path for companies to raise money.
The "newer" companies in your list are mostly post-GFC, during a period of ultra-low interest rate. This makes money easy for private investors to obtain, and so companies have an easier time getting funding from those private sources. The IPO is realistically not a funding mechanism, but an exit mechanism for those early private investors.
If you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil's work, I wonder whether this phenomenon might be related. Kurzweil notes that better technology begets better technology in a self-reinforcing and ever-accelerating cycle of technological advancement. His thesis implies rapidly evolving capital requirements. Massive amounts of nimble private capital, secure in the hands of highly competent people with relevant domain expertise, may well be an important precondition for continual acceleration.
Every study I've read that supports the "cheap solar" thesis assumes sunny days in normal temperatures, and never includes enough storage to maintain consistent output overnight (after sunny days in normal temperatures, let alone bad days).
In other words, they count on non-solar backup... which not only makes solar more expensive, but basically redundant.
Until Solar+storage is the cheapest form of energy while delivering its promised output at 4AM after a cloudy day in freezing temperatures, the "solar is cheap" stuff is simply dishonest.
That is true. We should not discount the drawbacks of solar and wind, nor their upsides. When they are working, they are producing energy almost completely for free. The advantage of free energy, even when intermittent, is so great that we should spend considerable effort trying to make the grid use it as much as possible.
Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms.
Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO.
Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say.
Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0]
Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent!
While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive!
While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government.
In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other.
The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated.
Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity.
I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like.
Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
Which countries do you have in mind? In my experience, most parliamentary democracies have rules which actually exacerbate the issue. See for example the elections last year in Germany, where the CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority in the Bundestag with less than 45% of the popular vote!
I thought "Dominate or be dominated" was the problem you saw in democracy?
Well, then I guess Germany's example is not too bad.
"CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority" ... well, no. That's not how it works at all.
CDU and SPD did not win a majority together, since they were opponents in the election, and fought tooth and nail over, for example, immigration issues. They did not, at all, campaign together.
They both failed to win over half of the parliament seats. In simplified terms, they both lost. Everyone lost, if you will, because the system is not designed for anyone to easily win over half of the parliament seats.
That's why they had compromise and form a coalition. Thus no-one rules completely over the other and, in theory, the compromises of coalitions have a better societal outcome than the extreme views one party or the other might hold on a certain issue.
I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here. Every democracy has a system for aggregating votes to parliament seats and the transmission is never 1:1.
In this case:
Votes for parties that don’t enter the Bundestag (e.g., those below the 5 % threshold) are not counted in seat allocation, making the share of seats for CDU + SPD higher than their raw vote share. Seats are redistributed proportionally among the parties that did enter parliament.
I don't see much of a problem.
The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream. This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it. This is a scenario for winner-takes-all situations between nations, which is a much much worse outcome than even a winner-takes-all situation between political parties.
The coalition government prevents a single party from controlling the government, which is definitely a benefit, since the two parties will somewhat limit the ambitions of the other. In the areas where they agree, though, those parties (who only represent 45% of the country) are able to rule the other 55%, who don't want to be ruled by them but have very few options for relief.
> I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here.
It's not about the vote, it's about the human beings who are ruled by a government they don't want.
We can all look at a country like North Korea, where the ruler is oppressing the hell out of his people, and feel for them. We understand implicitly that it is wrong for one man (or a ruling clique) to dominate the other 99% of people who don't want to be dominated by him. We can also look at a country like apartheid South Africa, where a relatively small majority dominated the majority, and say that is wrong. As people who've been raised and indoctrinated as (small-d) democrats, it's easy to look at our systems, where a paltry 49% (or, in Germany, 54%) of the people are being dominated by the other 51% (45%), but this is merely the result of habit. There is no reason that they should be forced to live and work and be taxed by a system they dislike or even abhor. And, of course, the sense that the evolution of the state has somehow "peaked" with democracy is an expression of the most common bias of all, which is our "presentism" bias--that past progress is obvious in retrospect but future progress is impossible, undesirable, or, at best, inscrutible.
> I don't see much of a problem.
Neither did Europe in the 20s, to their great discredit.
> The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream.
Because you say so?
> This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it.
Nine of the ten countries with the highest GDP per capita have a population under ~7 million: Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps you should inform them how "frankly absurd" they've been to forego the benefits of economies of scale?
How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production.
It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
100 separate political units, each with their own version of an industry, are by their nature less economically efficient than one entity that's 100x as big.
Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity.
Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?
Luckily we don't have to figure this out from first principles, we can just look at the data. 9/10 countries with the highest GDP per capita have populations under ~7 million, and the vast majority of the top 20 do as well. This is true both in PPP and nominal dollars.
Fair market value: the price at which a thing would change hands between a willing and informed buyer and seller.
A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.
> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.
You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.
However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.
> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings
To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.
Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.
> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.
We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.
FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
Talk about market cap, especially meme stock maket cap, reminds me of that old XKCD comic on extrapolation. Market cap is what you get when you extrapolate the fair market value for the 1% of a company's shares currently on the market all the way out to 100%. But demand doesn't work that way - it doesn't scale linearly.
> The ice seem to have roughly the same priorities and roughly the same methodology as the SA had in the beginning.
How do you figure?
> I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying.
Media coverage of the Pretti shooting has been awful. All seem happy to show the slow-mo recap of the officer disarming Pretti, but none show him reaching for/toward his holster in the moment before being shot (0:12-13 in this video https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/1qm4b0v/slow_m...). If the officer heard the "he's got a gun" callout but didn't see him be disarmed, this would obviously justify the response.
> As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
This is the reason for the second amendment. Trump and some others have seriously fumbled the messaging on this point. The issue isn't that Pretti had a gun, nor that he had a gun at the protest, but that he had a gun at a protest, obstructed law enforcement (a felony), then resisted arrest. Of course, doing so didn't mean that "he deserved it". Fighting the cops while armed with a firearm was extremely reckless and stupid, but that alone doesn't justify a shooting. Most attacks from the left are (whether honestly or disingenuously) based on only these facts, but ignore the most pertinent fact in play here, which is that cops have rights, too. Among these is the right to defend themselves. If a police officer perceives an imminent threat of lethal force, they are permitted by law to use lethal force in self defense. That is why it was so reckless for Pretti to fight the cops--because it is extremely easy, when fighting someone who is armed with a lethal weapon, to reasonably perceive an imminent threat of lethal force. Pair this with Pretti's aforementioned rapid movement of his right hand toward his hip in the moment before the first shot, and it is not a stretch at all to see this shooting as a justifiable use of force. Tragic, of course, but still legally justified.
> Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about?
2A supporters often spitball about scenarios that might justify a revolution. I've never heard anyone suggest that they would fight for protestors' imagined right to fight cops with total immunity from consequences.
And the big European nations own ~ 23% of US debt.
This is not a one-sided contest.
Oddly, it does feel like trump is what europe needed to wake up from its slumber. With new AI / startup funding, the rebuild of their military, and opening up to china this could be the making of the EU into a true superpower. About time.
1) This wasn't a poll of all Europeans, only of ten EU countries polled (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Estonia, Portugal, Hungary and Bulgaria).
2) Participants weren't asked if we were any ally, they were asked if we were "an ally - that shares our interests and values". Shared values have little to do with what an "ally" means in the common parlance.
3) Excluding the full context could give you a false idea of how they view us. The full results:
16% - An ally—that shares our interests and values
51% - A necessary partner—with which we must strategically cooperate
13% - Don't know or refuse to answer
12% - A rival—with which we need to compete
8% - An adversary—with which we are in conflict
4) The idea that Europeans don't see us as allies is belied by their answer to the question "At the current time, would you support or oppose developing an alternative European nuclear deterrent that does not rely on the US". Only 16% strongly supported it. So they don't "see us as an ally", but they're happy to rely on us as their strategic bulwark? Hmm.
5) In my mind, the only question that actually matters on this survey, w/ regards to the opinions of our European friends, was this one: "If your country was forced to choose between being a part of an American or a Chinese bloc of countries, which would you prefer it to end up in?" Sadly, European responses to that question were not provided! If anyone delves into the underlying data, I'd love to know the results for this question.
Yeah, sorry. You can spin it any way you want. The fact is the glitter has rubbed off the American wagon, and Europeans are starting to see a pretty ugly underskirt. If you don't think bullying Greenland is a net negative, I've got a small banana republic to sell you.
The question isn't "Is bullying Greenland a net negative"... that's too obvious and empty to get clicks. The spin here is in taking a survey designed to produce a specific result, and then using it as some kind of anchor to express a feeling that may or may not have a basis in reality. Is Trump a terrible president? Yep. Is that leading to the death of the EU/US alliance? No, and this poll is a poor excuse for evidence of that.
He's clearly alluding the fact that the Biden admin did far worse.
The great sin of Trump's FCC was a single ill-advised tweet by FCC chair Brendan Carr... in which he threatened to enforce the law as written. For comparison, the Biden admin's FBI actively engaged in purely political media manipulation in service of the sitting president's campaign, such as when they lied to Facebook (and presumably others) to "prebunk" the Hunter's Laptop story, which directly lead to a near-total ban of a factual news story.
He wrote that the FCC wasn't a government agency. Hard to argue that is correct, or that their political pursuit of one of trump's "enemies" isn't actually political.
It was more that a tweet no, but an interview with Benny johnson, an avowed political figure paid by Russians at one point?
> He wrote that the FCC wasn't a government agency. Hard to argue that is correct
You're harping on a detail that hardly matters in order to avoid the broader point, which is rather silly. The FCC is a government agency. Brendan Carr made an ill-advised tweet, which doesn't hold a candle to Biden's use of the FBI to spread misinformation and induce censorship for political purposes.
> or that their political pursuit of one of trump's "enemies" isn't actually political.
Of course it's political. It's political when both sides do it.
When you're ignoring the comment talking about people arrested for criticizing a political pundit to argue about minutae and claiming "both sides are bad", yes.
You got me. I am avoiding the comment about the Perry County Police Department, as it's so incredibly damaging to my worldview. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great to bear.
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