S&P is looking to repeal that rule at least for the case of SpaceX.

Nothing really wrong with a 5% withdrawal rule. In exchange for the extra risk, the investor generally gets paid more interest. But this is why such investments should be restricted to institutional and high net worth investors. Most retail investors either can't afford to give up the liquidity or will panic when there is blood in the water. These are long term investments.

Disclaimer: I worked for Citi for a couple of years, 2010-2012, before I got disgusted with their rather hidebound management.

My graduate degrees are in economics and I think the GP probably has a better understanding of how the system works than you do. Or at least he does a better job of keeping up with the news than you do.

OH resident here. I'm of two minds on this. I agree that a constitution should be a simple statement of how the government should work along with a statement of human rights. The problem in OH is that it is fairly easy to amend the constitution by popular referendum and so all kinds of silly stuff that really belongs in laws gets added to the constitution. A few years ago, as an example, a group of casino operators put forth an amendment that allowed 4 casinos in the state. The amendment specifically included the designated locations. It passed because only a simple majority vote by the citizens was required.

OTOH, that simple majority requirement also allowed a pro-choice abortion amendment to pass against the wishes of the Republican controlled state legislature. The anti-choice folks tried to get their own amendment through in a special election held just before the abortion amendment vote. Their amendment would have required a 60% vote to approve an amendment along with a requirement (IIRC) that getting it on the ballot required a certain percentage of counties to have met a strict signature requirement. I would have voted for it except that that last clause was just a sneaky attempt to derail the pro-choice amendment by giving rural counties a veto over whether it even got on the ballot. Their amendment failed the 50% voter approval requirement and the pro-choice amendment went on to pass by a 57/42 margin.

We also have a voter law initiative process. But because it is a law passed by the voters, once passed it can be amended by the heavily gerrymandered legislature. Ohio's marijuana legalization law was passed by a voter initiative over the legislature's wishes, and they have been trying to kill it by amending the law for the past couple of years.

So the bottom line is that yes, in a perfect world, the constitution would be a simple statement of rights and responsibilities, but often, a constitutional amendment is the only way that citizen majorities can impose their will on the legislature.

What you describe rarely happens. It is far more likely that the owner of the stock (or car) is lying about its current prospects and expected future profits and the short seller is simply calling them out about it.

You short sell a stock because you believe it is overvalued. And often it is. But often it isn't. No one is being abused by short selling. Short selling is just one of the normal mechanisms for discovering the value of a stock. Remember, if the short seller is wrong because the price goes up, they lose.

Why is that a problem? You still have the 50 cars. It isn't the short sellers problem that you were dumb enough to overpay for them in the 1st place. But now the market knows that your cars were not as valuable as people had assumed. And if the guy who borrowed the cars can't buy them back at the lower price he expects because they really are as valuable as you believe, he is the one who loses, not you.

All developed market economies (US, Europe, Japan, etc.) have option and futures markets for stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, and various indexes. They are used all over the world for hedging and insurance as well as for speculation. You should pick up a basic textbook on financial markets.

"There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."

-- Gerry O'Driscoll, the doorman at Abbey Road Studios

My objection to these decision systems is that they frequently use the wrong objective function. Does the patient have cancer or not? Maximizing the probability of a correct answer is the wrong objective function. If a the patient is told they have cancer and they do not, there is a cost involved, a more expensive, invasive test. If the patient is told they do not have cancer and they do, the patients life has been put at risk, a much higher cost. Is that a car full of terrorists or a wedding party? Decide not to fire at the car and it turns out to have been terrorists, a market is blown up and innocent lives taken. Fire at the car and it is a wedding party, you have likely created a new generation of terrorists. Each wrong answer has a cost that can be measured. Where the costs of a wrong answer of one decision vs the other differs substantially, the correct objective function is to minimize the cost of a wrong answer.

So you can tell the future? And you know right now today that AI is not a force multiplier that will inevitably decrease employment when it has barely been available for a year or two? The bottom line is that *you* don't know. To be fair, neither do I. But it is getting awfully old seeing post after post claiming they can foretell the future of the world and an economy as complex as ours.

Was that sentence written by an AI or have you been spending too much time in an MBA program? The problem with your comment is that it was not clear at the time if those technologies were force multipliers, to use your words. The loom example is where we get the term luddite, for example. And it likely won't be clear for several years if current AI models end up increasing employment, a cause of catastrophic unemployment, or a dead end. Predictions, as Yogi Berra observed, are hard, especially about the future.

{ Machine looms | Railroads | Electricity | Automobiles } is negative growth. We are replacing taxpayers with machines who not only dont pay taxes but they dont spend money like consumers

The problem with your claim is that it is was said about almost every new technology. But in the end those technologies created more jobs than were destroyed. At present, we simply don't know to what, if any, extent this will be true of AI. Get back to us in a couple of decades.

Just how heavily does the world rely on AI? A lot? Some? Not as much as Sam believes? Enough to cover the cost of building and running these data centers? Anybody have any real figures and citations?

A + B + C = D does not imply that if D increases, it must be because of A. Nowhere did I imply that was true. Did you pass your HS algebra class? Or are you simply unable to understand the written language?