Comment Re: Bribes (Score 1) 34
Failing that, stroke something else.
Failing that, stroke something else.
Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.
They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".
First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.
Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.
tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.
The reason for that isn't socialism, though. It's incompetence and corruption. Politics attracts the most incompetent and the most corrupt of people, always has and always will. Basically: If you're shit at everything else, you can always try making a career of telling other people what to do.
The whole point of stock markets and such is that you have hard core rational investors ensuring valuations are accurate.
In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.
The result is the two most overvalued companies in history (Tesla and SpaceX).
True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.
Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.
Hmm. Just from my own bullshit experience, if you find yourself in an empty room, you probably look to the right and then, naturally, you're moving counterclockwise.
I can read. Of course expected, that's implicit in "future" unless someone discovered clairvoyance.
So again, in other words: What do people base those expectations on when so far the company hasn't made any profit at all? In a profitable company, I can extrapolate. I can assume "with X additional cash raised, they can build Y more factories, selling Z more goods." - but for a company that is negative and is making a LOSS on every customer at the moment, growth does not equal profit, it equals more loss.
Yeah, but it's going to be quite a hunt to find an ETF that does NOT include any of the current obvious-cash-out IPOs.
But that's kinda the point. What future earnings, given that so far they have none? To make a profit, they would have to dramatically change their fees. As in: Quadruple at least. That's going to destroy the user base really quickly. And as Altavista found out: Once you are no longer synonymous with a service, you are easily replaced.
and a massive payday for early investors
That seems to be the goal of all these massive IPOs recently. For early investors to cash out before the bubble bursts.
Capitalism is all about the free market.
More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.
This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.
It's greed, pure and simple.
Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.
It makes sense that a long-lived species would take longer to develop
So then what is the point of Yoda being immensely old? Is he basically 63 in Yoda years?
I really wish that Git had stayed as a stand-alone free service for Linux developers.
It did. The authoritative upstream repository for the Linux kernel is hosted at kernel.org, not GitHub.
How can this be seen as a victory?
The "victory" is literally "pwning the libs." The thought process is, "Anything that denies them something that they want makes them weaker and us stronger." The base rallies and cheers, and meanwhile Trump and his cronies go back to extracting ungodly amounts of wealth from the entire world's resources.
If they leave them there, the next administration might be able to switch them back on and start gathering woke climate science data again.
Kinda unlikely. If you leave anything sitting under the ocean, it's going to experience significant wear and tear. If there's no budget even to monitor the status of the monitors, let alone conduct routine maintenance, they're likely to be as good as junk by the time they're switched back on.
"Time is money and money can't buy you love and I love your outfit" - T.H.U.N.D.E.R. #1