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Largest default in municipal bond history. I guess either memories or short or it was profitable enough for some people that a new generation wants to try again.

So I'd heard a lot about TED talks, had seen a few on video, and in considering this question, I wondered, what can the subjects be about? Here are the 25 most popular TED talks. They're supposed to 18 minutes or less. The acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design". So, some ideas I'd like to see:

Technology:
* "Avoiding "Guru Syndrome": Start with the Tenerife crash, where two 747s collided on the runway. The copilots knew something was f-cky but wouldn't tell/challenge the captain, and ended with 583 dead in a fireball as the 747s collided at takeoff speed. In programming, in business, in the workplace, one guy sometimes can be though of as knowing everything. He doesn't.

* "Listening With Humility": No matter how smart you are, and no matter how dumb your client, user or patient is, listen with humility, listen like you're trying to learn, and you can get better results.

Business:
* "Stopping Control Fraud": How to create organizational structures which are resistant to control fraud.

* "How to persuade people to give you money?": I am definitely no expert at this, but I'd like to see a discussion. I see panhandler and charities making money - what desire are they fulfilling in people? I see squeegee boys getting money - what desire are they fulfilling in their "patrons"? I see patent trolls, landlords, pharmaceutical companies, prostitutes, government contractors, lawyers: Why do people give each other money?

Finance:
* "What is money?": How do we get people to pick up the trash at zero dark thirty in freezing weather, slaughter cattle, lay pavement, build skyscrapers, go to war, with slips of paper?

* "What is MMT?": Funding the government via seignorage is an old idea that typically doesn't end well. Why is it becoming popular again?

* "What drives the economy?": I'd say it's human desire. Can it be reduced to equations? Or do you need a coherent theory of human behavior first?
 

Aerospace operates entirely on the Peter Principle these days. Everyone that could find other jobs in a hot job market have left.

Good Aerospace engineers that lead the R&D went to Automotive for the upcoming ISO26262 certification and ADAS. All that's left is a skeleton of the old American companies that are coasting on decades old engineering with more money spent on marketing. (See also IBM, Oracle).

Oh, Lordy... are you for real?

First off, you are obviously a fox news viewer, bless your tiny little brain

You, me, nobody outside of the DOJ have seen the Mueller report, get back to me after more people have read and analyzed it.

I see no reason to accept a summary written by the guy who closed out Iran Contra without any indictments (Barr)

As far as your complete lack of understanding of the multiple uses for the word Libertarian and the 1984-ish tendency of your favored new outlet to change the meaning of words... just read up on Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. Chicago School is libertarian and laissez-faire at its core, rejecting Keynesian notions of governments managing aggregate economic demand to promote growth. The Chicago School is also known for its contributions to finance theory.

First wouldn't be the only tax. Second - as opposed to our current system with the last cut being a truly massive permenant giveaway to large businesses and the 0.1% while almost nothing went to the middle class and those few breaks expire in 2024? It's not a regressive tax, it's equally applied across all purchases and functions like a sales tax except it's levied on the producers, is far easier to track, and is harder to wiggle out from than when you make the customer finally pay. It's the most common tax system used in the world and the US is the only major economic power, if not the only real country at all, without one. If you believe the government is corrupt there is no way forward, no matter what is tried it will only end in the same unaccountability and crushing of the middle and lower classes. But if we head forward sensibly, something has to change. This is going to be far worse than the industrial revolution and that killed the middle class for 80 years.

1) Here's a list of top dividend paying stocks, from Kiplinger's.

2) Here's a list of Treasury note and bill yields, from Treasury Direct.

You can see the differentials in returns. I guess 1 and 2 percent returns on stocks is superseded by the expected appreciation.

If you started buying stocks in 1987, "dollar cost averaging" with your income, you would be in a very good position today. My point is that the game has changed. The financial media used to whisper/joke about the "Greenspan Put". More recently one of the Fed Vice chairs (Stanley Fischer) said overtly that the Fed should take on a "third mandate", that of financial market stability. Today, it de facto if not de jure acts to support financial markets. It is going to stop its balance sheet runoff and interest rate increase program in response to the December stock market drops. This support has changed the nature of the game from dividends to chasing appreciation, since there the Fed is all but explicitly supporting the market. And it's not just here but also in the world's 2nd largest economy, China.

Oh and by the way, I listen to Bloomberg radio for financial market commentary most mornings. And I read The Economist for further observations.

I'm not heavily exposed to the stock market. But there are people I respect who have been, and are today, "all-in" on the stock market. And they've done quite well. I can only provide my perspective, FWIW, and YMMV. I support informed decisions.

True until 1996. At that time Berkshire Hathaway issued Class B shares which subsequently split and currently trade for $199 per share. They trade like any other similarly priced shares and have voting rights in Berkshire Hathaway like the original Class A shares but at a smaller ratio (logically).
https://www.investopedia.com/a...

There's a huge difference between writing a $3B check and not sending a $3B invoice in the first place.

Sure there is. The huge difference being that in both cases you have committed $3B to attracting a single business to the exclusion of all the other ways in which that money could be spent.

It is amazing how armchair economists who want something suddenly decide that the concept of "opportunity cost" doesn't exist and suddenly forget that the key word in the concept is "cost."The dead guy with nobel is bringing a reality bazooka.

Where is renting cheaper than owning? Seriously, citation please.

Any major city. Well, at least the ones with stupidly bad zoning laws like New York, SF, Seattle (the more expensive parts, at least), etc. In those places, buying property is a game for the rich. The upper-middle class and below either move to the suburbs or rent.

Here's some hard numbers on the price-to-rent ratio of US cities. Another site suggests any ratio over 16 means "it is typically better to rent than buy".

Cryptocurrencies are quite a bit worse than stocks. If you don't understand why this is then you need to start educating yourself.

The "long run" result is that once one company discovers that they can avoid taxes by pitting one locality against another in a bidding war, then all companies start to do that, and essentially what happens is that municipalities stop getting revenue from taxes. So they have to tax their residents instead. Everybody loses.

Not everybody loses. Life is a competition. It just is.

In a zero sum game, that would be true-- in that case it's a competition, some people do better, some do worse.

Society is, however, not a zero sum game. When companies pit community against community to get the best deal to avoid taxes, at the individual level, the company has won, but at the overall level, when all the companies do that, everybody loses.

(Unless you're a radical libertarian, and think the government is evil. Then not paying taxes is a good thing in and of itself-- schools and roads and sewers are evil socialism!--and the companies who manage to avoid taxes best are altruistic. Yay, tax avoiders!)

the rest of your post misses this point. You don't seem to understand prisoner's dilemma payout, where a company may have incentive to do X, but if all companies do X, everybody hurts.

and some of your post is simply baffling. "You can definitely limit competition if you want." The discussion is about one municipality competing against another municipality, but your comment goes on as if we were talking about governments limiting a company's competition against other companies. Restriction of trade is irrelevant here, because that's not what we're talking about.

The funny thing is, the companies themselves figured out that race-to-bottom price war is not good for themselves. I guess the public sector will need to repeat the learnin' of the private sector on their own.

It costs less than $2,000 to import a 40-foot shipping container.

There is a lot more to the cost equation than just the cost of the container. If it were just the cost of a container it would be a no brainer but there is WAY more to it than that. Total landed costs for a typical product can easily make a $100 product cost $130-170 by the time it reaches its destination. I'm a cost accountant and I've worked doing global sourcing for a living out of Mexico, China, and India.

When I ran the math in 2015, it was $1,300, making the shipping cost of a pair of men's cotton trousers from China to the dock at the US six cents.

It's a LOT more than $0.06. Here is a very incomplete list of costs off the top of my head that will be incurred in getting the product from China to its destination in the US. Not all of these apply to all products but the point is that there is far more to it than just the cost of the container on the boat.
1) Packaging and dunnage
2) Inventory holding costs
3) Cartage costs to/from ports
4) Tariffs/duties/taxes
5) Order management costs
6) Lead time costs (must order products months in advance which ties up resources)
7) Capital opportunity costs
8) Exchange rate costs
9) Transaction/accounting costs
10) Insurance
11) Engineering oversight

You know how we make clothes in China?

How? Yes. Do you know why? Because why is the more interesting question. Those products are made in China instead of the US because making clothing is a labor intensive process which means that labor costs are paramount. Labor costs in China and other even lower labor cost countries are SO much less that it is cheaper to make it there in spite of the overhead and logistics hassles. Yes some of the materials come from the US (also elsewhere) but the actual weaving and sewing that goes into making large volumes of clothing is only cost effective in very low labor cost countries.

Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet

If you actually plan on replacing most or all of the electrical production facilities and vehicles world wide without a large military taking over the world and dictating policy to every nation , I'm afraid you will be disappointed.

Not that I oppose the idea of getting rid of dependence on fossil fuels, but if you plan on producing approx 1 billion passenger cars ( and somehow forcing people to scrap the existing ones). http://www.worldometers.info/c...
Replacing nearly 900,000 power plants https://www.carbonbrief.org/ma...

Replacing 2 to 3% of the global economy https://www.investopedia.com/a...

My guess would be you are already way behind, regardless of what method you choose because you first have to convince those in control to take action on a massive scale and most of them are no where near doing that.

So IF the first preposition is correct ( and I hope it's not), there isn't much hope of going beyond that tipping point. If the chaos and wars it generates doesn't lower our carbon output , we will probably fix the problem over the coarse of 100 years or so.

it's a regressive tax. e.g. it disproportionately impacts the working class. That's why the Yellow Vests are targeting it. It's designed to shift the cost of maintaining civilization from the 1% (who receive by far the largest biggest benefit of civilization) to the working class.

The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone. Consequently, the government enacted a system of subsidies to assure there's always overproduction of food. An oversupply would normally crater the market price, so the government buys all that food at a fixed price (high enough to keep the farmers in business). Then resells the food to the public at a lower price.

That's why corn ethanol and high fructose corn syrup exist. Due to this system, the country grows more corn than it consumes. Consequently the government has to figure out things to do with the excess corn. It becomes foreign aid, feed for cattle, corn ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup. This is why those reports about beef costing us $x per pound in subsides doesn't really mean that we would save $x per pound if we ended the subsidies for cattle feed. The cost to grow that extra corn is a sunk cost. If we stopped using the excess corn for feed, that doesn't mean we get our money back. Its cost would just be distributed to other things we do with the excess corn - corn we send as foreign aid would cost us more, and ethanol and HFCS prices would go up. The way it's set up now, if farmers have a bad corn crop, all that happens is some cows go hungry instead of people going hungry (in fact those cows which can't be fed will probably be slaughtered to produce beef).

This is also why we we pay farmers not to grow anything - so their land is ready and available to be turned into cropland in case existing cropland should be decimated by disease, pestilence, or another dust bowl. If we didn't pay the farmers, they'd sell the land and it would be used to build condominiums and other things that you can't eat.

So the subsidies are basically insurance. We're paying extra to guarantee there's always an oversupply of food. We could kill the subsidies and the average price of food over time would be lower. But some years we wouldn't produce enough food to feed everyone and food prices would spike.

Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?

He never does. He just makes outrageous claims that read well to people looking to buy into some outrage he's peddling. There was one some months ago where he was complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos made each day and if you bothered to do the math, it came out to some impossible yearly figure where Amazon would need to more than double value each year for it to work out. Either the figures were completely pulled from his ass, or he grabbed something he'd read and tried to extrapolate in a completely inappropriate way.

If you stop to think about the idea that he's proposing, you'd realize it's pretty stupid. Why spend a lot of money to acquire something in order to ruin it to squeeze a little bit of profit out of it. You're better off just not spending your money on it to begin with, never mind that it makes everyone else pretty hesitant to do business with you in the future and the next buyout would be vastly more expensive simply because the sellers won't trust you. If you actually look at Eddie Lampert's net worth it's estimated to have gone down considerably since he took over Sears, so it's pretty hard to say that even if he's some nefarious vulture capitalist that he's had any success. In 2006 when Sears and K-Mart merged, he was estimated to be worth $4 billion. As of earlier this year, he was only estimated to be worth $1.6 billion. The same Forbes article indicates he was worth twice as much in 2013 when he took over as chairman of Sears.

for low income residences than with a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts the working class, including the working poor.

Seriously, in 2018 does anyone still fall for this crap? It's like when they rebranded trickle down economics as "Tax cuts for Job Creators" and left out the fact that "Job Creators" don't pay taxes when they invest in their companies...

If personal data turns out to be worthless, we're talking a shit-storm of problems for a society that's built around it.

TULIPS! Get your freshly harvested tulip bulbs here! Tulips! Only one per house, that's the price!

Link (How Much: at the peak of the market, a person could trade a single tulip for an entire estate, and, at the bottom, one tulip was the price of a common onion.)

A free market for energy does not exist. OPEC is a cartel of countries that set production levels to manipulate oil prices and control the supply.

OPEC is a cartel. But the market is less distorted than you think, at least in the US.

The US consumes about 20 million barrels/day of oil (source). Net imports are 5 million. 1/3 of imports come from OPEC countries. So OPEC is not able to exert monopolistic power.

Today's price for OPEC crude is $58.33. West Texas crude is at $53.37. Suffice it to say, any oil user in the US that has access to WTI crude is getting it. Imported crude users are likely refineries that do not have pipeline access to the domestic supply.

Once US oil exports ramp up, things might change, but for now, OPEC's price-setting ability is pretty subdued in the US.

Energy is a global market and the prices are global. Different regions have different prices because the oil is different.
https://www.investopedia.com/a...

OPEC's power is way down because they no longer control so much of the supply. The low cost of fracking has wrecked their market.
The US is now a major oil and gas producer, is still sitting on hundreds of years of coal, and has a growing renewable sector.
It's a huge diversity of supply. Maybe not complete energy independence yet, but getting there.

when I look at a dollar bill, it says "this note is legal tender for all debts, public or private".

So I'd think that if you offer to pay your coffee-shop bill with dollar bills, that's legal tender for the debt you owe then for the service. "A creditor is obligated to accept legal tender toward repayment of a debt."

Unless "closely held" means something significant? I invite you to clarify.

I don't know what you mean by "significant". However, "closely held" does have a very specific meaning. Here you go.

Aside from that, your assertion that "Corporation = partnership = people" is flawed. A closely held corporation is a partnership between individuals. Those individuals are people, but the closely held corporation is not people; it's a relationship between people.

"So Ohio, and its treasurer Josh Mandel, see embracing them as a way to signal that the state is tech-savvy and forward-thinking."

Like Orange County California, I bet
https://www.investopedia.com/a...

Just like Robert Citron, Josh is playing with other people's money. He should get smacked down fast.

Start here.

Iâ(TM)d like to short 3BTC. Where can I do that on margin?

Five ways to short bitcoin.

Free advice: If you are not an experienced investor, you are fool to short anything.

B) are you really trying to say that currencies are never are treated as investments? Really?

No, but really:
a) All currencies trend downwards in the long term, due to inflation.
b) To make money, you're relying on the difference between two currencies becoming larger over time.
c) You're relying mostly on one currency going down, not the other one going up (ie. the other one won't be worth more in the country where it's used).

Right now:
i) All cryptocurrencies are going down so the advice of any sensible person would be to switch to $, not the other way around.
ii) It's a negative feedback loop, less people using Bitcoin as a currency means it won't "recover", it will be worth less and less as time passes.

A thing can't be both an investment instrument and a working currency at the same time.

A) I am saying it's mostly going to be a working currency, however...

B) are you really trying to say that currencies are never are treated as investments? Really?

Even the USD (sort of stable) is used by people around the world as a hedge if nothing else. Just what life experience makes you think any currency cannot work for people and also be an investment at the same time? The more I think about it I am pretty sure you have the mocking direction backwards on that one. But I for one will not mock you for that deeper understanding of the workings of currency, as most people don't think about it that way...

Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation and board members of publicly traded corporations are required to do whatever it takes to increase the value of stocks or be voted out.

First of all, plenty of companies lose money without requiring their board members to be voted out. Secondly, according to Investopedia, Zuckerberg has shares with the majority of voting rights in the company, so that wouldn't really hold true, anyway.

We can end poverty today by just killing everyone that makes less than 40k a year.

In 2018, you need to earn $32,400 to be in the top 1% of income earners on the planet. https://www.investopedia.com/a... So you want to reduce the world's population to around 50 million people while advocating for the murder of roughly 7.5 billion people?

While I agree with your point, your first example of MS and github is wrong. You provided a textbook example of what is defined as goodwill in accounting. It's not an seldom used concept either; nearly every time you buy an entire company, unless it's performing very poorly, it's universally expected you're going to have to pay more than it is actually worth (based on sum of assets, income, etc.). While this may look like a "write down" in the sense it is a non-cash loss, the goodwill remains as an asset on the balance sheet. This is very different than "wasting" money (at least from an accounting sense) or a write-down where you're acknowledging the company has less valuable assets.

I always chuckle when Krugman goes to his IS-LM graphs and equations, and I think, "You really believe those describe the entire system?"

Considering he always says it does not describe the entire system, that's a rather odd thing to say if you're actually reading what he writes.

Krugman's NYT column is called "The Conscience of a Liberal." Nate Silver and Krugman had a public dispute when Silver left the NYT to form FiveThirtyEight. Silver said, about Krugman, "Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically,” Silver said in that interview."

Economic models are data fit to curves. See the 'Philips curve' and 'the breakdown of the Philips curve'. However, this data exists in the context of other systems. "All Models Are Wrong" of course, but it seems to me many economists don't appreciate the error in their models and are willing (and paid) to make grand pronouncements based on highly error-filled models. Often in support of one social narrative or another.

. The economy grows around those sources of money, which aren't geared towards addressing people's needs and wants. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved.

Except productivity has improved. The US, despite that whole "death of manufacturing" thing, is producing 3x the goods we made in the 1980s.....we're doing it with a lot less people because productivity has vastly improved, which is the one of the primary sources of that "death of manufacturing" thing.

Yes, it has since the 1980s, but it started stalling around 2005, and that is the point of curiosity. Here are other links. This is a basic, widely discussed topic.

I think going forward, there's a strong push towards socialist populism. Unless we can come up with a system that is again self-sustaining and self-organizing that allows people to create value and which fairly pays people for their labor. The view is dimming for the latter.

So, your first option is to invent a new economic system that will be highly stable because.....reasons.

No, not because 'reasons'. Because of its fairness and resistance to corruption, cronyism and favoritism. A system which is self-organizing and automatically rewards people based on their contribution would be fair; but then it could lead to vast swaths where people cannot contribute anything of value because offshore labor or machines can do it more cheaply and efficiently. That would be bad for humanitarian reasons and it can lead to social unrest.

Your second option is democratic socialism as practiced by most of Europe. Including Germany that you laud as successful in your post.

There's precisely zero reasons we can't do the latter in the US. The barrier has been the "Me Generation". And they're gonna die soon.

Don't conflate all of Europe as one.

We don't want to emulate France, Spain, Portugal. They have high unemployment and lower standards of living and more volatile economies. We're not like Norway in which we basically rely on vast oil deposits for our national wealth. Not in Europe but

A separate source, the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform, revealed a somewhat larger jump from 2014 to 2015. It concluded that gross premiums (those before subsidies) climbed by an average of 6% for the least-expensive plans on the exchange.

While a 6% uptick may sound significant, it actually looks pretty attractive in comparison to pricing trends before the healthcare law. The Commonwealth Fund, another nonpartisan research organization, studied the three-year period prior to the passage of the ACA – from 2008 to 2010 – and found that premiums on the individual market were rising by 10% or more per year nationwide.

Prices didn't skyrocket. You're either too stupid, too partisan, or too much of a fucking liar... to get that. It is clear, however, you don't have a fucking clue how insurance works in general.

the largest tranches of stock are being held by APPLE EXECUTIVES.

You are deeply clueless about all matters financial, yet you blow hard on the internet.

0.1% of Apple is owned by insiders.

The Top 5 Individual Apple Shareholders (AAPL) - all from Apple. Fuck you, you bloody moron.

the top five shareholders of Apple stock are all Apple executives.

Individual shareholders. See 0.1%, above. Bucko.

You are deeply clueless about all matters financial, yet you blow hard on the internet.

Yeah, yeah. The only problem is, the top five shareholders of Apple stock are all Apple executives.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

And nothing about your link contradicts my point: That the biggest individual beneficiaries of Apple pumping their stock price are Apple execs. And not surprisingly, they're the ones making the decisions on the buybacks (which by the way, strengthen their voting positions and enrich them greatly).

So, this all goes back to my original comment, which was a response to someone who claimed that "Apple doesn't benefit when their stock price goes up", and I explained why that was not true.

You might want to figure out what we're talking about before you jump in and beclown yourself with something you know little about.

While they may be DOWN by that much (but are not, see aftermarket) by definition "longs" have lost nothing...I bought some shares in the middle of the year but I have "lost" nothing

Nah.

Don't redefine words to fit your emotions. You could be doing 17% better right now and buy ~18.7% more TSLA stock than you own right now with the proceeds.

I'm not going to directly reply to Rei. His position is even worse given his claims about his market position in the past. So much effort spent when literally tossing money into an index fund and forgetting about it would have made him ~20% wealthier.

... as security breaches plague the company and spur questions around corporate oversight.

Because Mark is doing a bad job actually coding the security fixes? Maybe they can get another CEO to do the cyber security work. :-)

"We need Facebook's insular boardroom to make a serious commitment to addressing real risks -- reputational, regulatory, and the risk to our democracy -- that impact the company, its share owners, ...

Um... Zuckerberg is the majority (or largest) shareholder. From The Top Shareholders of Facebook:

The founder and "face" of Facebook indirectly holds around 14.18 million Class A Facebook shares in a series of funds, as of July 25, 2018. Zuckerberg also owns a whopping 441.6 million Class B shares. Control over nearly 89% of the Class B shares, gives Zuckerberg 60% voting rights in the company.

Rising tide lifts all boats. The best way to maximize tax collections is to grow the economy (as in broadly, for everybody) ... which is what Obama told O'Reilley that W succeeded with (!!).

The economics of it checks out.

https://www.investopedia.com/t...

That's not how an economy works; the yacht business provided jobs

This is the Broken Window Fallacy.

Yes, building yachts creates jobs, but so does cancer research. The difference is that the research also finds a cure for cancer.

Unless you're a very high net worth individual, you probably don't have access to the sorts of funds that charge a percentage of assets under management and even if you did you'd be better off without the professional traders. Instead you probably pay commission on trades and the financial industry is setup to get you into a trading mindset. They're always trying to get you into this or rotate out of that so that they can make extra trade commissions off of you. Warren Buffet was right when he observed that you should treat trades like an extremely scarce commodity. The example he used was of a punch card with 25 punches on it representing all of the trades that you will make in your lifetime. If you don't want to own a security for 10 years then you sure as hell don't want to own it for 10 hours or 10 minutes. If you think that's crazy then consider this. Warren Buffet defeated all challengers in his ten year charity benefit investment competition starting in 2008. How did he do it? He bought the S&P 500 Index fund and sat on it. Buffet won handily with an average 7.1% return, including the time period of the Great Recession, against a runner up of 2.2% average return for the next best actively managed portfolio. Think about that the next time an investment broker pitches you a financial product or a trade. The old adage still applies. If it sounds to good to be true it probably is.

In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.

This is misleading. The whole point of QE was to prevent a deflationary spiral in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So while it didn't lead to high inflation, it did lead to much higher inflation than we would have otherwise had.

The money was pumped into the financial sector and government. The Fed bought mortgages and government debt. I seem to recall the Fed buying some unusual loans, auto and the like, for a while.

The financial sector trades in financial and physical assets. It's the "house" for making bets on real life. There has been quite a bit of inflation in financial assets and real estate. The government, via the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) is heavily involved in real estate, financing (purchasing) nearly all new mortgages since the 2008 Financial Crisis.

There are two kinds of inflation: 1) Cost push and 2) Demand Pull (they mean what they say: cost push means costs are pushing the prices higher; demand pull means demand is pulling the prices higher). The definition of inflation is "the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising."

It does smell ridiculous that the government and central bank bailed out Wall Street for the benefit of the rest of society; that implies that Wall Street is operating for the benefit of the rest of society. I don't think that's true. The bailouts rescued the old system. The problem with the old system is that it was extractive, not productive.

The "fundamental" issues are supply [...], and manufacturing [...]

Part of the debate/angst over the claim that "Tesla is trading on its fundamentals" might be the use of an investing term of art "fundamentals" in the context of "trading" (i.e., investing) but with a non-standard definition of what the word "fundamentals" refers to. This article https://www.investopedia.com/university/stockpicking/stockpicking1.asp outlines the basics of fundamental analysis in the context of investing.

TLDR; I think that for investors, the term "fundamentals" usually refers to factors in what is known as "fundamental analysis," in which the important factors for analyzing a company involve[s] "... evaluating a security using quantitative and qualitative factors to answer questions such as: Are the company's revenues growing? Is the company actually making a profit? Can the company beat its competitors in the future? Can the company repay its debts? And ultimately: Will the company's stock be a good investment?" [from the Investopedia article]

People who question Tesla's "fundamentals" might well be questioning whether the company is actually making a profit and can beat its competitors in the future, not looking just at some factors that contribute to that overall analysis such as sourcing necessary parts and performing manufacturing.

I don't have any skin in the game; I don't invest in individual stocks nor do I play short-selling games. I'm very interested in electric vehicles in general, and Tesla in particular (as a company that is almost totally dependent on the success/long-term viability of electric vehicles). I've watched the debates over Tesla investing from the sidelines only.

• 1. A theory was correct and was investigated.
• 2. A theory was incorrect, and we wasted money investigating it.

There are actually four possible outcomes here:

• 1. A theory was correct and was investigated.
• 2. A theory was incorrect, but was investigated.
• 3. A theory was correct, but was not investigated.
• 4. A theory was incorrect, and was not investigated.

Like throwing darts, the vast majority of research will fall into the second outcome - investigated and turns out to be wrong. The few shining gems of science (first outcome) are the wheat sifted out of all the chaff via this process. In addition, outcomes two and three and inextricably linked - the less you have of the second, the more you'll get of the third, and vice versa. So decreasing funding for theories which will probably turn out to be incorrect, will increase the number of correct theories we never learn because they were never investigated (throwing the baby out with the bathwater). And trying prevent missing correct theories because we never investigated them, will inevitably lead to more incorrect theories being investigated (casting a wider net will result in catching more trash fish).

Actually, the percentage is higher, but it also includes a shockingly high percentage of people in the upper-middle class. Most people are inept at handling their own finances, and that's partially to blame on our education system. We don't teach our young how to live on their own...it should be a requirement for HS graduation.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

"...he loses the ability to set the overall direction of the company, ..."

Not so far - Musk is the largest shareholder of Tesla, which means:

A majority shareholder is often the founder of the company or, in the case of long-established businesses may be the descendants of the founder. By controlling more than half the voting interest, the majority shareholder is a key stakeholder and influencer in the business operations and strategic direction of the company. Their powers may include replacing a corporation’s officers or board of directors. A majority shareholder is more common in private companies than public companies, and not all companies have a majority shareholder.

"...he loses the ability to set the overall direction of the company, ..."

Not so far - Musk is the largest shareholder of Tesla, which means:

A majority shareholder is often the founder of the company or, in the case of long-established businesses may be the descendants of the founder. By controlling more than half the voting interest, the majority shareholder is a key stakeholder and influencer in the business operations and strategic direction of the company. Their powers may include replacing a corporation’s officers or board of directors. A majority shareholder is more common in private companies than public companies, and not all companies have a majority shareholder.

I wasn't necessarily trying to steer the discussion that way but I would prefer to see a sane single-payer system then the giant clusterfuck we currently have.

Sounds like we are on the same team then. Our current "system" is just absolutely batshit crazy and stupidly expensive with a lot of thoughtless ideology getting in the way of pragmatism and evidence.

If I could drop my current insurance and buy medicare instead I'd happily do so.

Medicare would be a step down from my current insurance but I'm luckier than most in that regard. That said, I think it would work just fine for my actual needs and those of most others and I think it would save our country a vast sum of money if done right.

In that I just want the insurance industry to go away.

Insurance is a useful thing. Don't be so hasty to throw the whole thing out - not that we realistically could. I'll be the first to agree that at least health insurance needs some massive overhauls but insurance and the industry that provides it in and of itself is not the problem. The problems exist because of the regulatory environment (or lack thereof) in which the insurance companies currently operate. They are simply doing exactly what I would expect them to do given the incentives of our current system. The Affordable Care Act was a substantial step in the right direction even if it was an imperfect one courtesy of the ludicrous politics going on in Washington.

We have the system we have because the insurance industry owns Washington DC.

I think it's more complicated than that. Yes, lobbying plays an important role but there also is the odd confluence of ideology (particularly on the political right) and power politics that gets in the way of trying something more sensible.

They pad the pockets of politicians on both sides of the aisle to make sure they get what they want - they outspend the NRA and compete with the defense industry for top "honor" in terms of lobbying spending - and the Affordable Care Act was their collection on their investment.

The defense industry isn't even in the top 10 in terms of lobbying dollars spent (they ranked 18th in 2017). The NRA isn't anywhere near the top of the list either - not even in the top 20 - their influence just is outsized to the amount they actually spend. The biggest spenders actually are drug companies by a pretty wide margin with insurance in second place just ahead of electronics manufacturing.

You live in a rarified world, filled with mostly one percenters.

You have to think globally. To be in the top 1% of income earners on the planet you need to earn only $32,400 USD per year; barely over minimum wage in some areas. Source: An Echo Dot is $50 or less, affordable by many who earn even less than $32K per year.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...
How do you figure that when they are mostly just domestic China market?

Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".

Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.

With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like a siphon becomes self sustaining. As long as there is more money coming in than leaving the game, prices should rise; vice versa for more money leaving than coming in.

But what about historic bubbles? Tulips, South Sea, etc? What prevents an item with little or no use from going to zero? Note that making people feel a certain way, no matter how silly it seems, is a use.