And if they go bankrupt and you have common stock, you get your shares cancelled. That's how buying on the exchange works. If the company gets liquidated, you don't get shit.
Not relevant analogy. He said that it's wrong if it's illegal because you don't know it's really wrong unless it's made illegal. If it's not illegal it's not wrong.
Maybe the person selling you the stock uses that money to buy bonds, handing capital directly to the company or whatever.
Maybe. That can happen. Funny enough, bonds work the same way: You don't buy a bond and hold it to maturity to get that 7% in 10 years; you sell bonds to other investors. Debt is traded like stock, money changing hands that the debtor never sees. That means, yes, ShipBuilderCo issues 1000 $1000 bonds and gets $1M, promising to pay 10% in 10 years or about $1.1M to pay off the bonds; while investors pass around the bonds and money changes hands again and again, none of which ShipBuilderCo sees, and some people make/lose a lot more than $100 on $1000.
Common stock is the same way, except they don't mature and the company doesn't have to buy them back and the stock can be cancelled by filing bankruptcy and the holders have proportional voting rights. Preferred stock can't be cancelled. You can cancel bonds by filing bankruptcy, since they're debt. Obviously government bonds don't usually get cancelled.
It is your assertion, though, that brokers and traders take home not 0.030 - 1% as shown in the filings, but approximately 100%. Therefore all the money put in is taken right back out, correct?
The traders acquire assets. That means you own 100 shares of SMB at $10/share. Through a bunch of trainwreck panicking, you end up with 100 shares of SMB at $1/share. You bought those 100 shares for $1000, which somebody now has; you can sell it back, but you'll get $100 and they have $900. In any case, right now what you have is $100 of assets and the trader has $1000--either $1000 of cash money or $1000 that they invested in STH which has been pretty level and is still worth $1000. We assume here that the trader is savvy and will make or maintain wealth; for this example the trader maintains, as I don't want to bring in a whole fantasy about him trading with other people to make that $10,000 of wealth that he got roughly the same way.
In any case, you can see what happens: initially you have $1000, and he has $1000 (in SMB). You give him $1000, and he gives you $1000 (in SMB). You now have $1000, he has $1000. SMB drops like a fuckin' rock, and you now have $100 (in SMB), while he has $1000 (in cash or re-invested in something that didn't drop).
If your trader re-invests in something that does drop, well whoopdie fuckin' do. He has $100, and some other trader has $1000. That money goes somewhere. It's not going into ships, but it goes somewhere. (Touch on this in a minute)
why is the asset value of the DJIA 15 times higher today than in 1980? Where did those trillions of dollars come from, if not from investment?
Inflation. As you already observed, the exchange grows by people putting money in the exchange. There's more money. Technically, yes, the money "comes from investment" in the same way that the billions of dollars Microsoft has "comes from buying Windows". People outside bring money to you, you take it, it becomes yours. People are putting money in their 401(k), it goes into stocks and bonds, and the traders get to play with it. As demand to buy INTL or AAPL goes up (a function of more money being available and more trading occurring), the stock price increases; holders of the stock have, on paper, more money. Thus the DJIA increases, and the S&P500.
This is also interesting: If you have 1000 shares of AAPL at $6/share in the market ($6000), and two traders use $100 of capital to trade them back and forth constantly, the stock price will go up. This is significant: there's 900 million shares of AAPL in real life and the trading volume is just under 12 million average per day, so trading 1 share per 1000 is significant and reasonable. So, anyway, the stock price gets up to where they're trading 1 share back and forth for $100. Now there's 1000 shares at $100, or $100,000 instead of $6,000.
There was a Russian scientist who took that bet in 2000 and won. Are we there again? Can I bet you $1000 and win?
The charts are showing me a 0.8C movement since 1900, which doesn't seem to be correlated to anything interesting. CO2 levels are strange--I'd like to see a chart of industrial CO2 output and the INTEGRAL of CO2 output (i.e. total CO2 output since baseline), because warming would tend to make CO2 less soluble and thus CO2 would emit from the oceans (or dissolve less). That means that CO2 output might not have an impact immediately because it gets dissolved; then it suddenly comes back into the atmosphere as it warms, creating an anomaly that doesn't line up. Or it could mean that sunspots cause the earth to warm, driving more CO2 into the earth, creating a pretty graph that correlates CO2 ppm to temperature.
All kinds of funny shit. Given the rate at which we burn fuel, and the massive fluctuations (including trends that are solidly and disturbingly down), a graph of industrial output would be interesting. Since we can't scrub CO2 out of the air except by ocean absorption, how in the hell do we actually go down in global temperature so solidly as around 1900-1910, 1940-1950, 1960-1968, etc? How did the Great Depression signal a massive increase in global temperature, when the economic climate would indicate a slowing of industry and reduction of output (CO2, thermal energy, etc.)?
Actual human *activity* is actually of interest to me. All I hear is a calling out of CO2 numbers and "Man it was hot this year". The funny thing is the fluctuation is so small that nobody should be able to notice it--the limit of human hearing is 1dB but you can subconsciously respond to differences in volume of as low as 0.2dB (louder sounds better); while 1 degree C is 1/100 of the temperature difference in the liquid phase of water, and Farenheit is just arbitrary shite, it stands to reason that a fluctuation of 0.2 degrees shouldn't be causing "Man it's hot this year, last year wasn't so damn bad!"
Overall to me I've seen normal temperature--when I was sent home in second grade due to an in-classroom temperature of 102F and an outside temperature of like 105F, it was uh... 1990. In 2011 when the temperature hit 106F people were like... damn, that was a hot day. It seems to me that there were more sustained hot days in the summer when I was a kid, but I probably more just remember hot summers because they were hot; more likely it went up and down and I didn't leave my house enough to care. These days I wonder why my summer's so cold because it hasn't been consistently above 98F all the fucking time.
So yeah. The science, the numbers, they're telling me 0.8C degrees in 100 years should be panicking me, and folks are telling me wait another decade and see how I like the heat. The real-life environment, it's like, I don't notice anything really spectacular, and I wonder why it doesn't snow (we had a blizzard 3 feet of snow in 1995 and 1998, and also in 2011... other than that, once in a while we get a few inches of snow; most winters are unspectacular) and why it's not extremely hot (it's been extremely hot a few times, I expect extremely hot in the summer). And then people waive the "cause" of this only-noticeable-on-paper non-issue in my face, and I'm like, "... so there's correlations both ways, an increase in temperature will cause this and you're telling me this will cause an increase in temperature... it doesn't seem to line up with human activity, but you're telling me this is human-caused. Are you sure?" and people point and laugh and go "U SO DUM!" like they heard it on TV and it must be true.
Well, you're wrong. When a company files bankruptcy--liquidation or restructuring--they cancel common stock. You buy common stock on the exchange, so you don't get a payout. Preferred stock gets a pay-out, which is what executives get. If the company is bought out (merger), you get paid for their shares and then immediately use the pay-out to buy shares in the purchasing company (if they're on the exchange; otherwise you just get a pay-out).
The funny part is we're in a cooling trend, and the "Carbon Dioxide" explanation was "Global Warming" because of "The Greenhouse Effect". Now that it's not getting hot, it's "Climate Change" but we keep the same explanation and everyone treats it like the same guy with a new haircut and we all know all about the dude. Makes for hilarious stupidity.
Well, kind of. A change in orbit caused this before; but that's not what's happening now. What's happening now is sunspots, hence why we've been peaking over the U curve for the past decade (no real warming trend for 15 years!) and in the past 4 years it's been getting colder: sunspots are responsible for global cooling and global dimming (yes, those are real things; yes, I'm talking about a different global cooling than the 1970s ass-on-head clownshoes stupidity).
Well, I'm accounting for 'stock' as an asset, so at transaction time there's no change. The position that your money moves into the trading market is valid; it's the rest of the implications that I don't like (i.e. that your money goes into funding various companies).
However, each time money is added to the trading market, it goes to one thing: Allowing traders to trade more slips of paper (or digital references to slips of paper) (okay, at your broker, there are physical slips of paper and ownership is accounted for; you're essentially trading real slips of paper with a broker warehousing them, mailing them in and out as necessary). They don't go into building more warehouses, bridges, or roads; they go into economic rent, into investment bankers who trade on the market to take more of your money into their own pockets.
Essentially, you become poorer, and they become richer. The money moves up, out of your retirement savings and your bank accounts and into Warren Buffet's. The thinking that you put $5000 into the market and that's $5000 of new economic activity is complete insanity. It's $5000 of "I have a slip of paper that I hope is going to be worth $5001 soon so I can get my $5000 back plus money I didn't have before!" That $5000 is being passed around by other people trying to do the same thing. The only economic activity here is mouse clicks and screaming on the floor of the NYSE while flailing your arms wildly.
I keep seeing people come online talking about how they're so noble and good and know how to vote with their dollars. There was a dude talking about how he doesn't invest "to make money", but rather to "support companies he likes". He buys stock in companies he thinks have good ideas or good ethics "to support them". That's not how that works; you're supporting Goldman Sachs. I thought like that briefly and refused to invest in Goldman Sachs, but the fridge logic caught up with me a couple months in and I was like... oh, duh. I still didn't do it; the original prompting was an investment fund run by Goldman Sachs available on my 401(k), and once I worked out what was going on it was clear that both my original understanding of the situation was wrong AND Goldman Sachs was actually running (thus profiting from money invested in) the fund, so the actual action didn't change but the reasoning did.
(This is many angles at once: Goldman Sachs directly makes money from investment funds run by Goldman Sachs. They also have general strategic trading operations, so your money in the market is accessible to Goldman Sachs traders who use it to rob little old ladies' bank accounts. And so on. Multiple mechanisms.)
IF someone sells one stock to buy another, there's no change in the available capital - it just moves from one person to another.
However, if someone puts 12% of their paycheck into the capital market as opposed to spending it, that's money being newly added to the capital pool.
Capital is money available for building stores, semiconductor fabs, ships, etc.
WRONG. As I said, the IPO (or issuing new stock) is a business selling its own stock, money flowing into the business. Every other trade is simply money and stock changing hands between security traders.
Let's say Facebook IPOs in, and now a trader holds $100 of Facebook stock. He sells that $100 to you. You don't put $100 into the market; instead, $100 leaves your pocket and goes to his pocket, and you get a $100 of Facebook stock. Now that stock loses value as the share price drops, and now is worth $50; no new capital has been added to the pool, it's all stock. You bail out and sell, $50 leaves his pocket and comes to you, you now have $50 and he has $50 Facebook stock. The stock doubles! You think it's a good buy (you're really stupid) (this is how the market actually works), you give him $100, he gives you $100 facebook stock.
So in the end, there's no change in the market--there's still X shares of Facebook stock, though it's worth $50 or $100. The trader, since meeting you, has managed to get $150 into his pocket. You have $150 less in your pocket, but $100 of Facebook stock, so you're down $50 on paper. He's up $50 because he started with $100 of Facebook stock and now has $150 of cash money. Notice that this comes out to zero.
When Facebook IPOs, before all this, they come with $100 of Facebook stock that's not in the market and bring it into the market. They just create that out of nowhere. It's imagined into existence. Then some trader gives them $100, so Facebook is $100 richer. The end goal is for the trader to make you poorer by getting you to buy Facebook stock when it's expensive and then panic and sell it when it loses value. To simplify, the trader hopes to get $100 of Facebook stock and use it to repeatedly pump multiple $100 of USD out of you, in $20 or $50 increments give or take.
Despite what's being told to pawns who don't know about financial markets, most of the money in the market is that 12% that ordinary people save, mostly
buy and hold which means their buys are adding to the capital market, not moving it around.
Untrue. The money goes into funds, where it is moved around as above in an effort to derive money from idiot traders who don't know what the fuck they're doing.
> The funds manager skims 1% regardless, so doesn't care much about you...
> $250 of his dollars go into my pocket, and I give him $50 worth of stock.
Not too good at percentages for someone who thinks he knows investing, are you? The management company gets 1% you said,
(0.030% for some index funds), and that 1% is most of it. Have you noticed that if the management costs are 1%, that means 99% is
invested is capital assets, in producing stuff?
You're playing quotes out of context. The money put into the fund is used to maintain a certain distribution of stocks and bonds and other assets, as declared by the fund manager. When market prices change, the fund manager buys and sells stock to adjust your holdings appropriately. That means when you dump money into the fund, it could just necessarily go into buying more stock that's about to become worth less, then get sold off--if other holdings lose value as well, for example, and thus they must be topped up by selling off that holding. Hence $250 of a $5000 investment drops to $50 of value, then some (all?) of that portion of that holding gets sold to rebalance the porfolio. Funds manager continues to skim money off the top regardless, which is less than that measurable loss.
He's obviously an international terrorist. Like that Khaddafi guy, we had to shoot him in the head immediately. Did you see him? He was even trying to trade gold for oil!
Heck, the US government is at the point that they need to effectively rob everyone by "printing" money and thereby devalue the worth of all USD, as they cannot now borrow enough to keep their fiat-currency Ponzi scheme afloat, and even running the money presses full speed won't hold off the crash of the USD much longer.
No the problem is they lowered the transaction tax on large purchases. Now instead of a $500,000 house being $150,000 to seller, $100,000 to bank, $250,000 to the Fed, it's $350,000 to seller, $100,000 to bank, $50,000 to the Fed. With QE3, federal interest rates are non-existent or even negative. Banks are offering low, low interest rates to encourage purchasing home that cost roughly the same, but lock you into the cost; the seller gets more of that chunk due to higher sale prices producing the same total purchase price, and the bank gets the same since they keep roughly the same marginal interest. The buyer doesn't get to evade most of that price by paying extra into the debt early--rather than potentially paying $200,000 on a $150,000 sale-price house (i.e. by getting a second job for 18 months and paying $1000 extra in), the same strategy will see you paying $400,000 even if you're loading everything you got into your debt. This is the same house that costs $500,000 in either case if you only make the minimum monthly payment.
It was Goldman Sachs, and they've gotten the conservatives and the liberals both to believe it was Freddie Mae and Fanny Mac. Sachs invented the Consolidated Debt Object, a way to sell off a package of toxic loans to other banks and convince them it's good for them. The explanation was that you get 10,000 loans and some subset are terrible, risky, and going to default and cost you money; but because the others are together lucrative, the overall is a net-gain. Thus Sachs invented a scheme to give consumers loans they can't handle, take all their money, then dump the impending doom and financial costs onto another bank (said bank pays off the debt, becomes the new creditor and tries to get that money plus interest back from the debtor).
The best part? Goldman Sachs had this pitch, their front-man is going to Fanny and Freddie and Bank of America like, "Well these are actually high-value packages with a few bad loans, but mostly high-value debt to deliver an overall high profit margin." Then, he goes back into the board room like, "Oh, yeah. These are steaming sacks of dog shit, but they bought it!" Steaming sack of dog shit. Really. High-value.
It's not gambling; it's a game that can be odds-controlled, that can be read and understood and won on skill. It's full of people who think it's A) gambling; or B) a matter of betting on good, strong companies; or C) a matter of buying into the S&P index and watching it grow. Diversification is talked about a lot--diversify your portfolio. Okay, buy the S&P 500 index, instant diversification. Then you realize the index operates exactly like an individual security, meaning "diversification" is a ridiculous buzzword.
Stock market trading is a matter of sentiment and perceived value. That sentiment moves in highly predictable ways.
Bitcoin exchanges do PRECISELY the same things that the "evil" Wall Street firms do. (Most of Wall St. is simply your mom's retirement savings being put to use building stores and such to earn her enough to retire.)
You show complete ignorance in how the securities market works. Allow me to enlighten you.
When a company IPOs, they offer stock for sale. This is no different than any other trade, except that the owner is the particular company and thus purchase of stock from them actually funds the company. When Apple IPOed, it didn't suddenly appearify 1 billion shares of AAPL; Apple went to a big broker and said, "We're putting 1 billion shares on the market, sell them to people" and then pumped the stock price with hype. Didn't get much IIRC, unlike Groupon and Facebook; but they always pump up the price that way. The sale money goes to Apple.
From then on, aside from issuing new stock or buying back stock, the stock price and stock trades have zero impact on the company. Purchases in stock (i.e. buying another company by trading your company's stock) can treat it like another currency.
That means when you buy/sell, nothing happens to the company. ZBoards Inc. doesn't get money when you buy 1,000 shares ZBDZ to build skateboards, and have it taken away when you pull it out. Somebody sells you 1,000 ZBDZ because they don't think there's much value in it and there's too much risk to try to squeeze the peak, or they're trying to get out on the downward spiral, or it's collapsed and you're savvy and know this is a good time to buy and you're soaking them. ZBDZ doesn't care.
Old peoples' retirement funds work the same way, almost. The funds manager skims 1% regardless, so doesn't care much about you. On the other hand, they're required to buy stock--so when a big Wall Street trader wants to unload some overvalued stock that's about to tank, and some 55 year old pumps another $5,000 from his paycheck into his fund that buys that stock as 5% of its portfolio, $250 of his dollars go into a stock that's about to be worth $50. Or, not really; $250 of his dollars go into my pocket, and I give him $50 worth of stock.
So, no, your mom's retirement savings aren't being used to build stores and such. They're floating in a fund for a funds manager to skim some of her money off the top, and acting as a liquidity source for robber barons to buy from (as the price starts to climb and your fund needs to sell to rebalance--at the worst time) and sell to (as the price starts to drop or you deposit money in and your fund needs to buy more). They're being used to make her poor and make investment bankers rich.
Incidentally, I've probably stolen some of your mom's retirement. It was a hobby for a while; I got good at it but it's very much a twitch game and relies a lot on outside forces. If you can predict the political sphere in the short term (there are plenty of folks who could tell you a mostly-accurate play-by-play a day or two ahead of time i.e. when Greece/Italy were yammering about default), you will have a periodic edge in the stock market. If the political sphere is stable, you can DEFINITELY predict the stock market to unbelievable accuracy--just the exact details of timing are hard (but there's plenty of math that works it out; day traders immunize themselves from the news by playing on a scale where they can work out the details to the minute, but that involves loans and interest because of settlement time--you need a margin account or a ton more money than you really want to trade with to do it).
Most people don't realize what this is. It's like poker: a game of luck and chance, to anyone who's looked at the odds. MIT nerds are smart: they've done the math, then stepped back and looked at the game and said, "There's more here than just cards." Then you get the really good poker players who know the odds and play with their friends, and they just can't keep their money at these tables with the big boys... the fish ge
False equivalence. He'll accept the facts (i.e. that the government does regulate monetary transactions), but that doesn't change his position (i.e. that such regulation is inherently wrong and the government needs to stick it up its ass).
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't. You can't have a situation where the nifty "hacker" currency that you like is exempt for all regs and you can do what the fuck ever with it, but traditional monetary instruments are regulated to try and stop shit like what happened in 2008 (in no small part because of the repeal of many regulations).
Sure you can. A single Trojan or Durex condom costs like $1.20-$2.50 depending on if you get a bulk pack, 3-pack, or get one out of a bathroom at a night club. Same rubber. These are short-life minted coins that have a circulation life of 2-4 years, or until someone uses them. You can make money buying and selling condoms--if you work in a bathroom at a bar, handing out toilet paper for tips, selling individual cigarettes and condoms at 100% or better mark-up.
Bulk unload the condoms on pimps and whore houses where they'll go through plenty of them. Because of the bulk-unload needs, the drug trade will most likely stay near the lower end of dollars-per-condom: pimps can always get a pack of Durexes from Rite-Aid, so you have to out-price them.
Are we going to put money laundering controls on condoms next?
Wired did a piece several years back about online virtual sex MMOs. Having taken a cross-section of these, IRC, 4chan, and Fark, I can say with confidence that the biggest appeal to 2/3 of the inhabitants isn't that people don't complain; it's 13 year old girls that won't get you arrested. The Internet is filled with pedophiles--to the point that they can freak you out even when you're used to it. There's people looking for VR sex with infants, which actually freaks out *other* *pedophiles*.
You didn't think I was just throwing the Greco-Phonecian shit in there to make people twitch, did you?
Slashdot Mirror
And if they go bankrupt and you have common stock, you get your shares cancelled. That's how buying on the exchange works. If the company gets liquidated, you don't get shit.
Not relevant analogy. He said that it's wrong if it's illegal because you don't know it's really wrong unless it's made illegal. If it's not illegal it's not wrong.
You mentioned buying from an exchange. If you contact the board and open contracted negotiations, then you can get preferred shares.
This is what I was thinking. About the bullet entering his brain and him being thankful.
So it's not wrong for your wife to lie to and cheat on you, since it's not illegal?
Maybe the person selling you the stock uses that money to buy bonds, handing capital directly to the company or whatever.
Maybe. That can happen. Funny enough, bonds work the same way: You don't buy a bond and hold it to maturity to get that 7% in 10 years; you sell bonds to other investors. Debt is traded like stock, money changing hands that the debtor never sees. That means, yes, ShipBuilderCo issues 1000 $1000 bonds and gets $1M, promising to pay 10% in 10 years or about $1.1M to pay off the bonds; while investors pass around the bonds and money changes hands again and again, none of which ShipBuilderCo sees, and some people make/lose a lot more than $100 on $1000.
Common stock is the same way, except they don't mature and the company doesn't have to buy them back and the stock can be cancelled by filing bankruptcy and the holders have proportional voting rights. Preferred stock can't be cancelled. You can cancel bonds by filing bankruptcy, since they're debt. Obviously government bonds don't usually get cancelled.
It is your assertion, though, that brokers and traders take home not 0.030 - 1% as shown in the filings, but approximately 100%. Therefore all the money put in is taken right back out, correct?
The traders acquire assets. That means you own 100 shares of SMB at $10/share. Through a bunch of trainwreck panicking, you end up with 100 shares of SMB at $1/share. You bought those 100 shares for $1000, which somebody now has; you can sell it back, but you'll get $100 and they have $900. In any case, right now what you have is $100 of assets and the trader has $1000--either $1000 of cash money or $1000 that they invested in STH which has been pretty level and is still worth $1000. We assume here that the trader is savvy and will make or maintain wealth; for this example the trader maintains, as I don't want to bring in a whole fantasy about him trading with other people to make that $10,000 of wealth that he got roughly the same way.
In any case, you can see what happens: initially you have $1000, and he has $1000 (in SMB). You give him $1000, and he gives you $1000 (in SMB). You now have $1000, he has $1000. SMB drops like a fuckin' rock, and you now have $100 (in SMB), while he has $1000 (in cash or re-invested in something that didn't drop).
If your trader re-invests in something that does drop, well whoopdie fuckin' do. He has $100, and some other trader has $1000. That money goes somewhere. It's not going into ships, but it goes somewhere. (Touch on this in a minute)
why is the asset value of the DJIA 15 times higher today than in 1980? Where did those trillions of dollars come from, if not from investment?
Inflation. As you already observed, the exchange grows by people putting money in the exchange. There's more money. Technically, yes, the money "comes from investment" in the same way that the billions of dollars Microsoft has "comes from buying Windows". People outside bring money to you, you take it, it becomes yours. People are putting money in their 401(k), it goes into stocks and bonds, and the traders get to play with it. As demand to buy INTL or AAPL goes up (a function of more money being available and more trading occurring), the stock price increases; holders of the stock have, on paper, more money. Thus the DJIA increases, and the S&P500.
This is also interesting: If you have 1000 shares of AAPL at $6/share in the market ($6000), and two traders use $100 of capital to trade them back and forth constantly, the stock price will go up. This is significant: there's 900 million shares of AAPL in real life and the trading volume is just under 12 million average per day, so trading 1 share per 1000 is significant and reasonable. So, anyway, the stock price gets up to where they're trading 1 share back and forth for $100. Now there's 1000 shares at $100, or $100,000 instead of $6,000.
Now imagine they sta
There was a Russian scientist who took that bet in 2000 and won. Are we there again? Can I bet you $1000 and win?
The charts are showing me a 0.8C movement since 1900, which doesn't seem to be correlated to anything interesting. CO2 levels are strange--I'd like to see a chart of industrial CO2 output and the INTEGRAL of CO2 output (i.e. total CO2 output since baseline), because warming would tend to make CO2 less soluble and thus CO2 would emit from the oceans (or dissolve less). That means that CO2 output might not have an impact immediately because it gets dissolved; then it suddenly comes back into the atmosphere as it warms, creating an anomaly that doesn't line up. Or it could mean that sunspots cause the earth to warm, driving more CO2 into the earth, creating a pretty graph that correlates CO2 ppm to temperature.
All kinds of funny shit. Given the rate at which we burn fuel, and the massive fluctuations (including trends that are solidly and disturbingly down), a graph of industrial output would be interesting. Since we can't scrub CO2 out of the air except by ocean absorption, how in the hell do we actually go down in global temperature so solidly as around 1900-1910, 1940-1950, 1960-1968, etc? How did the Great Depression signal a massive increase in global temperature, when the economic climate would indicate a slowing of industry and reduction of output (CO2, thermal energy, etc.)?
Actual human *activity* is actually of interest to me. All I hear is a calling out of CO2 numbers and "Man it was hot this year". The funny thing is the fluctuation is so small that nobody should be able to notice it--the limit of human hearing is 1dB but you can subconsciously respond to differences in volume of as low as 0.2dB (louder sounds better); while 1 degree C is 1/100 of the temperature difference in the liquid phase of water, and Farenheit is just arbitrary shite, it stands to reason that a fluctuation of 0.2 degrees shouldn't be causing "Man it's hot this year, last year wasn't so damn bad!"
Overall to me I've seen normal temperature--when I was sent home in second grade due to an in-classroom temperature of 102F and an outside temperature of like 105F, it was uh... 1990. In 2011 when the temperature hit 106F people were like... damn, that was a hot day. It seems to me that there were more sustained hot days in the summer when I was a kid, but I probably more just remember hot summers because they were hot; more likely it went up and down and I didn't leave my house enough to care. These days I wonder why my summer's so cold because it hasn't been consistently above 98F all the fucking time.
So yeah. The science, the numbers, they're telling me 0.8C degrees in 100 years should be panicking me, and folks are telling me wait another decade and see how I like the heat. The real-life environment, it's like, I don't notice anything really spectacular, and I wonder why it doesn't snow (we had a blizzard 3 feet of snow in 1995 and 1998, and also in 2011 ... other than that, once in a while we get a few inches of snow; most winters are unspectacular) and why it's not extremely hot (it's been extremely hot a few times, I expect extremely hot in the summer). And then people waive the "cause" of this only-noticeable-on-paper non-issue in my face, and I'm like, "... so there's correlations both ways, an increase in temperature will cause this and you're telling me this will cause an increase in temperature... it doesn't seem to line up with human activity, but you're telling me this is human-caused. Are you sure?" and people point and laugh and go "U SO DUM!" like they heard it on TV and it must be true.
You're all nuts.
Well, you're wrong. When a company files bankruptcy--liquidation or restructuring--they cancel common stock. You buy common stock on the exchange, so you don't get a payout. Preferred stock gets a pay-out, which is what executives get. If the company is bought out (merger), you get paid for their shares and then immediately use the pay-out to buy shares in the purchasing company (if they're on the exchange; otherwise you just get a pay-out).
The funny part is we're in a cooling trend, and the "Carbon Dioxide" explanation was "Global Warming" because of "The Greenhouse Effect". Now that it's not getting hot, it's "Climate Change" but we keep the same explanation and everyone treats it like the same guy with a new haircut and we all know all about the dude. Makes for hilarious stupidity.
Well, kind of. A change in orbit caused this before; but that's not what's happening now. What's happening now is sunspots, hence why we've been peaking over the U curve for the past decade (no real warming trend for 15 years!) and in the past 4 years it's been getting colder: sunspots are responsible for global cooling and global dimming (yes, those are real things; yes, I'm talking about a different global cooling than the 1970s ass-on-head clownshoes stupidity).
Well, I'm accounting for 'stock' as an asset, so at transaction time there's no change. The position that your money moves into the trading market is valid; it's the rest of the implications that I don't like (i.e. that your money goes into funding various companies).
However, each time money is added to the trading market, it goes to one thing: Allowing traders to trade more slips of paper (or digital references to slips of paper) (okay, at your broker, there are physical slips of paper and ownership is accounted for; you're essentially trading real slips of paper with a broker warehousing them, mailing them in and out as necessary). They don't go into building more warehouses, bridges, or roads; they go into economic rent, into investment bankers who trade on the market to take more of your money into their own pockets.
Essentially, you become poorer, and they become richer. The money moves up, out of your retirement savings and your bank accounts and into Warren Buffet's. The thinking that you put $5000 into the market and that's $5000 of new economic activity is complete insanity. It's $5000 of "I have a slip of paper that I hope is going to be worth $5001 soon so I can get my $5000 back plus money I didn't have before!" That $5000 is being passed around by other people trying to do the same thing. The only economic activity here is mouse clicks and screaming on the floor of the NYSE while flailing your arms wildly.
I keep seeing people come online talking about how they're so noble and good and know how to vote with their dollars. There was a dude talking about how he doesn't invest "to make money", but rather to "support companies he likes". He buys stock in companies he thinks have good ideas or good ethics "to support them". That's not how that works; you're supporting Goldman Sachs. I thought like that briefly and refused to invest in Goldman Sachs, but the fridge logic caught up with me a couple months in and I was like... oh, duh. I still didn't do it; the original prompting was an investment fund run by Goldman Sachs available on my 401(k), and once I worked out what was going on it was clear that both my original understanding of the situation was wrong AND Goldman Sachs was actually running (thus profiting from money invested in) the fund, so the actual action didn't change but the reasoning did.
(This is many angles at once: Goldman Sachs directly makes money from investment funds run by Goldman Sachs. They also have general strategic trading operations, so your money in the market is accessible to Goldman Sachs traders who use it to rob little old ladies' bank accounts. And so on. Multiple mechanisms.)
IF someone sells one stock to buy another, there's no change in the available capital - it just moves from one person to another. However, if someone puts 12% of their paycheck into the capital market as opposed to spending it, that's money being newly added to the capital pool. Capital is money available for building stores, semiconductor fabs, ships, etc.
WRONG. As I said, the IPO (or issuing new stock) is a business selling its own stock, money flowing into the business. Every other trade is simply money and stock changing hands between security traders.
Let's say Facebook IPOs in, and now a trader holds $100 of Facebook stock. He sells that $100 to you. You don't put $100 into the market; instead, $100 leaves your pocket and goes to his pocket, and you get a $100 of Facebook stock. Now that stock loses value as the share price drops, and now is worth $50; no new capital has been added to the pool, it's all stock. You bail out and sell, $50 leaves his pocket and comes to you, you now have $50 and he has $50 Facebook stock. The stock doubles! You think it's a good buy (you're really stupid) (this is how the market actually works), you give him $100, he gives you $100 facebook stock.
So in the end, there's no change in the market--there's still X shares of Facebook stock, though it's worth $50 or $100. The trader, since meeting you, has managed to get $150 into his pocket. You have $150 less in your pocket, but $100 of Facebook stock, so you're down $50 on paper. He's up $50 because he started with $100 of Facebook stock and now has $150 of cash money. Notice that this comes out to zero.
When Facebook IPOs, before all this, they come with $100 of Facebook stock that's not in the market and bring it into the market. They just create that out of nowhere. It's imagined into existence. Then some trader gives them $100, so Facebook is $100 richer. The end goal is for the trader to make you poorer by getting you to buy Facebook stock when it's expensive and then panic and sell it when it loses value. To simplify, the trader hopes to get $100 of Facebook stock and use it to repeatedly pump multiple $100 of USD out of you, in $20 or $50 increments give or take.
Despite what's being told to pawns who don't know about financial markets, most of the money in the market is that 12% that ordinary people save, mostly buy and hold which means their buys are adding to the capital market, not moving it around.
Untrue. The money goes into funds, where it is moved around as above in an effort to derive money from idiot traders who don't know what the fuck they're doing.
> The funds manager skims 1% regardless, so doesn't care much about you. ..
> $250 of his dollars go into my pocket, and I give him $50 worth of stock.
Not too good at percentages for someone who thinks he knows investing, are you? The management company gets 1% you said, (0.030% for some index funds), and that 1% is most of it. Have you noticed that if the management costs are 1%, that means 99% is invested is capital assets, in producing stuff?
You're playing quotes out of context. The money put into the fund is used to maintain a certain distribution of stocks and bonds and other assets, as declared by the fund manager. When market prices change, the fund manager buys and sells stock to adjust your holdings appropriately. That means when you dump money into the fund, it could just necessarily go into buying more stock that's about to become worth less, then get sold off--if other holdings lose value as well, for example, and thus they must be topped up by selling off that holding. Hence $250 of a $5000 investment drops to $50 of value, then some (all?) of that portion of that holding gets sold to rebalance the porfolio. Funds manager continues to skim money off the top regardless, which is less than that measurable loss.
To anyone who
He's obviously an international terrorist. Like that Khaddafi guy, we had to shoot him in the head immediately. Did you see him? He was even trying to trade gold for oil!
It's all hype.
Heck, the US government is at the point that they need to effectively rob everyone by "printing" money and thereby devalue the worth of all USD, as they cannot now borrow enough to keep their fiat-currency Ponzi scheme afloat, and even running the money presses full speed won't hold off the crash of the USD much longer.
No the problem is they lowered the transaction tax on large purchases. Now instead of a $500,000 house being $150,000 to seller, $100,000 to bank, $250,000 to the Fed, it's $350,000 to seller, $100,000 to bank, $50,000 to the Fed. With QE3, federal interest rates are non-existent or even negative. Banks are offering low, low interest rates to encourage purchasing home that cost roughly the same, but lock you into the cost; the seller gets more of that chunk due to higher sale prices producing the same total purchase price, and the bank gets the same since they keep roughly the same marginal interest. The buyer doesn't get to evade most of that price by paying extra into the debt early--rather than potentially paying $200,000 on a $150,000 sale-price house (i.e. by getting a second job for 18 months and paying $1000 extra in), the same strategy will see you paying $400,000 even if you're loading everything you got into your debt. This is the same house that costs $500,000 in either case if you only make the minimum monthly payment.
We need our high interest rates back.
Like the stock market, Bitcoin is driven not by reality but rather by how much exposure and hype and artificial demand exists.
That's not a tax thing. That's "Oh my god there might be GERMS in the lemonade! Did the health department inspect your dishwasher?!"
It was Goldman Sachs, and they've gotten the conservatives and the liberals both to believe it was Freddie Mae and Fanny Mac. Sachs invented the Consolidated Debt Object, a way to sell off a package of toxic loans to other banks and convince them it's good for them. The explanation was that you get 10,000 loans and some subset are terrible, risky, and going to default and cost you money; but because the others are together lucrative, the overall is a net-gain. Thus Sachs invented a scheme to give consumers loans they can't handle, take all their money, then dump the impending doom and financial costs onto another bank (said bank pays off the debt, becomes the new creditor and tries to get that money plus interest back from the debtor).
The best part? Goldman Sachs had this pitch, their front-man is going to Fanny and Freddie and Bank of America like, "Well these are actually high-value packages with a few bad loans, but mostly high-value debt to deliver an overall high profit margin." Then, he goes back into the board room like, "Oh, yeah. These are steaming sacks of dog shit, but they bought it!" Steaming sack of dog shit. Really. High-value.
It's not gambling; it's a game that can be odds-controlled, that can be read and understood and won on skill. It's full of people who think it's A) gambling; or B) a matter of betting on good, strong companies; or C) a matter of buying into the S&P index and watching it grow. Diversification is talked about a lot--diversify your portfolio. Okay, buy the S&P 500 index, instant diversification. Then you realize the index operates exactly like an individual security, meaning "diversification" is a ridiculous buzzword.
Stock market trading is a matter of sentiment and perceived value. That sentiment moves in highly predictable ways.
Bitcoin exchanges do PRECISELY the same things that the "evil" Wall Street firms do. (Most of Wall St. is simply your mom's retirement savings being put to use building stores and such to earn her enough to retire.)
You show complete ignorance in how the securities market works. Allow me to enlighten you.
When a company IPOs, they offer stock for sale. This is no different than any other trade, except that the owner is the particular company and thus purchase of stock from them actually funds the company. When Apple IPOed, it didn't suddenly appearify 1 billion shares of AAPL; Apple went to a big broker and said, "We're putting 1 billion shares on the market, sell them to people" and then pumped the stock price with hype. Didn't get much IIRC, unlike Groupon and Facebook; but they always pump up the price that way. The sale money goes to Apple.
From then on, aside from issuing new stock or buying back stock, the stock price and stock trades have zero impact on the company. Purchases in stock (i.e. buying another company by trading your company's stock) can treat it like another currency.
That means when you buy/sell, nothing happens to the company. ZBoards Inc. doesn't get money when you buy 1,000 shares ZBDZ to build skateboards, and have it taken away when you pull it out. Somebody sells you 1,000 ZBDZ because they don't think there's much value in it and there's too much risk to try to squeeze the peak, or they're trying to get out on the downward spiral, or it's collapsed and you're savvy and know this is a good time to buy and you're soaking them. ZBDZ doesn't care.
Old peoples' retirement funds work the same way, almost. The funds manager skims 1% regardless, so doesn't care much about you. On the other hand, they're required to buy stock--so when a big Wall Street trader wants to unload some overvalued stock that's about to tank, and some 55 year old pumps another $5,000 from his paycheck into his fund that buys that stock as 5% of its portfolio, $250 of his dollars go into a stock that's about to be worth $50. Or, not really; $250 of his dollars go into my pocket, and I give him $50 worth of stock.
So, no, your mom's retirement savings aren't being used to build stores and such. They're floating in a fund for a funds manager to skim some of her money off the top, and acting as a liquidity source for robber barons to buy from (as the price starts to climb and your fund needs to sell to rebalance--at the worst time) and sell to (as the price starts to drop or you deposit money in and your fund needs to buy more). They're being used to make her poor and make investment bankers rich.
Incidentally, I've probably stolen some of your mom's retirement. It was a hobby for a while; I got good at it but it's very much a twitch game and relies a lot on outside forces. If you can predict the political sphere in the short term (there are plenty of folks who could tell you a mostly-accurate play-by-play a day or two ahead of time i.e. when Greece/Italy were yammering about default), you will have a periodic edge in the stock market. If the political sphere is stable, you can DEFINITELY predict the stock market to unbelievable accuracy--just the exact details of timing are hard (but there's plenty of math that works it out; day traders immunize themselves from the news by playing on a scale where they can work out the details to the minute, but that involves loans and interest because of settlement time--you need a margin account or a ton more money than you really want to trade with to do it).
Most people don't realize what this is. It's like poker: a game of luck and chance, to anyone who's looked at the odds. MIT nerds are smart: they've done the math, then stepped back and looked at the game and said, "There's more here than just cards." Then you get the really good poker players who know the odds and play with their friends, and they just can't keep their money at these tables with the big boys... the fish ge
He's obviously the kind of person that believes speculative trading requires other people to be playing the game with you.
False equivalence. He'll accept the facts (i.e. that the government does regulate monetary transactions), but that doesn't change his position (i.e. that such regulation is inherently wrong and the government needs to stick it up its ass).
Who stole what now? How did theft come into this?
or the banks? Because you can't have it both ways: Either the government regulates money for various reasons (crime, abuse, economic stability) or it doesn't. You can't have a situation where the nifty "hacker" currency that you like is exempt for all regs and you can do what the fuck ever with it, but traditional monetary instruments are regulated to try and stop shit like what happened in 2008 (in no small part because of the repeal of many regulations).
Sure you can. A single Trojan or Durex condom costs like $1.20-$2.50 depending on if you get a bulk pack, 3-pack, or get one out of a bathroom at a night club. Same rubber. These are short-life minted coins that have a circulation life of 2-4 years, or until someone uses them. You can make money buying and selling condoms--if you work in a bathroom at a bar, handing out toilet paper for tips, selling individual cigarettes and condoms at 100% or better mark-up.
Bulk unload the condoms on pimps and whore houses where they'll go through plenty of them. Because of the bulk-unload needs, the drug trade will most likely stay near the lower end of dollars-per-condom: pimps can always get a pack of Durexes from Rite-Aid, so you have to out-price them.
Are we going to put money laundering controls on condoms next?
Wired did a piece several years back about online virtual sex MMOs. Having taken a cross-section of these, IRC, 4chan, and Fark, I can say with confidence that the biggest appeal to 2/3 of the inhabitants isn't that people don't complain; it's 13 year old girls that won't get you arrested. The Internet is filled with pedophiles--to the point that they can freak you out even when you're used to it. There's people looking for VR sex with infants, which actually freaks out *other* *pedophiles*.
You didn't think I was just throwing the Greco-Phonecian shit in there to make people twitch, did you?