HiLo

>All that is necessary is for the private sector to be better run and wiser than the government.

Many economists would consider this to be a problem that falls under their realm of expertise.

Can you provide counterexamples? If you look, there is plenty of competency in both sectors.

This is actually a pretty solid 1-line summary of the whole problem.

This is entirely subjective. What about those who devote their lives to a cause and go into government? Your money is better than their passion? This line of logic would suggest mercenaries are always have more incentive than soldiers.

I could say the same about your black and white thinking using outdated Chicago/Neoclassic economic theories when applied to aggregate economies, but I digress.

I didn't say they were built on the charity of the system, just that they were built using the system.

You act like the first 50 employees of your stupid app company aren't taking a risk too. But they get 0.01%, while the founders get...? Fairly early on, you literally don't have enough time in a day to do it all yourself, even if you wanted to, so you're quite literally taking credit for more risk than you were actually able to take.

Considering Paul Graham's essay about how most of the work is ahead of you even when you start adding employees, how is the risk so skewed towards initial conditions versus the long path ahead?

This toxic thinking that a twentysomething takes more risk by trying to start his own company while early in his career deserves orders of magnitude better compensation for the risk he took, over many career people that will have to be persuaded to risk their career and reputations on this new company, who have families, mortgages, and serious obligations to others?

He really took 1,000x more risk? Bullshit dude.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. With great power comes great responsibility - at some point billionaires can't blame their shit going wrong on other people if they were the more capable ones and clearly felt they were more capable when they set out to do this?

Compare the Federal Reserve to many of these subprime "technology driven" lending startups. Who is more professionally staffed?

Compare the NSA to Palantir.

Compare NASA to SpaceX.

Compare the Treasury to Enron.

Compare Bell Labs with WorldCom.

Your argument isn't as strong as your Econ 101 textbook made it out to be.

Private companies used to spend money killing, torturing, imprisoning, exploiting, robbing, and oppressing people, until the public stopped them through the means available to them in government. And you're saying this is a bad thing, and the power should mostly rest with private companies? At least with the government, the people staffing the bureaucracies and agencies don't have their (non-existent) bonus tied to how hard they fucked a customer over.

Does that discussion of his $100 million donation simply not count in your book? Did it not show up in your browser?

"it's the rich deciding what to do with their own money."

No, I wouldn't agree on that at all. That runs entirely counterproductive to what our society is built on. This is the arrogance people talk about - you think you know what is better for people than they do.

This is such a retarded argument. How did it get into the budget if nobody thought it was a good idea? Do you know how much of a fight it is to get anything in there at all?

Furthermore, all you're doing is cherry picking data points to support your argument without factoring in that military and medical equipment all have huge, onerous requirements for tracking every step of the supply chain, to the mine the metal came out of, which makes cost structures very weird.

What about the Manhattan Project, or the Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. Bad investments? See, I can cherry pick too.

Because the structure that enabled you to amass that amount of wealth is flawed, and disproportionately rewards "you" over the network that actually did much of the heavy lifting. Nobody is saying they shouldn't be richly rewarded, just that it's gotten fucking ridiculous.

No, it's a difference in opinion about who should decide what to do with the power, as the quote said.

What are you talking about? It has much more than that?

You take it as a given that the private sector is well-run and wise.

Nobody is saying either solution is great. All it's saying is that: wouldn't it be better to have all this power be in the hands of the democratically chosen, versus billionaires who may or may not be making relevant investments?

edit: Just downvotes, no response?

No I mean if you read all of it, it talks about the nuance in a lot of detail.

Krämer: So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

...

"There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the American system of tax-subsidized charity, of course."

"The critique is that this system affords too much power to the rich, whose decisions may not align with what’s best for society. This is not to say that the government is a paragon of efficacy either, but it risks a lot to depend on a handful of mega-billionaires to be prudent, effective philanthropists."

"What genre of philanthropy will Chan and Zuckerberg invest in? Possibly anything. Their letter Tuesday set two missions, both ambitiously vague: “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality." They mention curing diseases, improving clean energy, promoting entrepreneurship, fighting poverty and hunger, empowering women and minorities, and so on.

The pair do not have a sterling track record when it comes to effective charity. One of their previous efforts, a high-profile $100 million donation to fix the schools in Newark, N.J., has been widely criticized as a failure.

Chan and Zuckerberg write in their announcement that they have learned from their past experiences with philanthropy. For now, they will start with their own community in San Francisco, focusing on education, health and “connecting people.”

Why's that?

Or just as not worth more than the trouble they're bringing to this whole ordeal, when viewing it all as a portfolio of assets. (referring to the core biz)

It's only worth that if somebody pays that, which would be who in this case?

Fair. Has it been made explicitly illegal anywhere, or just not explicitly legal? Sorry for being difficult.

Does anybody know if they would have to get the DTC/NSCC on board with this (or if that would even be difficult), as they are the actual custodians for most of these securities and presumably would have to approve any new accepted forms of clearing/settlement? Took this from elsewhere:

"The DTC holds trillions of dollars’ worth of securities in custody, including corporate stocks and bonds, municipal bonds and money market instruments. It settles funds at the end of each trading day using the Fedwire Funds Service. The DTC is registered with the SEC, is a member of the Federal Reserve System, and is owned by many companies in the financial industry, with the NYSE being one of its largest shareholders. Securities brokers, dealers, institutional investors, depository institutions, issuing and paying agents and settling banks use the DTC, but individual investors do not interact with it.

In addition to safekeeping, recordkeeping and clearing services, the DTC provides direct registration, underwriting, reorganization, and proxy and dividend services. For example, under its dividend services, it announces when a company declares a dividend, then collects the dividend payment from the issuing company, allocates dividend payments to shareholders and reports those payments."

To be fair, all of this means government protection against harmful, unfair action against you.

Even if they don't sanction it, can they actually stop you from doing as you please with an asteroid, obviously assuming you somehow had the resources? I mean, would they actually block a private launch if the company behind it showed technical capability to do this in some kind of responsible way? Who cares about somebody stealing it or somehow ripping you off in your ownership of this thing, how would that come into play here?

Sorry about the internet tone - not meaning to sound like I'm arguing, I am genuinely asking!

Whoa OK well then by that line who said Earth creatures get to claim non-Earth objects?

The reason I ask is because I worked for one of the largest traders of physical commodities in the world, and was involved in that trade.

What you're talking about is called cornering the market, and when it happens, the people go to jail. You're using anecdotal evidence to support your claim about a large swathe of people.

Also, if their buying activities meant to create artificial scarcity was the only factor driving the prices up, why did their selling not have an equal effect pushing the price back down?

Not everything can be made into a damn hacker house or incubator. That's not a business model for the economy as a whole. We're going to start seeing startups doing rollups of startups doing shared working spaces for startups making apps and productivity software for startups doing shared working spaces and online advertising.

Playing devils's advocate, when have people, in all history, carrying large amounts of cash not been strapped?

When I was in Nicaragua for awhile it was kind of known you don't fuck with the cash dealers. From my experience, especially in these lower-income countries where these services are targeted, you're either getting protection or you're providing it; if neither, you'll quickly find yourself needing one of the former.

I'm not sure how this would change with a Silicon Valley style startup, but given Uber drivers don't know each other or have any "loyalties" for lack of a better word, I'm inclined to think you'd be right. However, I can quickly seeing this leading to the "dealers" on this system organizing into a group for self protection. Or a gang, cartel, militia, party, or advocate group, whatever you want to call it. Dudes you don't want to fuck with. And that doesn't sound conducive to a banking revolution, although maybe in the sense that payments are a social system at their core could make this feasible.

Not only does it make people targets, it's highly conducive to money laundering - an oft forgotten, but EXTREMELY important purpose, that seems to be too often forgotten in the fintech community.

And it might also be one of the best measures of aggregate economic activity for a large region, which could also be considered a good measure of............?

If you could build a giant battery the size of a large warehouse, on the cheap..... even people in Texas would be buying, as then all that wind could be used.

Hey so do you know how many commodity hedge funds own storage assets? Did you know those storage assets are highly specialized for each commodity? Just trying to politely point out that it's not the hedge funds that would be doing that :)