This writes itself. It shouldn't, but "should" as a concept needs a lot of work.
And even that isn't accurate. They are not bending the rules for a trillionaire, they are maintaining the consistency more systemic rules. This is how it has always been. We can all point to real or perceived ethical islands. They certainly exist, and are worth creating and preserving. But for now, the sea still sets the rules, and the sea is deep. For the deeper system, island visibility is a useful distraction. Sometimes something heavy moves near the surface and we misinterpret visibility as exception.
Did you get lost and start writing a poem? What’s all this about the “sea”? Fine. Let me turn down my anti-Elon-ness for a bit and caveat that the timing of these changes coinciding with this listing is suspicious, no? Grant me that at least. And then we can, with new found common ground, investigate the motives behind such a change.
Granted, indeed, and with the summarily bestowed honor of our royal favor.
Yes. The changes for Elon are exactly what they look like. Preferred treatment in exchange for the priveledge of being paid vast sums to serve him.
My sober point is that this is absolute par for the course. Every whale gets this treatment. Elon can take his business somewhere else, and expects something for not doing so.
The exception here is not a bent rule. But that the special treatment his spending power "merits" is so enormous, that the proportional conflict-of-interest sacrifice, is unusually visible.
The unknown subject is a valid construction in language. It is not necessary to be able to answer "who's they?". It is semantically equivalent to saying "I knew the rules would be changed."
There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.
>There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this construction is used to infer the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.
This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion. Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking that we're being oppressed by The Elites™.
Aren't we, though? Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.
To understand why this isn't a conspiracy of a sort by some "elite" group of people to take money from 401ks and IRAs, you'd have to argue that there's a good reason to shorten the window that outweighs the reason the window exists. The fact remains that many many IPOs crater within a few months. The rule change seems to exist to leave small low-effort investors holding the bag.
Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get us.
>Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.
It's also not hard to think of half a dozen other groups that could possibly benefit and plausibly have enough clout to steer things in their favor, hence why the need to make a specific claim rather than beating around the bush a vague "they" that can't be refuted.
>This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion.
It isn't central to the discussion. The appearance of corruption is clear; nailing down the culprit is difficult. It isn't reasonable to expect people to have a theory of corruption in order to complain about it.
>Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking
The perception of corruption is not a conspiracy theory. Corruption is an ordinary financially motivated crime, while conspiracy theories usually involve some kind of grandiose or mystical objective ("new world order").
Anyway, the question is moot because the only possible answer is "the regulatory authorities". We know who makes the rules! I just didn't want to tolerate this kind of fallacious nitpicking.
If you were to apply the principle of charity[0] to the person you originally asked the question to, who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?
>who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?
It's really not clear, which is why I listed 3 plausible options. I'm also not going to bother attacking an imaginary position and be accused of "strawman" or whatever.
There's no rule you have to own QQQ and indeed most people don't. There are thousands of low cost ETFs that provide passive exposure to the market. If this new rule bothers you, be like most people and buy one of those instead of QQQ. Problem solved.
Like sure, let's improve our tax systems (as an aside, I would say there are many more efficient and progressive options than a wealth tax, but whatever), but I don't see how there is even a tangential link between that topic and the NDX rule change.
If you already own highly appreciated QQQ in a taxable account then your options are limited, since moving to a different ETF would realize the capital gain. It may be preferable to hold even if you think you're losing money buying SpaceX at an inflated price, if selling would lose even more in taxes.
If you own an ETF that buys SpaceX but without overweighting vs. float, then you're not contributing to the inflated price in that sense. You're still buying at the inflated price though, so the NASDAQ rule change still affects you indirectly.
I guess the point of the "wealth tax" comment is that any higher taxation of the wealthiest individuals would reduce their power to shape the rules to their favor, and a wealth tax is potentially harder to avoid than income taxes. I think most prior attempts just made them emigrate, though.
As soon as you try to do something more efficient than:
mv some_rich_ppl_money some_poor_ppl
You're making it more inefficient; any other hop in such a system is inefficiency.
Such a tiny minority of real people are not that important to the species. Maybe that important to some mind palace of some contemporary meat suits but they're going to die anyway; kicking the can down the road for future people. If we can fuck the future, fuck us then. Our existence is just as forfeitable
My neighbors and family have been expressing such. If we're just going to screw the next generation via environmental collapse and serfdom to rich overlords they opt to give up on the living enabling it
There’s not a lot of sweet left in the world of bitter. But there are far more people that want peace than war, and the powerful are not as protected and immune from concequences as they think.
There seems to be a particular way that people working with LLMs start speaking - its like utterly confident, leaving no room for self introspection, borderline arrogant, and almost always selling the last thing they output. Hm
It’s making management manic, cult-like, and near psychotic. They have stopped caring about all the safeties and their only metric is how much LLMs are infused into everything. I use it, but having grown up in a cult this feels like a virus that’s infected everyone and nobody is making informed or good decisions anymore, because there is already an Answer and the only thing is finding the right questions that lead to it.
Advocating openclaw, LLMs attached to everything without any containment. We are in for a reckoning it feels like. The closest thing I can approximate this feeling to is like a massive bloom of insects where there is this huge amount of fuel in the systems we use. I do hope I’m wrong, and I’m surprised there haven’t been as many high profile hard crashes, so maybe my fear is overblown.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and are playing the game on the field.
Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
Hopefully that helps explain why there weren’t and wont be any consequences.
That's a fair point. But I'm not talking about the legitimacy (or not) of crypto. More that the president was (is?) running a pump and dump scheme. It should be profoundly embarrassing to supporters and it should be political suicide for the scammer. But it barely registered.
I feel like you missed the suggestions that the move (the shiiling and scamming) may have surved or been subborinate to an ulterior motive.
By taking relatively low risk public position (from the guy making wildly innapropriate comments and taking wildly irresponsible actions seemingly daily) they are able to effectively spread FUD with regard to crypto. And that could have been motivated by a perceived threat by crypto against USD and/or fiat in general.
Like...this dude took food from genuinely starving people because there was some abuse in the system and had no plans whatever to restore the food to the starving.
Scamming people that are typically seen (by his constituency) as elitist tech-mongers and coin-bros? How's that supposed to negatively impact his ratings anyay? At worst it confirms pre-existing favor both for and against him.
People who hate him for the coin shilling already hated him and were not likely to ever be convinced in his favor, people who fanaticize him will see it as stated above and will also not change their opinions in anything but degree.
Yeah I don't buy the ulterior motive. He just wants to enrich himself. That's the primary motivator for ~everything he does. Running a scam on your supporters is perfectly viable if you think nothing of them, and they think everything of you
> Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
This is worded like it's something negative, but I honestly fail to see what exactly. Tokens will be pushed to grey market, and? They are already fully utilizing grey and black markets, half of the worlds drug, arm and sanctioned oil trade is done in these shittokens. Cutting out the legal bridges and exchanges would reduce total amount of legal liquidity and on/off ramps and not not change grey and black markets much, since criminals are already operating there.
Instead it would cut a lot of the "legal" schemes by which country elites are laundering bribes and evade taxes. At least part of the schemes.
Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
Yeah the whole thing is absolutely scandalous. The president being anywhere near crypto is such a huge, blaring warning. Even more so if people are "investing" as a quid pro quo. But ~nobody cares. Scam economy
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
Maybe we should just abandon the concept of "freedom" and embrace material values. Or is that too 19th-century progressive? Must we always ignore all discourse that happened after the bill of rights was scribbled?
Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
Insofar as there's some nuance to what individuals choose to do but we like to eschew that in debate and make blanket statements about what you should or should not be allowed to do?
When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
This sounds incredibly naive. Competition does not magically prevent monopolies -- once you have a dominant player they just buy or undercut the occasional competing startup.
Every market exists within a regulatory system, which exerts power over the participants in the market. Using wealth, you can acquire influence, and thereby direct the power of the regulatory system to inhibit your competition, or create a legal monopoly for yourself. A free market is not magic; people have to make it happen, and people have many motivations beyond the freedom of markets.
> In a free market, you get wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it.
Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
The engine that really drives innovation and wealth creation is regulated capitalism that preserves competitive markets by restraining anticompetitive behavior.
If you’re ideologically attached to capitalism I have good news for you. That’s the approach that leads to its most effective implementation.
If you’re ideologically attached to “market fundamentalism” as I suspect, which is a reflexive opposition to regulation, then this concentrated market structure is what you’re advocating for.
> Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
Has there ever been a jurisdiction with unregulated capitalism? I'm unaware of any.
Even the most laissez-faire economies have had bedrock legal infrastructure: property rights enforcement, contract law, courts, which is regulation.
Maybe you’re thinking of anarcho-capitalism? But that has never worked at scale.
Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years later.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
> we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
There are more and more regulations every day. Oil refineries are being abandoned in California due to regulations so heavy there's no way for them to operate anymore. A friend of mine pulled his business out of California due to stifling regulations.
> Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient.
I give my unwanted items to the thrift store rather than the landfill. Others sell it on eBay. This is monetizing/making things more efficient. And it's good.
but not universally. oil refineries were causing asthma and environmental degradation.
them moving to another state is a regulatory failure (they shouldn't have another jurisdiction to move to, they should just operate without imposing negative externalities on others, spelling of the refineries).
what value is clean air? what is the value of a human life? how much is your attention worth?
these are questions that capitalism should not answer, but will nevertheless try to.
Socialist economies are much more environmentally destructive, because they are so inefficient they cannot afford the luxury of being environmentally cleaner.
The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
Really? Show me one society that wasn't ruled by a class of people that didn't, at some point, operate a monopoly on violence, often with basically nothing that would count as "due process" today.
The personalization stuff is why I avoided ML like the plague - all these folks making huge money but all of it to build a surveillance state for advertisers. Already having value my privacy enough to never work for an ad revenue company, they all seemed beyond the pale.
These stories often stand in stark contrast with how difficult it is to find some types of care, especially mental healthcare, on Medicaid . Things are not good for profoundly disabled people at all in the US, and the worst part of this is that the grifters make the rules worse and care less accessible for everyone, while they move onto the next mark.
They’re taking everything thats not nailed down. A wealth tax is the only way, it cannot continue like this.
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