Actually yes. I put my money in things I would like to see shape the future, which I think is what investment should be about: shaping the future.
But disregarding this admittedly niche attitude; it's not the same thing. If you're opening bets on the ships being bombed before a certain date, you're opening incentives for people to do so. Although buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionable, it does not create such direct incentives.
how about short-selling of stocks, isn't it the same thing? I'd even argue that sinking one ship affects say 10 people of the crew who most probable will survive in the warm Gulf waters whereis sinking a company may affect many people life outcomes probably causing a number of indirect deaths. CDS of 2008 would be similar example.
>buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionable, it does not create such direct incentives
it creates direct incentives to suppress competitors - wind and solar energy for OIL, and whoever Palantir competitors are.
Wrt. "Hormuz open" - does the "open" definition includes the new fee Iran would be taking for the strait traverse (something like $1/barrel, nice for Iran, how come that they had't implemented such an idea before? one can only wonder)
Shaping the future for “good” is not investing. That is ESG and if you value capital and capital appreciation ESG has been proven not to be a solid strategy. See also altruistic capitalism with such moral people as Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Trevor Milton and Adam Neumann. Solid list of moral people shaping the future.
Wow. I am not sure how to respond to this as you seem to have a completely different mindset. You mean to say it is "proven" not to be a solid strategy as in not maximizing profit?
Surely, you acknowledge that funding something is a rather direct way of actively supporting it. It is your money and your choice of what you choose to invest it in, and thus how you choose to shape the future. If you buy OIL to make money, you are still responsible for the additional investment made in oil, and are still shaping the future, whether you like it or not.
No, you're wrong. Oil producers produce oil... Consumers consume oil. In between the producers and the consumers, it doesn't matter whether or not trader A sells a barrel of oil to B, then B sells to C, and C sells it someone else. All of the A to B to C is net zero.
All of the money comes from consumers. The money may change hands 100 times in between, but the money from consumers goes to producers.
If you purchase any products which included petroleum in your life, whether it's a house, car (EV or not), or stretchy clothes, that is what funds the oil producers. That where the money goes into the system, including to investors as return.
The fact that is used to make profit doesn't absolve us from any moral judgement. Buying stocks of a company improves its financial position allowing it to grow.
Would you buy stocks of ClusterBombsInc over CureForCancerInc because it has slightly better prospects?
The problem with prediction markets is fundamentally that they're unregulated.
Modern equities and futures markets are highly evolved and rather carefully regulated systems. We've spent centuries learning what the failure modes are and how to guard against them. It's never perfect, it's never going to be perfect -- it's fundamentally a voting system -- but in general, we get liquidity and price discovery at a relatively low cost, while avoiding fraudulent and evil behavior like wash trading and criminal profit laundering.
These new "prediction markets" have been put in place without any of those hard-earned protections. And surprise, they're rife with dirty trick and dirty money.
Agree 100% that prediction markets are the wild-wild-west with no insider trading protections, pump and dump, and no oversight. It’s perverting the wisdom of the crowd and efficient market thesis.
typical HN comment when it comes to finance and the stock market. Over and over again the wisdom of the HN crowd is wrong in regards to stocks. Intel at its bottom (they are done, and doomed, listening to main stream media) perfect time to buy and load up. This has occurred over and over again in my 15 years being on HN, almost always they call a bottom.
Oil futures or any other commodity purchase that doesn't result in the buyer taking actual physical ownership of what they purchase is an obscene gambling market with perverse incentives yes correct.
At this point efficient pricing of energy is a strong motivator for environmental causes. Solar is ridiculously cheaper than fossil fuels and not subject to geopolitical risk. And once you have solar panels you've got energy for decades.
Carbon-related environmentalism and greed now go hand in hand.
Seems most probable it was Hal Finney. Hal passed away in 2014 which explains the no movement of the Satoshi coins which are currently valued at a staggering ~$75 billion
I’m a beginner electric guitar player and what motivated and helped me is learning songs I want to play. The first was Zombie by The Cranberries. The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment when you pin down the chords and strumming is amazing.
Second was Tomorrow by Silverchair (excluding the Daniel Johns solo which is way beyond my skills). Rant: Silverchair is super underrated of the grunge area bands, Daniel Johns is a fantastic musician.
The first and most obvious target will be Bitcoin. It’s market cap today is $1.4T. That’s a gigantic reward for any state actor or entity with the resources and budget to break it.
Does this mean Bitcoin is going to $0? Absolutely not, it’s just going to take the community organizing and putting in the gigantic effort to make the changes. Frankly I’m not personally clear if that means all existing cold wallets need to be flashed/replaced? All existing Bitcoin miner software needs to be updated? All existing Bitcoin node software needs to be updated?
> It’s market cap today is $1.4T. That’s a gigantic reward for any state actor or entity with the resources and budget to break it.
The market cap of a cryptocurrency — or any commodity, really — is not its market value. If you have all bitcoins in existence and try to sell them you will crash the price to zero. The slope of that price graph — from the current market price to zero — determines how much you make in total. Most cryptocurrency exchanges have public order books, so you can see how much (and at what price per coin) you can actually sell into the market before you eat up all the bids. Last time I checked it was closer to $10bn than $1trn.
A lot of auctions are like that. The party making the listing has no clue about the items, and exposes themself to liability if they guess wrong, so it's better to just put no information at all.
Unlike eBay, with traditional auctions, all the responsibility for "inspection" lies on the bidder -- you're expected to visit the item during the listed inspection times, if there are any, and make your own judgment of its worth. If there's no inspection period, then you're guessing blind with everyone else.
In this case, click through to the GSA Auctions listing, and scroll down to see the "property custodian", give them a call during the hours listed above on the page, and haul your butt out there to inspect the item.
Interesting. I started playing with Godot this weekend and got something simple to render with some toolbar windows and a statusbar. I’ve always been fascinated by game and graphics programming.
It sort of proves his point that he was trying to make the number of HN comments who are diminishing his (and Elon, I’ll also wrap Steve Jobs) accomplishments and contributions. The fact that so many so called “intellectuals” on HN can’t admit and even see what Elon has done with Tesla and SpaceX is just bat shit crazy to me. SpaceX made space travel and commerce possible. It’s the next big industrial resolution but limitless and unconstrained by resources.
I try to live my life as stoic as possible and simply. I don’t mean simply in terms of luxury lifestyle, or wealth. I mean mindset, common man approach simple. There is great power in it. That’s why the hardest working, smelly, and sweaty people are some of the happiest. Yet, the most intellectual people contemplating every single decision and living a life of pessimism and group think are perpetually miserable.
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