> I "slimmed" down my collection from 1TB+ to 200GB by deleting all the more "common" stuff I could easily find on Spotify only to realise that the versions I had (the original, pure, untouched music) was only available as fucking remasters etcetera
Yeah, you get the version they choose. Admittedly, this is not something I run into often, but for example: the stereo remasters of the early Beatles albums sound terrible to me with headphones because everything is hard-panned (e.g. vocals are only in the right channel). These albums were originally mixed in mono and sound way better that way. It's impossible to listen to these albums in mono on Spotify even though digital versions do exist.
...Yes? It seems like the head of a private company should be able to decide how to spend money based on whatever reasoning they want, within the limits of the law. Are you suggesting there should be a law that would have prohibited this behavior somehow? Or just that it was morally wrong?
I'm saying that the Hollywood Blacklist is pretty much universally considered to have been a Bad Thing nowadays, even though, yes, it was perfectly legal.
It's also a suggestion that perhaps one might want to think about what could happen should the "cancellation" shoe suddenly be on the other foot, as it well might. These things can change, sometimes faster than people expect them to.
Robespierre was pretty surprised when the mob showed up at his door, you can bet.
On re-reading the parent comment above yours, I see they were referring to criticizing things done by private companies that are technically lawful, so that's my bad for not seeing the full context. Legality and morality often get conflated in these sorts of threads so I just wanted to clarify. Although I don't really agree with either the choices behind the Hollywood Blacklist or this current Ebay banning, I believe they should both be able to happen in a free(ish) market.
Personally, I think the cancel culture stuff will hit a tipping point and go the other way toward some mean. That sort of pendulum swing happens with culture all the time. Just like our society and laws survived the Hollywood Blacklist (and many worse societal upheavals), it'll survive this.
> Money in band account that is not used is just a number. As Fed puts more money into the economy, the velocity of money decreases as the money is used less. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
A couple questions because I don't understand this very well.
Do we have an idea how much is actually sitting in a bank account vs being put into the market?
And, if people put money into stocks and park it there, wouldn't the velocity still be much lower than it usually is (when people are spending more on goods and services)? My interpretation of what's being shown here is that a large amount of newly "printed" money has gone into the stock market, thereby inflating asset prices. I don't see how low velocity refutes that.
You can't just put it into the market. There are two sides to every transaction. You give money, they give stock, they get money, you get stock.
When more money enters the economy than stuff is created, the price that the person willing to sell/price you are willing to buy that stock for goes up.
Thank you for saying this, because it is incredibly easy to overlook.
However, we must also remember that dollars are effectively debt—banks create them by loaning money. So while it is true that dollars cannot be “parked” in assets since there are two sides to every transaction, if the seller goes on to pay down debt with the proceeds then the money in circulation will decrease.
> However, we must also remember that dollars are effectively debt
They are debt in the most literal sense possible. They are listed as liabilities in the fed's balance sheet. The "note" in "Federal Reserve Note" written on every dollar bill is referring to the legal definition. It's a promise to pay.
That's a good point about transactions. But are stock purchases included in the velocity calculation? From what I can find [1,2], money velocity is a ratio of nominal GDP to (either M1 or M2) money supply, and neither of these includes stocks or bonds.
> Mainstream actually educated economists are right, not people hyperventilating about money printing.
This statement is so vague, I don't know what it means. Are you implying that all "mainstream actually educated economists" (whatever those are) are all in agreement about something? What exactly are they "right" about here?
> So how do you explain everything that happened on the wealth inequality front from the 1970s up to the financial crisis of 2009?
Of course there's never a single thing that explains a complex issue, but the root of the current Fed's monetary policy goes back to Greenspan, so the poster's argument could easily be extended to that iteration of the Fed.
Also, the 1980s is when (modern) wealth inequality really started to take off. And it's much worse today.
>Many of today's health epidemics are linked to a lack of fat and an excess of carbohydrates.
I'm genuinely curious as to what you're getting at. When you say "excess of carbohydrates", are you referring specifically to processed foods or refined sugars?
>Try finding fatty fruits and veggies: they were incredibly scarce for most the human population until the last 100 years.
Maybe fatty fruits and veggies were scarce for most humans 100+ years ago, but I highly doubt nuts and seeds were. But that doesn't really matter if we're talking about what we can do today. Things like avocados, olives, coconuts, and the above-mentioned large categories of nuts and seeds, are readily available for most people making these sorts of arguments. Plus, if you're vegetarian and not vegan, then you have access to cheese, yogurt, milk, and eggs. It's easy to eat high fat and low carb while avoiding meat, so the argument for eating meat to be healthy on these grounds seems quite weak to me.
> I'm genuinely curious as to what you're getting at. When you say "excess of carbohydrates", are you referring specifically to processed foods or refined sugars?
Long story short: many diseases are insulin linked. Insulin spikes highest by repeatedly eating carbohydrates throughout the day. Fiber decreases those spikes somewhat, but still doesn't compare at all to a fat-based diet or protein-based diet. There are ways to cope with an excess in carbohydrates (heavy exercise is one, fasting is another), but there is no way to cope with a lack of fat. Additionally, mitigation strategies can cause their own problems (many joggers, especially vegetarian and vegan ones, start developing iron deficiencies). The whole "it is just processed sugar" thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
>I highly doubt nuts and seeds were.
Put in perspective: foraging for nuts and seeds is a lot more difficult and intensive than hunting a giant mammal. Plus, the former is a lot more seasonal than the latter.
>But that doesn't really matter if we're talking about what we can do today.
It does. Human evolution and mutation is slow. By looking at what our primary diet was up until recently, we can understand the macronutritional and micronutritional needs of our body and how a vegetarian/vegan diet may or may not influence that.
>Things like avocados, olives, coconuts, and the above-mentioned large categories of nuts and seeds, are readily available for most people making these sorts of arguments. Plus, if you're vegetarian and not vegan, then you have access to cheese, yogurt, milk. It's easy to eat high fat and low carb while avoiding meat, so the argument for eating meat to be healthy on these grounds seems quite weak to me.
The main thing currently under scrutiny is the bioavailability and toxins (for lack of better term) of plant-based foods compared to meat. Turns out a lot of plants don't want to be eaten, and when you can't move, you start developing ways to protect yourself without requiring locomotion. Not only are various of these toxins decreasing bioavailability (zinc is a big one, eating beans with oysters is a terrible way to decrease bioavaialability of zinc), these toxins are actively causing harm and inflammation, whereas a meat-based diet is seen as the "ultimate restriction diet". Avocados, coconuts, olives and nuts stand out here, being more fat heavy, but as most of the population does not have a history with these compared to animal products, it is difficult to say its all good. Beyond that, it is very difficult to get all your minerals and vitamins just on those alone, which isn't the case for meat and seafood, which results in either tapping into the remainder of the veggies and fruit, or tapping into animal products.
Obviously, the argument is more than macros. If macros were all that mattered, you could just stuff your face with whey protein and vegetable oil and call it a day. The argument in favor of meat is a lot more nuanced and without that nuance, will be ruthlessly picked apart by the pro-vegan gang who tend to be a lot more zealous than their carnivorous counterparts (the carnivores have nothing to lose if vegan diets prove to be better, they are already on the moral low). To explain this in its entirety would take far more than a HN comment.
What's concerning is just how much meat-eaters have to play the defense. We don't know that much about vegan and vegetarian diets compared to an ancestry and entire tribes of carnivores. We put forward theoretical models devoid of animal products, using obscure plants to fill in some deficiency, but never test whether it will work on the larger scale. The ecology argument is thrown about as if people don't understand how carbon cycles work. It's humans going vegetarian and vegan which deviates from the status quo, not the other way around. We should be questioning the long term (multi-generational) effects of it as long as we haven't put hoards of people on a vegan or vegetarian diet that didn't include some shady 10 ingredient meat-replacement containing added sugar. We should also be questioning our current understanding of the "cows bad beans good" narrative, and what truly is the cause of the problem (human greed).
Thanks for the response. I won't respond to every point because (1) that would be long and (2) I don't disagree with everything.
> Human evolution and mutation is slow. By looking at what our primary diet was up until recently, we can understand the macronutritional and micronutritional needs of our body and how a vegetarian/vegan diet may or may not influence that.
What was "our" primary diet though? Depending on where a group of humans lived, presumably the diet varied greatly. It seems to me that humans can successfully adapt to a wide variety of foods. I'm sure early humans ate meat, but vegetarianism and pescetarianism date back at least to antiquity. And just because a diet kept us alive doesn't mean it's "good" for us in the modern sense. Say, hypothetically, that a meat-heavy diet increases the risk of early death. That would be irrelevant in the context of natural selection if that age is much older than that of typical reproduction. Our "goals" are different now, too. Does a person sitting at a desk all day require the same nutritional profile as a hunter?
> The main thing currently under scrutiny is the bioavailability and toxins (for lack of better term) of plant-based foods compared to meat.
This is interesting to me and something I've been researching too. It does seem that a lot of the "toxins" can be mitigated by using very old cooking techniques: soaking beans/lentils, cooking vegetables (rather than eating raw), sprouting, fermenting. These techniques can weaken the plants' defense systems, so to speak.
> Avocados, coconuts, olives and nuts stand out here, being more fat heavy, but as most of the population does not have a history with these compared to animal products, it is difficult to say its all good. Beyond that, it is very difficult to get all your minerals and vitamins just on those alone, which isn't the case for meat and seafood, which results in either tapping into the remainder of the veggies and fruit, or tapping into animal products.
To be pedantic: meat doesn't really have a lot of vitamins, right? If you want a complete mix of vitamins and minerals, you would need to eat the kidney, liver, brain, heart, etc, which for whatever reason we don't really do anymore (in the US at least). For the average person (again in the US), this means you will need to step into non-meat sources for e.g. vitamin A or vitamin C. I only bring this up because the topic at hand is specifically about meat, not necessarily eschewing all animal products, so they are presumably allowed in this context.
This just seems like a complicated way to go about budgeting correctly. Save money when you have excess from increased revenues, and use that to cover yourself when revenues decrease. I don't understand what is gained by bringing puts into the equation, if they are just as cyclical as your revenues. And it seems to me that you'd need a decent understanding of what your budget should be in order to decide how much to spend on puts in the first place. What am I missing?
Saving money requires keeping cash (sometimes a lot of it) in the bank that could otherwise be put to productive use. Options contracts allow offloading of risk without keeping this excess cash sitting there doing nothing.
Call me crazy but I thought the idea is that banks would use deposits to fund loans and kick some of the profit back to the account holder in the form of reasonable interest rates.
That seems capital efficient to me, but it's apparently a quaint relic of the past now that eternal 0% interest rates are the norm.
I'm reminded of the scene from It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey explains to all his account holders why they can't all withdraw their money at once, because it's being put to productive use by their fellow townspeople: https://youtu.be/iPkJH6BT7dM?t=49
Banks don't use deposits to make loans though, that's a widespread misconception which is perpetuated by concepts such as 'fractional reserve banking'. In the modern economy bank lending is simply adding a number to someone's account and adding an equal number to the bank's loan sheet.
The banks still do this; they leverage deposits to back the loans they provide.
However, they have little to no impetus to provide a reasonable interest rate on savings accounts; they'd much rather pay the absolute possible minimum the market (and regulation) will allow, and pocket the rest as profit.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but don't options contracts introduce risk? I've never run a business -- what risk are you incurring by having the cash sitting in a bank? If the play is instead to take a (perhaps small) risk in order to increase your amount of money or keep up with inflation, I understand that. But then I still don't see why options are necessary. There's lots of ways to do that.
The original post described options as a way to make your stream of money both "safer" and "steadier". I'm struggling to understand how introducing options can be safer and steadier than keeping money in a bank and creating an intelligent budget.
But you're not offloading risk -- you're increasing risk. What if jet fuel rises for some reason other than increased usage? What if usage is increased, but, people simply aren't visiting your region?
Simply doing something with the money is not necessarily better than doing nothing with it. None of the above is productive use -- it's simply betting. Jet fuel producers don't care about your commodity-indexed fund call option.
> Yep, it's really great that markets can create speculation that are not tied at all to the fundamentals of a security. That doesn't create bubbles, volatility, or open the door for endless shenanigans at all.
Speculation is a huge part of the market, and "sophisticated investors" take part in it all the time. Tell me why certain popular tech stocks are trading at P/E ratios of more than 1000, or pulling in negative income year after year. Be sure to justify your answer using "fundamentals".
Do you think that I think that that is a good thing? Speculation is good for a lucky few and very bad for lots of people when it goes off the rails. Which is the whole point of having governing bodies regulate the market.
Are you proposing that we rein in speculation in a wider sense? Then please, sign me up! But let's not do this with mobs and all the screaming, please.
I don't think it's that simple. Of course the Gamestop situation is a unique one, but speculation is the entire point of the stock market. You can justify (and lower) the risk you take by examining fundamentals, or by investing in "safe" funds, but you are always speculating that the price will eventually go up and not down.
An example: One could argue that TSLA's current price is almost entirely speculation divorced from current fundamentals. Are you sure it will be "good for a lucky few and very bad for lots of people when it goes off the rails"? It's possible, but what should we do about that? Restrict people's ability to trade TSLA?
In the case of Gamestop, I agree with you, it will be bad for lots of people who get in late. I think more people should be informed about risk before entering the stock market, but I don't know if I agree with you that we need more government regulation in the market to do this. What would that look like?
>It would be hard to see how anyone was hurts by GME speculation or organized buying.
That's because the they still in the pump part of the pump and dump scheme.
People buy Tesla because they think its worth even more. Everyone who has thought about it for more than a second understands GME is not worth 22 Billion dollars.
So the people who are buying now are going to collectively lose a ton of money when it inevitably crashes back down to 8 bucks a share.
The people knowing engaging in the short squeeze are taking that risk, so that is on them. But I feel sorry for people who foolishly chase the gains or the wifes/husbands of fools who are buying in now.
The whole ideas is that the hedge funds are these "bag holders." And to a huge degree they were, which is hilarious. But a huge amount of the bag holding is going to be done by retail investors.
> The whole ideas is that the hedge funds are these "bag holders." And to a huge degree they were. But a huge amount of the bag holding is going to be done by retail investors.
Yup, people are buying into a misconception here that because of high short interest there must be more to squeeze and the shorts will be the bag holders, while completely ignoring that the further this goes from the actual value of GME the more attractive it is to short, so who is short may change, but short interest won't go down much. The mob for some reason sees the short interest not going down as "they'll have to buy it at a higher price!" Once the smart longs start taking their profits the whole idea will fall apart, some shorts are going to make much more than people who bought early in the run and held thinking it would keep running up.
This is a lot of the problem. Certain people are too big to fail, they can keep the profits, but they don't suffer. How many people who had barely heard of the stock market lost their homes after 2008? How many speculators lost their homes?
How many people who have barely heard of the stock market have made massive gains over the last 10 years? How many speculators?
The government borrowed trillions, that all ended up in the pocket of people with shares, not in the hands of people who struggle to make rent.
How was the volume of GME enough to cause this problem? Today was around 60 million. Aren't they usually executing billions of trades across the market every day?
If I understand it correctly, RH is making funds available for trading right away, rather than making users wait until T+2 to be able to reinvest those funds. They can't instantly unilaterally change their policies to make users wait until T+2 to reinvest those funds. If you jump into and out of a 10k USD position 5 times today, that eats into almost 50k of RH's collateral with clearing houses for the next 2 days. A very small number of stocks probably account for a vast vast majority of this rapid flipping on their platform, so preventing expanding positions in that small number of names gets rid of the vast majority of the problem. Also, the most volatile stocks have the highest margin requirements, doubly compounding the issues with GME trading.
Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue. Maybe it's fully due to the higher clearing house margin requirements for the higher volatility stocks.
> Aren't they usually executing billions of trades across the market every day?
Clearing collateral requirements vary between 2 and 100%. That means $10bn of trades in one name can require the same amount of capital as $200mm of trades in another.
Can you describe what it would look like to "own" land in your view? Are you suggesting people should be able to buy land in a community and then sit on it forever without contributing anything back to said community?
> Can you describe what it would look like to "own" land in your view?
Not paying taxes forever on it would be a start to call it "ownership". As far as I know, on about everything else you buy, you never end up paying x years for possessing them.
Yeah, you get the version they choose. Admittedly, this is not something I run into often, but for example: the stereo remasters of the early Beatles albums sound terrible to me with headphones because everything is hard-panned (e.g. vocals are only in the right channel). These albums were originally mixed in mono and sound way better that way. It's impossible to listen to these albums in mono on Spotify even though digital versions do exist.