Waiting to see if they’ve got any more fun contributions in the thread before doing exactly that lmao

This take sounds like the kinda guy who introduces “hot dogs are a sandwich” to a group, everyone enjoys the laughs and mock debate for a minute, then gets weirded out when the dude appears to really mean it and wants to defend the idea seriously 😂

You fucking suuuuuck dude, get better ideas

Adding to the chorus - you’re a real piece of shit for taking an artist’s work, REMOVING something the artist finds important, and then pretending like you’ve got some moral high ground here.

Go fuck yourself!

Big difference between a comic and a meme, you should go fuck yourself.

I say you’re underselling my position entirely with that last sentence, in a way that borders on uncharitable. Boiling down today’s extreme escalation in corruption (by my measure) into just garden-variety “corruption” is dishonest (by my measure). And I never claimed to refuse to invest in markets, nor recommended such for others, in fact I make it pretty damn clear how I think most folks are best served BY specific investment choices. But nonetheless your phrasing is at least broadly in line with the spirit of my points, yes.

I’m claiming there are at least 2 classes of entity in the market, you and I are in the “get fucked every which way” class. Doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made in a broad sense, even for that class, and it seems like we agree on that pretty solidly. We disagree from there, kind of increasingly so, the further we go from those broad points, and it doesn’t sound like we are going to get any closer to one another’s POV by further discussion.

[Edit: to respond specifically about your “why not buy knee pads and condoms” - because of the nature of opportunity cost, and the nature of finding one’s own dignity worth preserving, as I talked about in my “encouraging abusive loops” note above. You don’t HAVE to be up in there, trousers loosened, defenses applied, ready to go. Ya could just do other things with your money.

Again, my own is where my mouth is - I largely exited US stock positions somewhat recently due to a timely combination of factors, some old and some new, overlapping with the ones I’m discussing here. The lovely thing is - I’m no longer tethered to this gross beast that promises and delivers ruin, for everyone slightly below my rung on this idiot ladder (with the delivered ruin getting more inescapable and more omnipresent, the farther one descends those rungs…).

And of course ya never addressed the “how can everyone enjoy the fruits of capitalism?” parts, and how that idea can’t really hold up to scrutiny.]

Have you ever rigorously compared your own picks, against having bought a comparable index fund instead, making sure to account for e.g. expense ratios and other fees, and taking the long view as you’re describing? I would imagine your picks look successful in isolation, as in your positions improved, but it’s very unlikely you did better than picking an index fund that minimizes costs and decision-making over that time instead. That’s one of the big tricks - active management, even if magically chosen well, suffers from higher fees (no matter the performance, lmao) - you get stable (fixed) higher costs to overcome before profit, with a less stable potential for profit. Additionally, we can talk about order prioritization, e.g. where your broker (and then theirs) reorder transactions, using info you lack, to maximize their own profit, literally at your expense - another fun trick. There’s more, but lo and behold, consumer tends to lose over time while brokerages mathematically can’t - casino shit.

Aside from that, the idea of offsetting or paying for a product’s price increase - by buying stock in the company - felt deliberately misleading, hence the initial hostility / severity of response. The average consumer of investments has zero hope of trading profitably in that kind of timescale, and were you to say “well I mean over the long-term it’s like it paid for the price increase” - that’s just hand-wavy to the point of disingenuous nonsense. Okay I guess the slice of dairy in my own portfolio’s index fund is paying for milk getting more expensive and everything’s just fine over the long term then? No one would accept that, it’s a bad premise, no matter how I try to consider it.

One of the more egregious parts though is the way the suggestion seems to reward a company for abusing its own consumers, in a self-reinforcing loop. In an era where we suuuure need less self-reinforcing loops of abuse! You see that right? “It’s okay if they keep raising their price, I’ll just keep buying their stock, that way when they win, I win!” - you can imagine the signal that gives the company, right, should others do so? Ya know, the big publicly traded company, where the decision makers notably care about nothing, not even basic human decency, more than the stock price and leap at anything that promises to make line go up? Why would you advocate to be fucked like that lmao?!

And finally, how exactly do all of us manage to benefit from the fruits of capitalism in the way you’re describing elsewhere? If you’re selling your stock someday at a profit (Netflix price increase defeated, huzzah), someone is either getting a bad deal (your buyer will be unable to do the same later, they will take a loss) - or prices just go up forever. The first is not what you described as all enjoying fruits, the second is…obviously impossible (though not far from how the system actually behaves / pretends!).

I didn’t even start on the way the current administration / crime family has dropped the mask and openly manipulates markets, through large and frequent crimes like well-timed lying up through some of the biggest crimes available, literally triggering gigantic global events, as well as having established multiple income streams for open bribery. I didn’t talk about the clear bubble that is present valuations and what always happens IF the invisible stress limit for the bubble is breached [edit: well, you kind of did, I guess indicating that in your view good picks recover]. I didn’t talk about how the petrodollar has a real risk of unraveling altogether, which would entirely reshape all US economic everything. I didn’t talk about the ethics of it all, what it means for all American high earners to have their savings and futures locked into this hideous machine that merely exploits them, while ruining and killing the rest of the world.

I’m trying to choose where to stop ranting, but again, what ya said struck me as severely, disastrously wrong. And just extremely dated, it’s advice from the same era that produced the “single income of almost any kind buying a life of ease for an entire (specific kind of) family” anomaly. As in, before monsters like Jack Welch came in and “innovated” techniques by which he discovered you can make a stock’s value go up by actually closing a profitable manufacturing plant, even one that happens to form the economic engine of an entire small town. If it’s not profitable enough, compared with others, well maybe that’s a bad sign and the shrewd business exec is better off cutting it loose before it becomes a drain!

And other such pearls of wisdom and value, fruits of capitalism I guess, from the slavering wolves. Your simplistic take just functions as bait to have others financially raped and abused yet further.

For one thing, by today’s standards that kinda stuff sounds like the investment advice equivalent of “just walk into businesses, give them a firm handshake, and ask for a job”. Anachronistic to the point of sounding like satire.

Market value is untethered from business fundamentals, has been for a long time, anyone telling you otherwise can go listen to Jim Kramer or whatever. You as a consumer thinking a product is good has fuck-all to do with a company’s stock price (and therefore, fuck-all to do with that stock being a good buy - anything that you’ve observed that happens to line up is closer to happy coincidence than “informed strategy”).

And regardless, the comment I’m talking about had you claiming one could simply offset Netflix’s rising price by buying their stock - there’s just so, so many things to disagree with in that statement. I chose the one that the person who seemed to take that seriously needed to hear, so as not to burden the thread with my ideas about all of it.

I can do that now, though, if you really insist.

Your comment above implied an active investment strategy, which is for losers and suckers.

I’m not saying the “random” nature of the casino is the similar part. I’m saying the baked-in way the average Joe loses in comparison with the casino operators - that’s the similar part.

Either you’re advocating active investment (“I have a hot hand today at the casino! Or any day I choose cuz I know how to do it!”), or you’re saying “well a conservative investment strategy is a useful thing for most folks” - which has fuck-all to do with paying for a specific monthly expense? Namely the Netflix subscription from your comment?

Your original comment was fucking stupid and misleading, now you’re just doing the thing where you instead say fairly reasonable stuff that isn’t half as controversial. Take the L on your bad take, is what it is, apologize for it or just be quiet.

Don’t bother, this is terrible advice. The idea I guess being “if you bought some of their stock each month, it’s gone up enough that if you sold it at some point, it would cover the subscription”.

As if that’s a thing people can know ahead of time and use for decision-making. The only people who try to do stuff like this routinely get fleeced by “the market”. Random average consumers are not out here using stocks to their advantage in this way, it’s not a thing.

It’s very similar to saying “if you just throw X dollars into a casino every month, Y thing becomes free!” - no, no it doesn’t lmao. It could, maybe, but of course it never does cuz that’s not what a casino is for, it’s for other people to profit, not you. Stock market is surprisingly similar.

I came across this song via the opening theme for a deranged and fun little cartoon called “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack” (or similar, can’t be arsed to go look).

I shit myself when I somehow stumbled onto the much older source one day, having heard it in cartoon form a good hundred times or so prior.

This is about surveillance, not jobs.

Well that’s a fucking disaster. BIG hate for this sellout.

Father of Ghislaine Maxwell, yes the Epstein one, had quite a lot to do with it, which sure bears mentioning!

Fuck “The Guardian” (no shade to you, commenter), Behind The Bastards did a competent 4-piece or something (for those who enjoy such a format) on the guy, and to a degree, the topic. Interesting - mostly, but oddly not all - bad stuff.

Just got mine set up this weekend, really works a treat! Utterly painless. Even put the client on the Roku I apparently don’t own, hope the pricks somehow notice lol