For comparison, Webvan hit $8 billion market cap, losing $400 million a year, Uber's on $69 billion (hasn't even IPOd yet) losing $3 billion last year.
Hundreds of dubious cryptocurrencies of which a few might make it far.
So in a way, I think you and the parent are both right -- you are talking about different sides of the same thing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Bogle#Investment_philo...
The difference between investing and speculating is whether you get paid for owning it or only for finding a greater fool to relieve you of it. The wheels have come off the equities market because management has realized putting on a convincing show for speculators nets more dumb money than actually succeeding as a business worth owning.
Buffett holds LT due to tax deferral benefits conferred by the US tax system. If there were no capital gains taxes he'd be a different animal.
But then again, I can't shake the feeling that this is more about fun than really being close. I remember having close friends in high school and at the university. We spent many hours a day together for several years. Can't fake that, and I doubt anything like that will be born through Snapchat or similar tools.
You sound quite certain that it has value. However, some claim that "communication" through technology can also alienate people. Some say it's a bit more shallow, that it doesn't have the same feel as actually talking to someone or even touching them for a second or two (really important for bonding).
Value is not always clear. Forgive me a drastic comparison, but factory farming strikes me as similar: it brought cheap, tasty meat to a great number of people, but the jury is still out on whether it's good.
I've got a whole bunch of friends whom I know mainly from online interaction. Surely that's a new class of friendship, which is useful?
My recent experience going cold turkey from Facebook revealed 1 friend who noticed my absence and reached out to me.
I guess in a perfect world, people would understand the benefits but also fallacies and balance their use of these networks. That's the way I think we could get the most value out of them without exposing ourselves to their issues too much.
You really have to see how adolescents use it differently from adults to appreciate this. There is a sort of additional language to it in a similar vein to how we all used AIM and its ilk back in the day. For adolescents, who spend time together as you describe, they spend more time sharing experiences over SC augmenting their continuous in person interactions.
We are in danger of speaking past each other regarding the group and type of connection. But I absolutely believe SC is capable of Bri going people together. I do not believe that about any other Social platform. (Excepting blogs and podcasts but those are very different.)
i think the jury is in on that - the market being the jury. The overwhelming majority of purchasers decide through no uncertain terms, that factory farming is the way to go.
There are some people who have moral reservations against factory farming, but i believe those numbers are low (despite how loud their voices are). A silent majority (especially through less wealth countries) agree by voting with their wallets.
What about the gambling industry?
I feel in a few decades, this social media will be considered harmful and will be regulated and possibly taxed.
The issue is whether a society that has mutated to a system funneling meaningful wealth gains to 0.01% of its members is on the path to long term health or on the certain path to some sort of catastrophic system failure with a generous dolling out of collatoral damage to the 99.99% that were on the receiving end of "value added" goods and services [only].
My comment was intended to establish a yardstick to judge them by. Society doesn't value free market enterprise because it's great at enriching a small number of people. We don't like that Dropbox exists because it turned its founders and investors into millionaires and billionaires. We value capitalism because it encourages people to bring new products to market. If society's goal was to enrich a small number of people, then we should've stuck with feudalism. But society wants to enrich society.
If a tiny tiny subset of a society has established a system where they are the analog of "judge, jury, and executioner" of what sort of mind products are developed, supported, and made de facto 'necessity of modern life' (such as Google's) then let's stop pretending and call it what is it: an authoritarian system that (ab)uses market mechanisms
EDIT: my username is not a coincidence here...
There were a lot of busts from that era and the average person isn't going to be able pick them well.
As for the average person picking well, I encourage you to look at the Motley Fool community. There you'll find literally millions of hobbyist investors, some who have been chatting together since the mid 90s and many, many people doing well. Even looking at the medium-active CAPS player (basically their over/under prediction board where anyone can make bull or bear cases on any stock), it's better than what you'd get giving your money to Wealthfront or some other manager.
Blocking retail investors from micro caps would just be one more way insulating the rich from competition with the conscientious. As bad as Sarbox has been, that would be an entirely new way to make the US system less equitable for the masses.
No retail investor will invest in a micro cap company because the cost to perform due diligence is too expensive for the amount they want to invest.
Retail/institutional investors want a company they can put 10-1000 million dollars into. For this size of investment, the due diligence research is worthwhile. For a micro cap company, they can't throw that amount of money at them because it'd be larger than the company's market cap, so basically the investor would be buying the whole company (and the investor doesn't want to buy the company, just own a portion of it).
Basically, the administrative overhead for investment institutions is too large for micro cap companies. Just look at how much money is in Small Cap ETFs versus other ETFs.
pardon my ignorance, but what is a 'micro cap'?