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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

Wish there was a way for public investors to invest in certain parts of a publicly traded company. If I believe in a certain project at Apple or Google, I want to fund it and get returns on my investment.

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The government should work like that with taxes. Instead of just giving 100% to whatever the government decides it wants to fund, 20% could be reserved to go to what people want it to go to. Have some participation in the tax paying.

More interesting and better for the world if we apply that to governments rather than companies :)

Instead of just giving 100% to whatever the government decides it wants to fund, 20% could be reserved to go to what people want it to go to.

Under that plan, the best funded parts of the government would be the ones that benefit rich people only.

Then again, considering the intelligence and temperament of the average person, I think in short order we'd have amazing playgrounds and free hot dog stands everywhere, all under the flag of the hammer and sickle.

Seems to have worked for Porto Alegre, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto_Alegre#Participatory_bud...

> A World Bank paper suggests that participatory budgeting has led to direct improvements in facilities in Porto Alegre. For example, sewer and water connections increased from 75% of households in 1988 to 98% in 1997. The number of schools quadrupled since 1986. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTEMPOWERMENT/Resources/... (English)

Seems to also have been implemented in quite some places

> By 2001, more than 100 cities in Brazil had implemented PB, while in 2015, thousands of variations have been implemented in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol8/iss2/art8/

Would be interesting to see how it impacted those places

That's called participatory budgeting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting

Thanks for connecting it to a name. I've thought about that thing for some time but never found anything related, so many thanks!

The problem is you now have investors voting on what the company should do. You buy Apple shares because you trust them to envision the future. I bet most punters would have put money on the next iPhone and nothing else. And also there is the issue of most money coming from index funds just chucking money at everything regardless.

Isn't that cart before the horse? The concept of investing is taking a risk. If you want to invest in only successful products after they're developed, there's no wealth delta to be a part of.

I think they're getting at a model either like Kickstarter, or directly funding a department ( say Google's AR department, if you liked their Glass idea ). The problem with a normal investment and no seats on the board is that you don't really have a say on direction provided that a company does more than one thing. there's also the fact that money is fungible and would probably just subsidise loss making departments as is common today

I would want to invest in projects that I think will take off. For example, if I had to invest in Tesla, I would not invest in the Cybertruck. In fact, that project turns me off investing in Tesla entirely. But say, the Model Y, on the other hand is something I think will be successful so I would bet on it

If you believe that Tesla as a company is a reasonable capital allocator, and that the Cybertruck will end up being a flop, then you should expect that investing in Tesla will mean investing in the successful segments (Model Y per your prediction) and quickly divesting from the unsuccessful ones (Cybertruck per your prediction).

The same goes for Apple and Airpods.

Tesla Cybertruck as it currently stands will flop in Europe, as the design is unsafe.

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