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Comment by playday | Hacker News Reader

When you buy a restaurant lunch, you are expecting to increase your work income via the efforts of the cooks. And you clearly invested money since you pay for the lunch before you ate it. That’s all 3 prongs if the Howey test.

Why isn’t the SEC enforcing securities laws against lunch fraud? Lunches must publish their financial statements so lunch buyers can make informed decisions! Personally I am angry that restaurants don’t publish the information I need to make an informed decision regarding my investment. What if they go bankrupt after I paid for my lunch and before they deliver it?

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Even under your ludicrous example, lunch is not an investment because the increase in income does not come from reselling the lunch. At the absolute most, if you really squint and stretch, you could argue that lunch is a business expense.

Or, to put it in terms of the Howey test: eating lunch is not a common enterprise, and not dying of hunger is not an expectation of profit.

> …and not dying of hunger is not an expectation of profit. Presently, although with maybe another couple decades at our current clip, we’ll all live to see a world where our great-grandkids will all be employed to Elon Musk’s preserved head in a jar—mining minerals on Mars in exchange for bunkbeds in the old mineshaft and a handshake promise you won’t dye of hunger. The pension plan is an opportunity to purchase “Vitality Coins” pre-tax that can be exchanged for MeatX[TM] rations at the company store until you ultimately perish from everything else killing you in the Martian environment.

J/k obviously. It would be branded “MeatX” and the living arrangements would involve some kind of “pod”.

If crypto was actually like lunch -- returns were generated in minutes, there were tens of millions of successful examples that don't fail, and the insanely rare ones that fail in that mode risk double or low triple digit dollars -- then maybe the SEC wouldn't care as much.

When lunches fail it's more often the CDC (or the local equivalent) that gets involved.

HAH right XD

It may seem like lunches are doing well for a little while, but 12 hours later, they all go to shit

There should be a version of Nomic[1] specific to the sort of fantasy legal interpretation popular with NFT-enthusiasts, tax protestors, sovereign citizens, and other idiosyncratically motivated amateur legal practitioners.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Indeed, I think this is actually a tricky issue, especially for technically-minded people. I, too, fell into the trap of thinking of the legal system as not a system of guidelines for human interaction, but instead an airtight system of interlocked regulations. Exploiting loopholes or finding odd emergent behavior was a feature and not a bug. It took some maturing for me to realize that law serves the people, not the other way around, and that hyper-compliance with the law such that your "legal" actions generate unexpected/unintended effects just collapse when they meet with the legal /system/, which is just people.

> you are expecting to increase your work income via the efforts of the cooks.

Are you suggesting that retirees, the unemployed, students, and children never buy lunch?

> since you pay for the lunch before you ate it.

When was the last time you went to a restaurant that wasn't fast food?

> since you pay for the lunch before you ate it

Is this a post-pandemic thing? Like so many people are just walking out without paying the bill these days that they have to charge the card before you eat? This sounds like something that may be happening in SF, and maybe it will catch on in other places eventually, but right now it's not the norm anywhere I've been.

If the restaurant calls the lunch a "Stonk Special" and talks about how the restaurant is growing fast and that people who have purchased the lunch before "did really well", then maybe.

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