buttcoinslol

> The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user

Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.

That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.

I'm sure the S&P 500 committee took note, they decided not to include TSLA in the index, which I am thankful for.

If they don't provide an extension, they lose the Senate and the White House. Trumpvilles, etc. I doubt they will gamble like that.

> I see a lot of doomsday predictions, but 4 months in, I’m barely seeing any signs of a protracted recession.

Perhaps the trillions of dollars of stimulus money that has been distributed has something to do with it? Or maybe the generous unemployment benefits the federal government has passed out over the past four months to ensure people could pay their bills and purchase things to stimulate the economy?

Without those things we'd be in a completely different scenario. Things may get worse yet, we're not exactly winning the fight against COVID-19 in the US.

> I've also never really seen them seriously recon with the question of what you do with people who cannot compete, and at some point I feel like that crosses the line into intellectual negligence.

It absolutely is intellectual negligence, and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out. The standard answer trotted out is "charity" which is disingenuous at best, and completely impractical at worst.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out the logical flaws of people who secretly wish they were feudal lords or a pater familias in Ancient Rome, and wildly overestimate what their position or level of success in a theoretical 'Libertarian Society' would be.

Offices cost more than cubes. An office needs a door, ceiling, lights, lighting control, sometimes a sidelight (window), floor/wall finishes, HVAC, along with a couple receptacles and a data opening. This costs more than an 8x8 cube.

Why would a drug dealer want to inflict violence on you????

It depends. First class mail needs probable cause and a warrant since it may be private correspondence [0]

[0] https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/USPIS-FAQs....

Has anyone commenting ever actually bought or sold drugs before? Every single dealer or customer I've ever met has been through someone else, or someone I knew. There's relationships and trust vouching, just like any business. Credit is extended, and paid back. Transactions generally occur in homes or cars.

The comments here are acting like all real world drug market transactions occur between strangers, which is so far removed from the truth we might as well be talking about something else.

A good way to describe selling weed is 'the only MLM where people actually want what you're selling'

Why would an irl dealer rip of a potential customer? Do you have any idea how profitable selling weed is? Wholesale->retail is 100% or more markup, and you have virtually no overhead (bags, gas, time). Reliable customers means reliable cash flow.

The package of the black market thc cartridge will list if it has Vitamin E Acetate?

There isn't vitamin e acetate in nicotine e-liquid because vitamin e acetate is used as a cutting agent in black market thc carts, and not used in e-liquid at all.

You can't regulate the black market, but you can make it smaller or eliminate it by legalizing marijuana.

Money is extremely cheap to borrow, and companies have decided the interest rate risk is lower than the short-term share price gains from borrowing money to do buybacks. Perhaps current management assumes they won't be the ones left holding the bag.

I agree with you, when rates go up a large amount of zombie companies being held up by cheap money are going to go bankrupt, and it will have large ripple effects.

I'm not claiming all ETFs are passive by definition, or without risk.

ETFs do have additional liquidity risk that mutual funds lack. If liquidity is lacking, it could lead to the bid falling below NAV, potentially quite significantly, and investors who chose to sell at that point in time would be losing additional money.

Mutual fund sales are processed at NAV at the end of the market day when the sale takes place, which ensures you will receive the NAV when you sell.

ETFs allow more flexibility, with the drawback of possibly trading below NAV or above NAV, which can be good or bad depending on if you are buying or selling.

If the price of the ETF falls too far below NAV, big traders will scoop up the ETF shares to redeem for the discounted underlying stocks as an arbitrage play, bringing the ETF's price closer to the NAV.

I will assume your interest is genuine, here are links to the documents explaining the methodology behind the various S&P[0] and DJ indices[1]. I'm sure you can find documents for /RUT and IWM (Russell 2000), as well as /NQ and QQQ (Nasdaq 100) if you would like to see those as well.

[0]https://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology...

[1]https://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology...

Seeking to replicate the performance of an index by trading a basket of stocks/futures/options is not active management.

For instance, when an institutional investor gives SPDR say, $300,000,000 for a million shares of SPY, the fund goes out at purchases the underlying stocks in proportions that match the composition of the S&P 500, and then issues the SPY shares and holds the underlying and dividend payments in trust. SPDR does not have the option to choose the shares, they purchase a basket that replicates the S&P 500.

This is passive management, there is no one actively picking stocks, and when to buy/sell them.

> When companies have now started to go into debt to buyback shares and artificially raise their EPS, who are they targeting?

Their shareholders, which includes management. Buybacks are essentially dividends in another form. Buybacks have the upside of not being expected to go up indefinitely, and there are no dividend cuts to upset investors.

There are a lot of entities with enormous sums of money who must buy quality debt at whatever yield is available, and they dwarf retail's appetite for bonds by several orders of magnitude

This is what benzodiazepines are[0] and they are not safer than alcohol[1][2]. Alcohol and benzodiazepines are cross-tolerant with each other[3].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6147796

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19465812

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816010/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712270/

You can create a synthetic short with options, no need to borrow any stock at all.

Minor quibble: a doctor would write "Patient reported no thc use" not "Patient did not use thc".

Patients are notorious liars

I personally think it's the latter.

There are estimates that 60-90% of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes, which is 2-3x the normal smoking rate. I think schizophrenics are more likely to smoke marijuana around the time the disease begins to manifest. It's a lot easier to look at your child/brother/uncle/whatever and say "weed did this to him, it's all weed's fault" vs "the disease presented concurrent with a time period where person used cannabis".

I'm not even slightly convinced that weed induced schizophrenia is real.

A military officer participating in warfare?! How uncouth.

Were you just looking to get in a dig about US hegemony? I prefer it to Chinese hegemony, and so should you.

Cheap credit will not last forever..

I wish you didn't have to wait a week to buy options for newly listed stocks, I want to write calls and buy puts on this ticker

Once consumer credit dries up, this company goes poof

The problem is that "Sellers outnumber buyers as equity markets fall" and "Buyers outnumber sellers as equity markets post gains" are not compelling headlines.

As you've noted, financial news is post-hoc analysis. It is narrative-based, and not fact-based. Sometimes the narratives and facts coincide, though.

IBM would take you to court for breach of contract.

To the ultra-rich, "other parties" are other ultra-rich people. Everyone else is just an insect. I mean that in the most visceral way possible, the ultra-rich view us with contempt.

edit: This is why Bernie Madoff went to prison and why basically no one went to jail over the 2008 GFC. Madoff stole from his own social class, which is a big no-no.

He died the way he lived: with people looking the other way.

Does anyone know the going rate for a prison murder in NY? Through the guards, not the other inmates.

Americans in 1789 and 1945 did not have the ability to broadcast their thoughts worldwide for virtually nothing.