hogFeast

No, I didn't. I said execs are replaceable...and they are. If you replace Tim Cook with a ham sandwich, it will make no difference to AAPL at all. It is very rare (I have never seen it) where the SP will fall because of a CEO leaving, it is more common for it to rise when a CEO leaves.

Again, it is important to realise too...there are probably no other CEOs that have made as much as Tim Cook. Even amongst execs, he is wildly wildly wildly overpaid. Corporate governance at AAPL is basically non-existent.

People who benefit from higher land prices are already taxing everyone else.

Housing is the one of a few things that people have to buy. Choosing to essentially tax everyone in society to buy that product is...unthinkably stupid (a subtle effect is also that because the turnover of properties is so low, this has massive inter-generational effects...this isn't clear now because only people born 20-30 years ago are getting taxed, everyone else is just sitting on their capital gain...as these people die and that gets realised, the effect on wealth inequality will be incredible).

Another comment here mentioned that you have to be very educated to think something so daft is stupid...it is actually quite simple and requires no education.

Imagine that everyone ate only bread. What we have done is create a system in which bread manufacturers produce no extra output but benefit from bread price increases of 5-10%/year...for multiple decades. The economy is now largely based around bread, people whose parents were fortunate enough to own a licence to produce bread are now multi-millionaires, everyone else is a peon. Bread is so expensive that the rest of society is actually struggling to feed the bread manufacturers. The fallacy is believing that we aren't already paying a massive price.

It isn't expropriation of land, it is reversing expropriation by returning land to the people who always owned it (i.e. no-one and everyone). It is completely fair (unless you are a bread manufacturer). For economies in the West, it will be massively enhancing to productivity because it only taxes value which generates no gain for society (tbh, I am not sure anyone can really know what the consequence would be...it would change the economics of commercial ownership of resi property completely because landlords couldn't pass on costs, the only risk is disincentivizing housing production...I don't think it does this, if anything it would incentivize production...where I am, housebuilders sit on land for years and wait for house prices to go up...I live near a development of fifty or so houses, the developer has taken four years to put up houses there because land is rising so fast here, an adjacent development of the same size went up in 12 months...as I said before, no-one can look at that and think this is productivity enhancing, it is just nonsense, this is a grievous tax on productivity).

The key word there is "received". He didn't buy stock himself, he was given it, he is a wage worker.

He is purely out for his own wealth. He is one of the most absurdly overpaid execs in the US. How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me. Taking no risk, getting all the reward.

I worked on the buy-side. I would make this assumption 100% of the time, 100%. Every single time I have seen a company ignore stuff like this, it has bitten them in the end. To flip this on it's head, I have also never seen a management team under pressure for failing to do something like this.

The weird thing about your viewpoint is that it gives the perception of capitalism without actually understanding anything about how businesses function. It is like the pro-capitalist government employee's understanding of capitalism. It accepts capitalism but also accepts that capitalism is evil...it is a very weird viewpoint (you also see this in the ESG departments of large fund managers...people who hate capitalism, view it as inherently unfair...but work at a fund manager, it is very 2020s).

But to spell it out: if you do not respect stakeholders other than shareholders, your business will die because no-one needs you. Your shareholders needing you is not why a business exists. A business exists because it creates value for other people. One of the biggest problems today is that corporate leaders do not understand this, and they end up losing shareholders massive amounts of money. But it is important to be very clear: Tim Cook is a wage worker, executives are wage workers, they are not business owners, they do not act like business owners, their aim is not to maximise shareholder value, their aim is to maximise their wealth. If there is ownership, it is a dual share class dictatorship, it isn't an alignment of interests.

The big problem with China is that, whether you sign deals with the govt or not, the govt needs to have direct control over businesses in order to maintain political control. We are talking about a country where large businesses have CCP officials inside the business, the red phone to the CCP in the CEO's office...business is politics, AAPL doing this deal means they are part of the CCP. The CCP don't care about your shareholders, they don't care about your employees or customers, their aim is to stay in govt and die at an old age in their bed, not violently hanging from a lamppost. That is why the govt heavily favours large businesses, that is why they have done deals with large US tech companies (MSFT is the other one, MSFT are neck deep in Chinese politics now) but it won't work.

I actually know people who are very familiar with the thinking on this at AAPL. They do not understand Chinese politics at all. They think China is just a better version of the US, more meritocratic (seriously), less political instability (again, seriously), and more accommodating to special interests (...seriously). I think the assumption people make is: AAPL understand what is going on...they do not, the reason they are doing things like this is because they don't understand (AAPL is one of the worst for this kind of thing, their executives are extremely aggressive in everything they do, they take home far more than they are worth, and they understand almost nothing outside of their business...if you look at GOOGL or AMZN, it is quite different).

Wait until you hear where Musk got the money to stop TSLA going bankrupt a couple of years ago (spoiler: it was the Chinese govt).

I use wireguard/iptables for this.

I have one small VPS with access to wireguard network, wireguard rule to forward certain traffic to a virtual machine running on my desktop, fairly easy to setup tbh (and I add/remove devices constantly). I am not a networking person, my understanding of iptables is shaky but I also ran a similar setup with Nginx. Could also use TailScale, but I found the wireguard CLI very easy. Straightforward to add more networks and isolate stuff from each other (tbh, I only run one network that doesn't isolate my web-facing stuff from other stuff I run privately...as I said, I am not a networking guy so have no idea how bad of an idea this is given that the only way in is traffic on certain ports being forwarded).

Bloomberg had a video about this, one of their journalists wrote a book about him. The conclusion of that book was that Sarao didn't break the markets, and it was probably not necessary to throw the book at someone who was mentally disabled because some incompetent prosecutors needed a scapegoat. If you only read about Sarao within the context of the Flash crash, you will get the wrong idea.

Well, not anymore because it is against the law...but I think it is acknowledged that it is still going on (it is very hard to prove because you have to prove what someone's intention was when they entered the order). But the speed at which they can trade is obviously an issue by itself.

Afaik though, human traders have been spoofing on Eurex since the late-90s (Paul Rotter most infamously). And no-one looked at the order book and assumes it is bona fide because humans understand human reasoning, the issue was HFTs who use that as an input to their pricing model. You have iceberg orders, they are basically reverse spoofing, and it is how most institutions execute large trades...they don't put a huge order in one go because it will get picked off by HFTs, they break up the order into lots of 100 shares or whatever, so no-one uses the order book now anyway because HFTs will pick you off if you do (again, that is why spoofing was made illegal, the only way HFTs can pick you off is if a regulator has banned false bid/offers).

And how is that different from spoofing? If I know I need 100k shares but I am bidding 100 lots at a time then I am hiding my intention just like a spoofer (and btw, doing this will get you fined in some OTC markets...if you tell your broker I need 10k shares and you take his offer, and you then say you need another 10k shares then you get reported...at least it is totally clear in that instance that the rules exist to stop brokers losing money). Again, the market is run by HFTs who are just trying to make the most money by doing the least amount of work, part of which is tilting the rules in their favour so no-one can hide their intention from their algos.

One of the best hedges has been index puts. They are the bet that no-one wants, and they get cheaper and more effective as things get crazier. Vol has gone through the roof again so I wouldn't advocate holding them but if Vix gets down to high-teens, that can be a very effective hedge. Some single-stock puts are clearly ludicrous too, I don't have the funds to put on this trade properly but there are tons of stocks out there that are clearly going to collapse if things get dicey. And there are quite a few unfashionable companies on mid single digit P/E that are going to do well in that scenario too (which I do own).

For diversification, I would try to diversify geographically if you want to retain a 100% equities allocation. US is overvalued, lots of markets outside the US are cheap.

It depends on what terms you are getting but it is important to be clear that this is a bet on the Fed not raising rates, and I would argue that you should own linkers if you want to do this bet instead.

Everything makes perfect sense when the risk-free rate is -5%. If the Fed does hike late and the risk-free rate has to move to 5% then your debt will start looking like a noose.

Inflation does enter the conversation for investors. Risk-free real rate is -450bps, equity risk premium is historically 200-300bps so implied return for SPX is -150bps.

One of the arguments is that things like tech will protect value because they have pricing power/growth or something similar, but this hasn't worked if you are starting from high valuations because inflation tends to change the cost of equity quite significantly, as the original calculation showed (to be clear, the point is that the price for bonds and/or equity is very wrong)...valuations are very high, a financial shock when you starting from a valuation that implies equities have no risk will be severe.

I am not saying that anyone should do or not do any specific thing but inflation, if it persists, will impact everyone because the effect of inflation is not limited to prices rising. For example, inflation might not impact you but a risk-free rate of 10% might.

Spoofing has been going since the mid-90s with no impact to the global financial system. It was only made illegal when markets went full electronic, and large HFT firms started losing money to spoofers.

The real problem with market stability is nanosecond liquidity and HFT firms that will pull liquidity when things get dicey. Spoofing largely doesn't occur anymore, and you still see huge swings in prices because the liquidity isn't there anymore...investment banks have been regulated out the market, HFT firms flee at the first sign of trouble, there are relatively few speculators willing to buck the market anymore.

Wrong. They returned the profits, and paid two fines on top of that.

You misunderstand a lot about what went on there.

One, there is no question that Sarao had nothing to do with the flash crash. The cause of the flash crash was a fund manager adding an extra zero to a trade they were making. The reason Sarao was blamed was to put pressure on him, and because the SEC needed to blame someone for there total failure to properly manage markets (the person who prosecuted the case against Sarao was the person responsible for monitoring electronic trading, she built a huge media profile through this case...no-one ever asked why the only person they charged for this was a disabled guy working out of his parent's bedroom).

Two, Sarao did go to jail in the US and the UK. This in itself was pretty unusual because he admitted to the crime, the crime had never been charged criminally, he explained to prosecutors exactly what he was doing, and he had relatively severe mental health problems which (given that he was totally compliant with prosecutors) should have meant he was never extradited (I believe he was in jail in Chicago, and he became very unwell whilst there). He was extradited to the US because prosecutors wanted to see him suffer (this is also why their first contact was a dawn raid on his parent's house), and it worked because he ended up signing a plea deal for something that he was very unlikely to actually get found guilty for (the case went on for something like 10 years).

Three, the reason why Sarao was charged was because people at HFT firms were losing money due to spoofing. That was it. The person who notified the SEC worked at an HFT firm. Ironically, Sarao himself also attempted to notify the SEC about things HFT firms were doing...nothing happened with that.

Four, people have been spoofing for decades. When markets were still a mix of open outcry and electronic, the largest traders were all spoofers. Saying that spoofing is illegal relies on the notion that once you enter an order, you must have the intention of trading at that price...do you know how to measure intention? The practice was only made illegal when the market went full electronic, and the order book data was being used by HFT firms.

Five, the reason why Sarao didn't go to jail was because the case against him made no sense. He was spoofing, spoofing is illegal but when the SEC raided him (again, highly unusual) he thought that the SEC was actually investigating his previous communications about HFT firms...it wasn't. He gave huge amounts of information to prosecutors about what large firms were doing, apparently he sat them down and went through hours of examples of market manipulation...no cases were brought as a result of this.

Sarao is the archetypal of example who was forced to serve real time at the behest of HFT firms in order to further political aims.

> You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.

Same in every bureaucracy.

So you are saying the solution is for the EU to take an active role in the government of the Middle East and Africa? Perhaps through establishing some kind of colony? I am sure I have heard of this before. The US invested hundreds of billions in attempting to secure the Middle East...that win them a lot of friends down there?

The problem isn't political instability or war. Both things have existed in the past, even within Europe, and there has been no migrant crisis. European nations have always taken huge numbers of asylum seekers, the doors are still open but it has to happen legally and in a controlled way...Europe is a democracy after all. And be clear, there are lots of economic migrants too...some from Sudan, some from Syria but the majority are economic migrants (I am in the UK, admittedly the stuff you see here is particularly extreme but you have asylum seekers taking over LGBT support groups or getting confirmed so they don't get sent back...it is crazy). That is why the article talks about climate change a lot (nutty right-wingers were saying this would be the justification years ago...funny how things work out, it is now apparently an argument made by very serious people...it is bizarre because Africa has one of the greatest endowments of arable land anywhere, so why these people are seeking to move to a region with less arable land and no route for migrants to acquire land is...beyond me)...although I am not sure what someone seeing his brother making money in Spain has to do with climate change, Elon Musk is making tons of money in the US so can I claim asylum there?

Right now, you have activist groups assisting human traffickers, we have no idea who is coming here or why, we have people who are suffering in our own countries (youth unemployment is often lower in the places these people are coming from)...the only solution is to do what governments are doing. Be totally clear too, the only people who differ on this point are people who believe that borders should not exist. That is fine, but this minority view should not be imposed on the public through undemocratic means (the amount of money here is huge: human traffickers are making hundreds of thousands per day, activist groups are collecting wheelbarrows of cash from donors...a lot of people are getting very rich, very fast).

This isn't something that the public is going to yield on. In the UK, an asylum seeker who was cosplaying as a Christian killed an MP. Sweden, bombings through the roof, shooting through the roof. France, attacks on churches and priests constantly. There is a reason why this is happening...these people are not legitimate asylum seekers, there are no controls, they are here to take and not contribute (and btw, both sides of my family were migrants, I know asylum seekers that came to the UK from Uganda, I have friends who are coming here from HK now...the mentality in some parts of the UK is already totally different to the groups that we welcomed in the past, the UK is still tolerant but look at Europe...you are seeing that this is creating real opposition to all forms of migration, it is very worrying, it is having the opposite effect that the "open borders" crowd think, they are creating the thing they say they are fighting).

Wow, some of this stuff is truly incredible. You have "activist groups" assisting human traffickers, that is very surprising (these groups are very suspect, the person who led one of the largest "activist group" in Calais was having sex with migrants...apparently this is rife). You have someone who works for a nonprofit claiming they are a journalist when they are, unsurprisingly, imprisoned for doing things they shouldn't be doing. The author describes the danger of Libya at great length but the implied solution is: just let everyone come in...ofc, makes perfect sense.

Just generally, is it a good idea to enter a country that is in a state of war in order to illegal migrate to another country (which, btw, has very open routes for people to seek asylum legally)? No, it is not a good idea.

This kind of thing is totally unenforceable in the UK. The corollary of clauses about side projects is that you are unable to work anywhere else whilst you are employed at the company, again totally unenforceable in the UK (the case law against restraint of trade goes back to the 17th century in the UK).

The only exception to this is if the work you are doing outside the contract conflicts/overlaps with the work you are doing within the contract. In that case, if the employer inserted a restraint of trade clause into the contract, that would be enforceable (that is a standard non-compete, which is perfectly legal and sensible).

It is all total nonsense though. UK employers, and lawyers, are a bit mad about this kind of thing. They will insist on things like probationary periods or working "at will" for a period of time...and then they will demand that you yield 24 hours of your time whether awake or asleep to them...whilst they pay you for 7 hours. It is what happens when underemployment is high.

Right, and how do you explain what has happened in Scotland then? The SNP gave ample rope to the NHS, and they promptly hung themselves with it. I agree there are structural issues but those aren't separable from the funding issues. A few months ago, the Tories said the NHS was getting £20bn in extra funding, and journalists were being briefed by NHS lobbyists/BMA that weekend that it wasn't enough...at some point, the public has to recognise that the resources problem isn't separable from the structural problems.

My comment about electives was for the US audience. The US does a huge amount of quality-of-life, elective surgeries that don't happen in the UK (i.e. giving an 85-year old a knee replacement). So when you write something like: the waiting list is long, people from the US might not understand that the mix of surgeries in the UK is very different from there, and it largely represents people who need prompt care (for example, I have a relative who is a high bowel cancer risk and needs a regular screen, in the US this would likely happen annually but hasn't happened for about three years now because they were overdue in early 2020 and then everything stopped).

I don't think you need to outline a number in advance (if you are familiar with the UK's response, one very big problem has been that forecasts of deaths has consistently undershot estimates even when England wasn't in lockdown and had no mask mandate). We had excess mortality around 10k/week in April, that probably did require a lockdown (to be clear though, if the govt had handled the care home situation better than maybe not necessary) but the bump in December last year was very minor. I am not sure what you mean by who...whoever gets Covid.

Yes, no issues at all. I support lockdowns and have had relatives who became very ill because of lockdowns (delayed/ineffective hospital treatment, I am actually not well myself either for the same reason). I think trying to argue that someone should only support/oppose something because they have something to gain personally is the reason why politics in some countries is totally fucked (the UK is probably the worst for this, somewhere around 2017/18 most of the media became tabloids and every politics story contained some hyperbolic bullshit from some random person claiming their life would be destroyed by X minor policy change...it is just a waste of time and energy for all involved).

And lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil.

There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).

It is worth remembering the "let people get on with it and they will work out" viewpoint within Europe was widely discredited by April 2020 (and ignoring the fact it worked in countries like Japan that have quite significant constraints on govt power).

My conclusion from this is that, in this area, regulations are path dependent. In some countries, people will make the right choices themselves. In others, they won't. I am in the UK, in 2020 it was evident that the hands-off approach really wouldn't work. But it did work this year.

Also, I don't think there is any question about fixing it. You have to test (most countries still don't test enough), you have to give people the information to make a choice, and you have to keep vaccinating. Imo, and I thought the opposite in 2020, lockdowns/heavy regulations aren't a long-term strategy (outside of China).

Would love to see stats on what parts of society this is going to impact? In the UK, the govt would have had to produce stats on the impact on minority groups. Based on what is happening on other countries, this looks like an outright assault on the poor, disabled, and recent migrants. History tends to repeat...perhaps the unvaccinated should be forced to wear badges? To protect the vaccinated ofc.

I am in the UK, in a part of the UK that has a badly malfunctioning health service. Waiting time for ambulance two weeks ago was twenty minutes (and that was just travel time), no issues at ICU (not for me, it was a relative the ICU was precautionary), no issues getting a bed...strangely, the experience was much better than the pre-Covid...significantly so. Germany has the same vaccination rate, Germany has a better health service...it is strange. No-one places any value on their freedom because it is something that is freely given to everyone today, our ancestors shed blood for it but we didn't...is this worth it? It is a huge change in freedoms for something that is unlikely to change things (I am not sure how this kind of thing is legal, if it is legal for a govt to essentially quarantine citizens in their own home if they refuse to have a medical procedure...that is alarming).

I would consider why someone is doing something. Try to put yourself in their shoes.

Would you post what time you worked out everyday? Would you post how many hours you worked today? Would you post how many calories you ate today? There is a reason why this isn't a common way for people to use the internet.

Ron Durkle isn't unidentified, it is Ron Burkle.

EDIT: Another one is Jimmy cayne, he was CEO of Bear Stearns.

A psychologist would have a field day with that.

It is easy to pigeon-hole because conservative writers were writing about this kind of thing before Marx (about five decades before in fact, this is a slightly complex point because politics then wasn't so linear but a lot of the critique of capitalism came from the wealthiest, it was the new rich Liberal factory owners that were the advocates for capitalism, the traditional land-owning elites, for example Disraeli, were making identical points to the OP).

I think the problem today is that people view Marxism within the context of a discussion that postdates Marx by one century. Historical materialism is also something quite distinct from Marxism. Marx wasn't a Marxist (or so Engels said), and there are lots of historical materialist historians (particularly economic historians) who aren't Marxist either.

On your final paragraph, I think much of the discussion today is totally reductive. You are right there is no difference between neoliberalism and socialism but that is because there is no difference between neoliberals and socialists. I am not actually opposed to "Third Way" politics but there is no real representation for working people. And yes, part of that is because the left has the moral authority and wealthy people have hijacked that moral authority in order to fight their culture wars about social causes that are largely irrelevant to most working people (the enemy doesn't exist, it is just a way for wealthy people to shed their guilt and obtain self-justification). It is telling that working class reaction in the US was led by an orange billionaire, it makes no sense (and btw, I don't think people like Sanders or Warren are particularly compelling or effective leaders, the reason orange man won was because, for all his grievous faults, he actually seemed like a normal human being...as weird as that sounds when talking about someone who is so obviously abnormal in many ways).

> What matters is the kinds of jobs and how much of the pie is being distributed, a fact completely left out of their article.

Again, this is not left out. This point is explicitly mentioned.

> Do conservatives care about have an economy that's actually just and equitable?

Yes, that is what the article is arguing for. I am not actually sure that Marx did say this because the notion of justice and equity is inherently subjective. What he said is that capitalism changes the nature of social and cultural relations.

Okay, that is what you have seen, it doesn't make it true because your point of view is: conservative people are bad. If you actually think more carefully about what you are saying, you would understand why this is wrong (conservative thought in the US was founded on the principle of challenging an accountable state, challenging entrenched elites, and creating democracy).

The other reply explained this but imagine you bought a soda, and you drank it and it turned out to be rat piss. You call up the company: my soda was full of rat piss. Their reply: "Oh yes, we sell lots of sodas, you couldn't possibly understand how much soda we sell so rat piss soda is a seven sigma event...bye".

If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).

Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don't say anything.

As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.