We're they raping in order to replenish their armies? The claim is rather far fetched.
651 karma · joined June 10, 2017
This is silly stuff
It's like if you had 6 people who owned a pizza restaurant and one of them was the CEO. One day he calls a meeting and says, "Great news! I went to the bank to take out a loan, and paid Bob and Fred to buy their shares out. Now, as long as we continue to make a profit, we'll each make 50% more on our investment, the only catch is we have this debt hanging over our heads, and have to pay interest on that. Of course, if we start to lose money, your investment will lose out 50% quicker, but we won't talk about that. Also, I had to pay Bob and Fred enough that, in their opinion, it was more profitable to take the cash than own the company."
The only thing this does for the investor is make their investment more volatile. It's the same effect as if you opened an account at a brokerage, bought one stock, and took out margin so you could own more shares. Only the company is basically forcing you to take on margin in this way.
It's possible that it may make sense in some situations to do this, but given that it's so popular, I think the real reason is slight of hand.
The EPS goes up and the stock price goes up to a premium compared to the rest of the market. Take anybody that's not doing their DD, by either using a system, such as "dogs of the dow", or buying an index fund or simply choosing stocks at random. If you can sell your stock at a higher price, you make more money per share sold, and since these investors basically can't tell shit from shinola, you might as well sell them at the shittiest price you can manage.
If what I'm thinking is true, its somewhat hilarious that common wisdom is index funds and systems like "dogs of the dow" are commonly espoused as the best investments for new investors.
An index fund, or someone who is buying-and-holding would have the exact same effect.
The company makes a bid on it's own shares, and regardless if you are doing a buy-and-hold, or investing in an index fund, or a low information investor, you are not selling, even if the share price passes their inherit value.
The point I'm making is this gives corporations an easy way to keep their stock prices stable and rising, without having to perform. This attracts more investors, which raises the price even further until it's way past what is should be valued at.
If it keeps going like this, eventually the whole stock market will become way overpriced (a bubble) and crash like we've never seen before.
To buyback stock the company has to make an offer that enough investors are willing to sell. Once investors start to do so at these higher prices, the stock price goes up.
To the low information investor, this looks to them like the stock is worth even more than it was before, because it made money for them (on paper, at least).
And what about index funds? Regardless of the number of buybacks, the index fund isn't going to sell. This would also cause the stock price to rise.
This idea that a stock buyback doesn't affect price only works in a market where everyone has perfect information. In real life this isn't the case.
Corporate debt to gdp is at a record high, and they're funneling the money into stock buybacks and dividends. I don't know why this isn't of interest to the other commentors here.
The stock market has been eerily predictable and calm for the last few years, and I think this is why. The game is to lull investors into a false sense of confidence that the market never falls beyond the scope of a few weeks or so.
To the low information investor, everything looks great, and also when there are a lot of low information investors in the market, stock buybacks tend to increase the price.
Carbon dioxide blocks a narrow spectrum of radiation. It acts a lot like food coloring dye mixed in water. If you mix in a couple of drops, the change is dramatic, but if you double it and mix in a couple more, the change is much less so.
If the only effect on the atmosphere was the CO2 greenhouse effect, and we added 10x the CO2 the average global temperature would only rise a couple of degrees.
The issue and the controversy that surrounds CO2 is how the Earth will respond to this added heat that it can't get rid of. If it's a tipping point, and will end up in a death spiral of factors compounding upon each other (ex. the permafrost melts and changes the albedo of the earth and that causes more warming, etc.) is where the science of climate change actually is.
The problem is that climate is complicated and no one can predict exactly how it will behave. This is why there are ton of models and it seems no one can agree upon how much the effect will be.
Climate skeptics will argue this is because the science done so far is mostly conjecture and very weak, and the conspiratorial among them will say that only studies that support climate change are being published/funded, so there is a lot of bias to make out that their evidence is stronger than it is. There has also been a lot of modifications to historical temperature readings, (this seems to be with good justification), but I personally can't judge.
Whether the effect of CO2 is going to be large or small is outside of both of our grasps, and we really have to trust on others to make that determination, unless you're willing to really learn the science behind it.
However, your list of reasons are just muddying the situation even further. They are easily debunked and if you proclaim them, and people find out they don't hold muster, you may drive people further into the climate change skeptic camp, which I don't think you really are trying to do.
Nearly anyone can do the former, but only a few have the luxury to attempt the latter.
The IRS then released guidance that after Jan 1st 2018, it was not acceptable to do so.
What sort of evidence are we talking about? We don't have a another exact copy of Earth so we can't perform a controlled experiment by somehow inducing low clouds to form in one and not in the other. But if you need this sort of proof then how can you turn around and justify the belief that CO2 is definitely causing climate change?
Even NASA would disagree with you (https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=54219):
Clouds play a complex role in the Earth's radiation budget. Low Clouds reflect much of the sunlight that falls on them, but have little Effect on the emitted energy. Thus, low clouds act to cool the Current climate.
(Note the paper is specifically referring to low clouds)
> The problem with this line of thinking is that, when you do something to a system, usually lots of properties of the system change. So you can always say "Look, properties A and B changed at the same time right after we did X! So maybe A caused B, not X."
Sure, but also, when you make changes X1, X2, X3, ... Xn, you can't just arbitrarily say that X1 must be the cause and X2 .. Xn are not.
This isn't a plan of action that someone is likely going to advertise.
It does more than that. It predicts that for every 1% decrease in low clouds, the temperature goes up 0.11 C. They also used all available data (25 years) of cloud cover.
The correlation is very high. Figure 3 shows this.
> It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are both anthropogenic.
Perhaps, but it's entirely unproven that co2 affects low cloud generation.
I get that dumping a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and hoping nothing will change seems scary. But so is converting a large portion of land into farmland and cities, drilling into tectonic plates for geothermic energy and oil (which seems to correlate with earthquakes forming nearby), etc. And keep in mind it's a trace gas. We're talking about parts-per-million here.
With 8 billion people on the planet, we are going to be making changes to the environment regardless. It's important to understand what we are doing, and not blindly try to stop co2 production, when something else could be much more problematic.
Then we have individual engines that take this data and choose for the user what to display for that user only. So if the user is unhappy with what they are seeing, they simply plug in another engine.
Probably a block chain would be good to store such a thing.
This limits its value as a currency. It's like the “7 degrees of seperation” thing. You might not be doing anything with librecoin that the governments of the world don't like, in the network of where the currency could flow would like to but can't it has a cascading effect which severely hampers the size the network can grow to.
For example, if you trade with John who trades with Alice who then tries to trade with Eve, but Eve doesn't want to use your currency becausesshe's doing something Facebook or the U.S. government doesn't like, then Alice won't want to use it because she can't trade with Eve, and then John will be turned off to it for the same reason all the way back to you.