“ In principle, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. All investment expects a ROI over some time horizon”
Huh? Why is there nothing wrong? Yes they wouldn’t make the investment if they didn’t think they had a way to get ROI, but how does that entitle them to one at any cost or make it necessarily moral?
As an extreme example, If I invest to create a company that is clearly exploitive and addictive, nothing is wrong in principle and I’m entitled to my roi?
Bringing morality into it opens a whole can of worms that I don't think we have the tools to answer.
My view is companies don't have a conscience, and any expectation that they are going to independently act with moral righteousness is unrealistic. Any perceived conscience is either for marketing (green/pinkwashing), or the sum of the morals of their owners multiplied by their willingness to exert any moral authority over the company.
Besides, if you try to imagine a company having an independent conscience, what even would that conscience be based in? I'm vegetarian and think it's immoral to eat meat, but obviously I'd be insane to expect companies to divest from meat based on my peculiar moral position.
In most cases, people do not exert any moral authority over anything they own. Do you actively select your pension investments based on your morality and vote in the shareholder meetings? If you do, I'm genuinely pleased and happy that someone is. But the reality is most people don't give their investments any thought beyond "line goes up", so companies end up acting as ROI maximisers.
So: the main way we enforce morality on companies is ultimately the government. If you want companies to act morally, you set the rules such that an ROI depends on following our democratically agreed set of regulations. Maybe that even harms economic growth but we still consider it worth it (which is typically how we think in Europe, but look at our economies are doing!). However, the company and its investors are still acting as ROI maximisers.
That is a baffling response, no one suggested corporations have consciousness.
The poster said “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this” are they a corporation? If they are, apparently they do have consciousness because they say “I think”
And yes some people do in fact try to vote with their dollars. Canadians are doing it plenty right now for an easy example.
That companies’ sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value, usually near term, is basically a toxic social construct and fairly recent. It’s not grounded in anything other than greed.
As someone that works large events on weekends, holy fuck alcohol should not be legal. Nearly every single problem we get is because of alcohol. Someone on heroin or weed or e is almost certainly less problematic.
What predictions? Why is it useful to know what the odds are for Trump to the word “postage stamp” in a specific speech?
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.
You can look at who is likely to become the next president for USA etc, it helps a lot to see what people who spent some effort looking into it thinks.
Bad example. Americans can only very recently even place trades on PM and even then its through other companies and most people don't know about this. Those markets are often very thin and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.
A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.
So hertz can report your car stolen after you return it, landing you in jail?
Renting a car comes with extra worry, even taking that extreme case out of consideration.
You’re driving around a break in magnet, advertising that it contains suitcases.
It comes with highly restricted rules - technically it violates Avis’s rental agreement to pull off onto a dirt median even if you have a flat tire or ever need to drive on a dirt parking lot - strictly anything unpaved like a national park campground site’s parking.
And you’ll reserve one particular car type, who knows what they’ll actually give you. And the tires may be sketchy too (had that)
And they’re be trying ti upsell you all sorts of horrible deals when you reserve and then pick up
I always thought this was baloney but James Hoffman’s recent video where he steamed water with the steam wand instead of boiling it normally for an americano changed my mind. I tried it and it was a genuinely different tasting drink. Not sure what causes it but different dissolved gases seems plausible.
That makes a ton of sense except one killer flaw - literally killer.
People will put off buying new tires to dangerous extents. Yes Some people already do that, but adding any meaningful fee/tax on new tires will most certainly lead to people drawing out replacements and causing severe accidents.
Unfortunately many states (north eastern states that spread salt on their roads I’m looking at you) have rolled back their safety inspections - but this is the perfect application of a reasonable state-sanctioned activity. Tax tires, inspect vehicles, write fixit tickets, and let insurance handle the rest of the edge cases where deadbeats caused harm with their slick-tired jalopies.
This is not a very compelling argument. Things already cost money. We wouldn’t oppose a water tax because we were worried people might refuse to hydrate themselves once water was marginally more expensive. It might marginally exacerbate an existing problem, but the benefit of solving the target problem (funding roads fairly), even if imperfectly, is a much greater good
respectfully sir, I think that their argument might be a bit compelling. The reason why a water tax works but a tire tax wouldn't work is that well.. you can't live without water but you can live with bad tires until you don't (with accidents)
but people will simply just say, oh this wouldn't happen to me, life already has so many complications and people would simply postpone the tires.
Now granted, all of this depends upon the amount of taxes, the financial situations and greater analysis of the argument but I wouldn't throw mint5's argument completely.
It is funny but people will buy vice even if it might be taxed but people are simply less likely to do actual preventive measures depending on how much they cost.
I think its because we all have this belief that nothing bad might happen to us until it does and we take things for granted. There must be an effect named after it (survivorship bias? or we think we are the main character or something similar, superman effect?, not sure.)
Water tax is different in many ways, and a bad comparison. Also that water tax phrasing is bizarre, like saying people in famine areas are being silly for refusing to buy food on the moral principle of high cost.
Ignoring the other flaws with analogy, not drinking mostly affects the person and their family. Car accidents affect the primary party. But often also a person chosen at random in a second car. Does a person choosing to not drink, ignoring the other flaws of the analogy, make a random second person die of thirst?
And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war. It’s a complaint that doesn’t make sense unless one is jd Vance.
Why would you think returning to Obama's Iran deal would be a win? Actually, let me word this better: how could you possibly think that anyone in the White House for the past decade would think returning to Obama's Iran deal is better than this war?
The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.
"So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?"
Where in that long comment before yours did you see an implication that anyone was thinking a return to Obama's Iran deal was a win? Why did you use the word "so"?
They talked about Iran giving up its HEU, i.e. basically returning its uranium stocks to the Obama deal days when Iran agreed to even get rid of its modest quantity of medium enriched uranium.
Why are people so literal these days? The poster didn’t use a magic buzzword so no one can connect dots?
An no, I don’t actually think they’d consider returning to Obama’s deal would be a win because if I had to guess anything Obama did is the definition of bad in may peoples books.
So, to clarify, you were just trying to spread the meme that Iran giving up its HEU was equivalent or inferior to just holding to Obama's deal, in spite of your belief the commenter you were replying to would not agree with this, nor the instigators of this war?
Maybe don't troll. Or sealion. Or shill. Or propagandize. Not sure which of these is the best description, but it's one of them.
Huh? Why is there nothing wrong? Yes they wouldn’t make the investment if they didn’t think they had a way to get ROI, but how does that entitle them to one at any cost or make it necessarily moral?
As an extreme example, If I invest to create a company that is clearly exploitive and addictive, nothing is wrong in principle and I’m entitled to my roi?