If you can meet their goals, that just means there is more they can squeeze out of you. The incentive structure for our corporations means there is literally never enough and they will always demand more.
This dynamic might not even been so bad if there was some honesty and graciousness behind it. Some friggin humanity. It’s not so cold to understand and systematize the natural tension between expectation and reality and effort.
Once again at the end of the day the problem is more likely the profit motive above all else
> It seems that the selection process optimizes for either liars or dumb people who are easiest to emotionally manipulate.
It does. Having expert knowledge is a deal breaker too. I actually want to serve on a jury but because I am unwilling to lie to a judge I’ve been bounced everytime when I am asked if I would believe the police testimony and I reply with “that would depend on if they were a Brady cop”
I once saw the livestream of jury selection in a big trial and read up on the whole thing and it seemed like such an obviously weak point of the whole process. The whole language around the concepts that underpin it seem totally ignorant of human psychology and pretend that humans are great at self reflection, won't hide their motivations etc. Like asking whether you're able to put aside X and Y from influencing your judgment, and if you say yes, that's good, if no, you're out.
Of course it's impossible to look into people's minds, but it's clear that the kludge is a result of historical push and pull of interests and a kind of truce and compromise they could arrive at that people still find convincing enough in the end, but also practical for the lawyers. Like, I understand this isn't easy, you don't one one highly qualified person dominate everyone else, even if just subconsciously. You want to encourage all jurors to feel that they have an equal input into the process. It's certainly not a system that's engineered for finding truth, and much more concerned with pretense in favor of the appearance of truth. A realist retort would be that pursuing a truth-finding system is only possible in utopia idealized situations, so going with the adversarial system is the best bet we have for getting some acceptable balanced compromise.
If the state legalized it then it’s not a crime as far as the state is concerned. The feds still have it illegal but states are not required to enforce or even help federal law enforcement to enforce their own laws. They can choose to do so but it’s not an obligation.
Your comment is coming from the perspective that they are criminals because you don’t like the activity, not because they broke the law. Lobby your state representatives and run an activist campaign to make it illegal again if that’s how you feel.
Even if a state legalized marijuana it’s still illegal to possess a lot of it, to sell it without a license, and can violate tort, municipal, state and federal laws about drug smoke outdoors or indoors. It’s not my opinion, it’s regulation based on scientific evidence to protect public health. A lot of this is understood in California but cash poor states with huge budge problems look the other way. Potheads know this, they use these facts to pressure cities and states to take their dirty money. Since the revenue from taxing marijuana isn’t going to K-12 schools a lot of locals are getting tired of the bad money coming from pot. It’s a trade off like legalizing gambling but with no benefits. Smokers make up a fraction of the total population so you’re going to see pushback very soon.
Then have pushback, that’s how democracy is supposed to work. If your complaint is that enforcement isn’t 100% perfect then you’ll find most laws are lacking.
I say this as someone who also hates public pot smokers but I’m not talking about them like they are “dirty money”. People commonly want to do something with negative externalities. Enforcing regulation against that is a tradeoff between cost and benefit.
Right, not enforcing laws is criminal. It’s like you’re agreeing with me but you’re depressed and apathetic about it. It’s not just me, you see it all over social media. People are grossed out by potheads. I grew up with hippies and didn’t have a problem with it until normies started abusing it. Legalizing drugs or gambling is a trade off, it’s dirty money. Politicians know this, they have meetings about how high crime will go up afterwards. Again It’s just a fact, it’s not my “feelings” or “opinions”. I’ve studied political science. My observations easily fit within an Isaiah Berlin‘s concept of liberty.
Not enforcing the laws isn’t criminal in the United States, although I wish it was. The police in various jurisdictions have gone all the way to the Supreme Court to confirm that[1][2]
> It’s not just me, you see it all over social media. People are grossed out by potheads.
Cool, but you or anyone else being grossed out by someone’s activity doesn’t automatically rise to the level of criminality. I, and many others, am grossed out by devoutly religious people, do you think they are criminals based on that fact?
> Again It’s just a fact, it’s not my “feelings” or “opinions”.
Your comment included people being “grossed out” by others activity. That is literally your feelings and not objective fact.
> I’ve studied political science.
Oh hey, me too, even got a degree in it. Several of my classmates who studied it failed. Studying the topic doesn’t make you correct, only more likely to be well informed. Since I also have studied it we can remove that as a common denominator between us and stick to arguing our differences.
Everything you’re saying I’ve heard a thousand times before. People tell me this kinda stuff all the time. I’m just good at predicting things. People talk in circles like you’re doing or laugh and then they see. Good luck.
If you are incorrect, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that everyone else will claim you are also incorrect.
If you go through my comment history you will find that I am fully willing to declare hills I will die on and can respect the energy. All I am asking of you is a logical argument or proof.
Everything you’ve stated so far if presented as an “ought to be” argument is unimpeachable. But you’ve presented it as an “how it is” argument, which is impeachable.
Because most people can’t map their idea of obvious to the various levels of proof different courts have, and “beyond reasonable doubt” is a much higher standard than the colloquial English means.
The literal forum we are communicating on will ban you for hate speech. I’ve been banned on multiple social media cites for quoting the current president because he has full free speech and we do not.
Pretending that hate speech isn’t a known term is being actively ignorant even though there can be real arguments about where the line is drawn.
> Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level.
How would an EU organization have less ties to EU businesses than a US corporation that has already demonstrated that it doesn’t care about small EU businesses?
The EU is an inter-national organisation in the sense of "between nations", this means it works almost exclusively with government agencies. This means that it currently has quite limited capability for directly interacting with companies active inside the union.
For example: the DMA was passed in 2022 and the commission took a full year to designated the first six gatekeepers, and two more years to identify two further gatekeepers. So that's the EU directly interacting with 2.5 companies per year. In comparison the EU has about 33.5 million companies.
Do you have a source on EU residents paying a “heroic percentage” of their income?
Everytime I’ve gotten actual numbers from people the total tax burden has been roughly equivalent between the US and the EU, but people confuse the different buckets it comes from as the EU has taxes like VAT and the US will be split between federal,state,local,property,sales, etc
I don't understand what you wrote. It sounds like you are saying this is a zero-sum game of winners and losers -- SpaceX "wins" and the tracking funds "lose". The ETFs and mutual funds that track these indices don't care what stocks are added or removed. They have one job: To track the index as closely as possible with the lowest cost.
SpaceX’s IPO is believed to be set at wildly inflated prices. The company just isn’t that profitable, it lacks significant opportunities for growth, worse its facing significant competition in the near future. Trying to short it when index funds are forced to buy vast quantities of stock is a losing proposition, but those indexes are definitely getting hosed over the next decade.
At least that’s the general consensus, nobody would be worried about index funds buying stock if it looked like a good long term investment. Really the expectation that the stock price would tank is why there’s been a push to change the rules.
Not true, they collectively lose investors if they become less attractive. Probably not an overnight thing, but if people are told that index funds are not attractive anymore then increasingly fewer people will put their money in them vs a hand-picked portfolio.
And historically indices had a waiting period for IPOs to allow for true market price discovery, and the fast tracking as well as allowing small float stocks into the index generates a ton of upward pressure on something that we already don't know the true value of.
Dimensional funds have a type of index factor funds that roughly track these indices without strict adherence to S&Ps inclusion rules. That's the only one I'm aware of.
Vanguard doesn’t use S&P, because they wanted low fees and the license was expensive. They use CRSP’s index rules.
I checked and it looks like new stocks get added to the CRSP index at the next rebalancing, which is September. So, even the knockoff S&P adds it quickly.
BTW, CRSP was run by University of Chicago, but got sold recently to Morningstar, a mutual fund company.
> they’ll adopt some of these proposals that are in the benefit of these companies IPOing at the expense of large funds?
Yes. And I see the argument for it. It’s hard to claim you represent the market if trillions of dollars are outside it for no reason other than newness or capital-structure weirdness. (I agree with excluding unprofitable companies.)
Moving the goalposts of an index fund for one or 3 IPOs puts the reputation of S&P and Nasdaq in question. The comments in this thread make that clear.
> Moving the goalposts of an index fund for one or 3 IPOs puts the reputation of S&P and Nasdaq in question. The comments in this thread make that clear
These indices have lots of competition. NASDAQ 100 lost basically zero money when they made these changes. If S&P makes them, I'm doubtful anyone will react either.
When S&P was still taking public comment, I put the link on HN. It got like two upvotes. This isn't something materially care about as much as like to get angry about on the internet.
Why do you consider HN upvotes to be more indicative of "materially caring" than HN comments?
Perhaps you got unlucky with the timing of your post, or title didn't grab attention in the /new feed compared to this post's. For all we know, whether or not they saw your HN submission, every critical commenter here may have also submitted a public comment to S&P.
I’m not sure I could. Even starting to research how to prevent being affected by these changes shows that there’s layers upon layers of systems that are being manipulated, and there are costs charged for moving the capital in my retirement account to other accounts.
Saying you as in any random person can protect themself from a group of dedicated experts who also have access to levers the common person can’t pull, is kind of not believable on its face.
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