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From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment
by makeitdouble 5y ago
From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.
- californical 5y agoThat’s about as valid as saying “robbing someone’s house is legal as long as the victim has a high net worth, after all, they can afford it”. That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoThat may be how "laws" work, but it's not how society works. There's a reason why "Robin Hood" is a parable. Legally, not all theft is treated the same, either - wage theft is largely ignored compared to other kinds, despite accounting for an order of magnitude greater amount. And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.
- makeitdouble 5y agoThe point was on "sins", so I didn't comment on the legal basis, but the moral one. To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun. The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.
- sellyme 5y agoEven ignoring the extremely explicit Robin Hood example that's already been pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of fiction centered around going to the lair of a dragon that does nothing but hoard gold, and killing it. Possibly you missed the subtext when reading those stories, but the gist of it is that society is totally fine with not caring about an extremely rich person losing a tiny fraction of their wealth.
- xapata 5y agoWhat do you think funds our union pension plans?
- makeitdouble 5y agoI don't have a union pension plan, and I'd argue they should be backed by less volatile investments than "innovative" companies.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThey are, generally speaking; pretty sure they're mandated by law on how much risk they are allowed to take. But, I'm convinced the stock brokers at pension funds are also playing the market a lot, because better results is better for them.
- xapata 5y ago> less volatile investments A wise investor reduces volatility by diversification, rather than by concentrating on low-volatility assets.
- uCantCauseUCant 5y agoI actually would argue that Vapoware has a net-positive effect. It creates incentives to "involuntarily" get inventive. The "We got to get this working, they did it" effect is real and has created several involuntary inventions. In my eyes, even a con-man who commits fraud, gets humanity to progress, by getting "real" companies to compete against a "virtual" adversary and humanity in total reaps the reward.
- simonh 5y agoI don't think you can discount the fact this money could have been used more productively that easily. It could have funded a lot of jobs for ordinary working people and developed new technology. That's an awful lot of good that didn't get done. I can't point to the working people that lost out from this, but they do exist. It's not like if without Nikola all of this money would have gone to one other thing. Sure some of it might have got wasted, but realistically most of it would have gone to productive uses.
- bumby 5y agoI think the argument is that rampant fraud generally destabilizes the economy which is eventually bad for everybody