4 ms·

This period has been very special because of the 401k, which is itself part of the growth story of the corporate legal structure. I think this is coming to an e

by jl2718 4y ago

This period has been very special because of the 401k, which is itself part of the growth story of the corporate legal structure. I think this is coming to an end. Corporate boards and officers no longer represent the best long-term interests of the companies and shareholders they represent. It’s also a very precarious legal status as an arbitrary judicial ruling can make or break a company. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the corporate bubble is based on arbitrary tax codes that both advantage corporations and push worker savings into the stock market. Even if these conditions continue unabated, the cash flows from working class into the stock market will eventually hit equilibrium with capital extraction from the owner class. If the extractions return to the same markets, then things stay in equilibrium. They won’t, however, because the tax advantaged assets are different for them. They may seek hyper-volatility, or government bond shelters, but will generally avoid the assets on the working class tax treadmill. There are fundamentals to financial assets that have nothing to do with “number go up”, and these will ultimately dictate reality, with the caveat that “the markets will remain irrational longer than you will remain solvent”. Rationals get wrecked too, except every once in a while when one gets lucky on their timing and makes so much money that they become a hero and we make movies about them. We cheer because it gives us hope that our intuition will serve us too. Unlikely. This is all to say that such charts are using an inductive hypothesis to predict an inherently anti-inductive phenomenon. People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. The stonk religion is the same; well worth the price for your peace of mind. True or not, you’d be a mess without it.

mistrial9 4y ago
> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. could you strengthen your argument by omitting casual broad-brush explanations of religion, please?
- jl2718 4y ago
  Well, I can't anymore, but, I might have instead said something about how religion is commonly maligned for such practices. This is only to show that modern investment practices bear strong elements of ritualistic faith. Your response is most welcome. Thank you.
  - danans 4y ago
    > This is only to show that modern investment practices bear strong elements of ritualistic faith. Conversely, ritualistic faith has a long history of financial investing, evidenced by its tendency to procure very high value real estate for itself with the funds of it's adherents. Also, the cathedrals of Europe are glistening with the golden dividends that accrued from religious investment in the conquest of the Americas.
    - arminiusreturns 4y ago
      Further, it seems religion may have developed as a part of the need to keep track of resources in ancient Sumeria. My impression is that the studies said something along the lines of by establishing a priest class wich survives on tithes but also function as clerks/scribes that society enters a new new level of economic development.
      - mistrial9 4y ago
        further casual broad-brush explanations of religion then, gotcha
        arminiusreturns 4y ago
        I strongly disagree with your summary. In studying the evolutionary origins of religion the development of language, in particular writing, which moves religion away from oral tradition, is a key component. Did I articulate this well? No. The science remains well reviewed on this topic though, (that writing was first used for business transaction accounting, and later for ritual purposes).
mechanical_bear 4y ago
I liked your explanation but you undermine your write up by discussing something you clearly have no business discussing: >> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of tithing and I’m not going to get into that at the moment, but it makes me consider if you are discussing other things in your write up that you don’t have experience with as well.
- jl2718 4y ago
  Actually I'm heartened to see people defending religion on HN. Tithing to a church you truly belong to is probably a better use of your money, even purely by personal benefit, than tithing Wall Street. I hope that I've introduced some of those ideas in the text by making a negative comparison to the church. But yes; it was sloppy and possibly interpreted as disparaging of religious practice itself, so for that I apologize. Meta: this is what I like about Hacker News. I get challenged to maintain disciplined thinking, often at the boundaries of the argument where I casually drift.
  - jen20 4y ago
    I didn’t see it as a defense of religion (it did not express an opinion) - more as a correction of your post.
    - jannyfer 4y ago
      Agreed, the reply makes me more sure that the comment suffers from non-expertise and that we should remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
  - sytelus 4y ago
    You might be even more heartened to know that one of the top most and highly respected computer scientist, Donald Knuth, is ardently religious. The contrast between his works that is extraordinarily precisely well reasoned after decades of thinking and his complete submission to ancient religion where logical reasoning is not all that welcome, is absolutely a thing to behold. It makes me marvel at complexity and perhaps still evolving nature of our brains that can even do this. I used to be very interested in personalities who you would absolutely consider highly intellectual and utterly rational but at the same time extremely religious. My observation was that these people had developed some sort of switch in their brain which suddenly turns on and off depending on subject matter. One very common trait was also that all of these high IQ people were exposed into religious practices since very early age with a lot of non-negotiable enforcement from otherwise very loving parents. It seemed to me that part of their growing brain had just carved out area which was basically off limits to questioning ancient religious practices. Human brain is fascinating thing.
tomcam 4y ago
> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. You… you may want to post some receipts on this, or perhaps edit your comment
- jl2718 4y ago
  It’s commonly taught this way in the historical context of religious conquest and reformation, which may or may not be accurate for some population in some period of time, but is probably a lazy approximation that historical populations were ignorant and simplistic. My understanding is limited, but specifically that the term is not commonly used today outside of certain traditional churches (I have been to some). I used it to invoke the historical imagination where one may consider their actions in the perspective of a larger timeline where someone else may be studying them. But it’s certainly touched a nerve and distracted from some of the points I was trying to make. Or perhaps it was so vapid that there’s nothing else to discuss. Either way, I’d like to know. You may notice this response as less apologetic than the first few times this accusation was levied. That doesn’t mean I regard it as any less accurate, but as I see it again, I try to address different aspects as there must have been something lacking to warrant repetition. One thing I’ve noticed is that none of the accusations have bothered to provide a specific correction. Perhaps you should consider starting with the assumption that people want to do well by you and improve their understanding of the things that are important to you, but cannot do that without your participation.
WalterBright 4y ago
> cash flows from working class into the stock market will eventually hit equilibrium with capital extraction from the owner class What? The working class becomes owners when they buy shares.
- jl2718 4y ago
  I don’t think this is the case in any meaningful way, especially through the 401k mechanism, as participants are forced to delegate their ownership rights to the fund manager, which is yet another layer of dysfunctional fiduciary abstraction. The latest set of developments here are the fiduciary duties to ESG, which was intended to align long-term interests of fund participants and fund managers, but has been warped into a tool for fund managers to control investment flows arbitrarily by ESG ratings rather than by passive market indicators. It’s easy to see how this could be abused in a scenario like the listing and then de-listing Tesla in the ESG index. Smaller private equity funds can nimbly adapt to front-run the bigger funds even without prior knowledge of the rating change. This does not rule out the possibility of either prior knowledge or purposeful manipulation; easy to do and hard to prove.
  - epups 4y ago
    > I don’t think this is the case in any meaningful way, especially through the 401k mechanism, as participants are forced to delegate their ownership rights to the fund manager Administration rights, not ownership. And 401k's, with all their issues, are still one of the best investments a worker can make.
- tangjurine 4y ago
  The working class become owners when they buy enough shares that the dividends or expected growth from those shares are equal to their expenses. "And according to data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances by the US Federal Reserve, the most recent year for which they polled participants, Americans have a weighted average savings account balance of $41,600 which includes checking, savings, money market and prepaid debit cards, while the median was only $5,300. "
itronitron 4y ago
>> They may seek hyper-volatility, or government bond shelters, but will generally avoid the assets on the working class tax treadmill. 0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inverse-tesla-bet-among-first-040100121.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inverse-tesla-bet-among-first... 1. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-approves-single-stock-leveraged-and-inverse-etfs https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-approves-single-stoc... 2. https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/crenshaw-single-stock-etfs-20220711 https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/crenshaw-single-stock-etf...
anonu 4y ago
Can you be precise about "this period"? I don't disagree with you that 401k puts an implicit bid into the market. However, they've been around since the early 80s and the market goes up and down regardless.

by jl2718 4y ago

mistrial9 4y ago

> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. could you strengthen your argument by omitting casual broad-brush explanations of religion, please?

jl2718 4y ago
Well, I can't anymore, but, I might have instead said something about how religion is commonly maligned for such practices. This is only to show that modern investment practices bear strong elements of ritualistic faith. Your response is most welcome. Thank you.
- danans 4y ago
  > This is only to show that modern investment practices bear strong elements of ritualistic faith. Conversely, ritualistic faith has a long history of financial investing, evidenced by its tendency to procure very high value real estate for itself with the funds of it's adherents. Also, the cathedrals of Europe are glistening with the golden dividends that accrued from religious investment in the conquest of the Americas.
  - arminiusreturns 4y ago
    Further, it seems religion may have developed as a part of the need to keep track of resources in ancient Sumeria. My impression is that the studies said something along the lines of by establishing a priest class wich survives on tithes but also function as clerks/scribes that society enters a new new level of economic development.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      further casual broad-brush explanations of religion then, gotcha
      - arminiusreturns 4y ago
        I strongly disagree with your summary. In studying the evolutionary origins of religion the development of language, in particular writing, which moves religion away from oral tradition, is a key component. Did I articulate this well? No. The science remains well reviewed on this topic though, (that writing was first used for business transaction accounting, and later for ritual purposes).

mechanical_bear 4y ago

I liked your explanation but you undermine your write up by discussing something you clearly have no business discussing: >> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of tithing and I’m not going to get into that at the moment, but it makes me consider if you are discussing other things in your write up that you don’t have experience with as well.

jl2718 4y ago
Actually I'm heartened to see people defending religion on HN. Tithing to a church you truly belong to is probably a better use of your money, even purely by personal benefit, than tithing Wall Street. I hope that I've introduced some of those ideas in the text by making a negative comparison to the church. But yes; it was sloppy and possibly interpreted as disparaging of religious practice itself, so for that I apologize. Meta: this is what I like about Hacker News. I get challenged to maintain disciplined thinking, often at the boundaries of the argument where I casually drift.
- jen20 4y ago
  I didn’t see it as a defense of religion (it did not express an opinion) - more as a correction of your post.
  - jannyfer 4y ago
    Agreed, the reply makes me more sure that the comment suffers from non-expertise and that we should remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
- sytelus 4y ago
  You might be even more heartened to know that one of the top most and highly respected computer scientist, Donald Knuth, is ardently religious. The contrast between his works that is extraordinarily precisely well reasoned after decades of thinking and his complete submission to ancient religion where logical reasoning is not all that welcome, is absolutely a thing to behold. It makes me marvel at complexity and perhaps still evolving nature of our brains that can even do this. I used to be very interested in personalities who you would absolutely consider highly intellectual and utterly rational but at the same time extremely religious. My observation was that these people had developed some sort of switch in their brain which suddenly turns on and off depending on subject matter. One very common trait was also that all of these high IQ people were exposed into religious practices since very early age with a lot of non-negotiable enforcement from otherwise very loving parents. It seemed to me that part of their growing brain had just carved out area which was basically off limits to questioning ancient religious practices. Human brain is fascinating thing.

tomcam 4y ago

> People tithe and sacrifice to their church for a promise of rewards in the afterlife. You… you may want to post some receipts on this, or perhaps edit your comment

jl2718 4y ago
It’s commonly taught this way in the historical context of religious conquest and reformation, which may or may not be accurate for some population in some period of time, but is probably a lazy approximation that historical populations were ignorant and simplistic. My understanding is limited, but specifically that the term is not commonly used today outside of certain traditional churches (I have been to some). I used it to invoke the historical imagination where one may consider their actions in the perspective of a larger timeline where someone else may be studying them. But it’s certainly touched a nerve and distracted from some of the points I was trying to make. Or perhaps it was so vapid that there’s nothing else to discuss. Either way, I’d like to know. You may notice this response as less apologetic than the first few times this accusation was levied. That doesn’t mean I regard it as any less accurate, but as I see it again, I try to address different aspects as there must have been something lacking to warrant repetition. One thing I’ve noticed is that none of the accusations have bothered to provide a specific correction. Perhaps you should consider starting with the assumption that people want to do well by you and improve their understanding of the things that are important to you, but cannot do that without your participation.

WalterBright 4y ago

> cash flows from working class into the stock market will eventually hit equilibrium with capital extraction from the owner class What? The working class becomes owners when they buy shares.

jl2718 4y ago
I don’t think this is the case in any meaningful way, especially through the 401k mechanism, as participants are forced to delegate their ownership rights to the fund manager, which is yet another layer of dysfunctional fiduciary abstraction. The latest set of developments here are the fiduciary duties to ESG, which was intended to align long-term interests of fund participants and fund managers, but has been warped into a tool for fund managers to control investment flows arbitrarily by ESG ratings rather than by passive market indicators. It’s easy to see how this could be abused in a scenario like the listing and then de-listing Tesla in the ESG index. Smaller private equity funds can nimbly adapt to front-run the bigger funds even without prior knowledge of the rating change. This does not rule out the possibility of either prior knowledge or purposeful manipulation; easy to do and hard to prove.
- epups 4y ago
  > I don’t think this is the case in any meaningful way, especially through the 401k mechanism, as participants are forced to delegate their ownership rights to the fund manager Administration rights, not ownership. And 401k's, with all their issues, are still one of the best investments a worker can make.
tangjurine 4y ago
The working class become owners when they buy enough shares that the dividends or expected growth from those shares are equal to their expenses. "And according to data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances by the US Federal Reserve, the most recent year for which they polled participants, Americans have a weighted average savings account balance of $41,600 which includes checking, savings, money market and prepaid debit cards, while the median was only $5,300. "

itronitron 4y ago

>> They may seek hyper-volatility, or government bond shelters, but will generally avoid the assets on the working class tax treadmill. 0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inverse-tesla-bet-among-first-040100121.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inverse-tesla-bet-among-first... 1. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-approves-single-stock-leveraged-and-inverse-etfs https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-sec-approves-single-stoc... 2. https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/crenshaw-single-stock-etfs-20220711 https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/crenshaw-single-stock-etf...

anonu 4y ago

Can you be precise about "this period"? I don't disagree with you that 401k puts an implicit bid into the market. However, they've been around since the early 80s and the market goes up and down regardless.