5 ms·

i read it as most likely people will lose their retirements if the companies goes bust. is that correct? in my country now they move to new pension model which

i read it as most likely people will lose their retirements if the companies goes bust. is that correct? in my country now they move to new pension model which will allow more aggressive investments with them. i am worried it will just get sent to these bros and i'll work until i die.

moffkalast 5mo ago
The reason they're doing that is because traditional European ponzi scheme pension systems don't work with shrinking populations, so actually we're working till we die in either case unless automation taxes pay for it.
- saidnooneever 5mo ago
  each few years the pension age rises 69 for me now, but it will likely go up further. much further up is beyond the average life expectancy...
  - sscaryterry 5mo ago
    Yep, I'm sure in 25 years time, when I "should" retire, the retirement age will be 75, meaning another 10 years of work, so I have 35 left :) At least!
    - onemoresoop 5mo ago
      Too bad it's getting harder and harder to find employment after you're in your 50s
      - endemic 5mo ago
        Welcome to Costco, I love you.
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    Which is why I have several different sets of savings for retirement. I have no choice about working now, but I hope to retire early in a few years, and my other savings just need to get me through until the official retirement income starts.
- arkh 5mo ago
  Originally pensions were created so people who could not work would not be destitute. The fact it became an all-inclusive all-year-round vacation reward is an anomaly which is getting corrected. Too bad for us we're the generations holding the bag.
  - pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
    At 60/65 (women/men) years old pensioners could contribute a lot to society in their last decade or more of active life. Caring for grandchildren, running clubs and societies, giving their experience to local politics. At 60, women who had daughters at 30, whose daughters just had children would be well placed to help with childrearing. These sorts of things got lost in UK with equality and the pensions crisis.
    - MrMan 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
      There was a response about starting businesses. I consider those in their 60s to be capable of contributing to financial systems (eg businesses), I was just focusing on social aspects that have seemingly been lost with societal/political changes. So it was contribution in the non-financial sense I was particularly thinking of. I suppose when we look at things like the 4-day week, we imagine more time and energy available for social cohesion. Or I do at least.
- Ray20 5mo ago
  > unless automation taxes pay for it But this doesn't solve the problem in any way; it simply leads to production drop. I mean, this is literally the logic of every communist government in the 20th century. They had the same logic that "given the mechanization of agriculture, food practically produces itself; you just need to throw a seed in the ground and give it a couple of tractor rides, and the earth will do the rest. Therefore, we need a tax on such activity, because we have enough resources to feed everyone". In other words, it's literally a pure tax on automation. The results were mass deaths from starvation every single time.
  - ab5tract 5mo ago
    There were so many contributing factors to those famines but my understanding is that it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping. There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with. Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.
    - Ray20 5mo ago
      > it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause. When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society. This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant. But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.
- Arn_Thor 5mo ago
  You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits. If we had a reasonable tax system that captured more of that surplus value (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more.
  - Nasrudith 5mo ago
    Surplus value is a propaganda myth from Marx along with other trivially disproven delusions like LVT. Tell me what work is being done by whom in a wine cellar as the vintage matures after harvest? "Reasonable" is doing herculean amounts of work as usual, as it is implicitly operating under a thief's logic that the target didn't really deserve it anyway therefore if I steal all of it I will be justified. We see the same shit when regiemes 'nationalize' segments of the economy and then wonder why instead of miraculously getting better without the 'exploiters' things turn to shit and absolutely nobody wants to trade with them. Empathy such a foreign concept to them that they don’t understand why merchants refuse to trade with those who steal businesses wholesale. Whose only response when confronted about their crimes is lame whataboutisms and victim blaming.
    - Arn_Thor 5mo ago
      fine, strip out the words "surplus value" and "reasonable" if they truly blind you to the point. Let's say, "If we had a tax system that captured a greater share of the increase in profits resulting from higher productivity (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more."
  - munksbeer 5mo ago
    > You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits. You mean our pension funds?
romanovcode 5mo ago
The gamble is that you either succeed or fail. If you try nothing you'll work until you die regardless. Current system: Work until you die. New system collapses: Work until you die. New system lucks out: Probably get returns (pension).
- rvba 5mo ago
  I doubt that a FAANG programmer from hacker news has to work till they die. You are doing something wrong. Current system isnt great but works. Just fear uncertainity doubt here.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    Not everybody on HN is in a comfy FAANG role
    - Normal_gaussian 5mo ago
      Id go so far as to say that the majority are not.
      - nervousvarun 5mo ago
        I'd go so far as to say the VAST majority are not. "back of the napkin" logic: ~2M FAANG employees (source: Gemini & this includes all types of employees...is your avg Amazon delivery driver regularly reading HN?) ~10M HN users (source: Gemini (via HN post :)) )
        rvba 5mo ago
        You mean 22k unique visitors per day making 13k comments and tons of web scraping bots? Data from 2022, so if we multiply it by 2 I would say 26k real hacker news users. Wasnt the stat that for 1 creator there are 10 commenters and 1000 viewers?
iLoveOncall 5mo ago
No, it's wrong. Amazon is worth $2.81T right now and only represents 4.03% of the S&P500. So a $1T share would represent less than 2% of the S&P500. This is significant for a single company, and 6% for 3 shit-tier companies (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) is even more significant, but we're far from "losing retirement if they go bust"-levels.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  I've recently learned a new finance term, "float", and I want to check if this makes a difference to this discussion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float I hear S&P 500 is weighted on float rather than on market cap, while Nasdaq 100 is based on market cap.
  - eru 5mo ago
    Yes, that's mostly correct. Many indices are weighted by something like free float.
  - outside1234 5mo ago
    Yes, and in this case, it means that SpaceX will only be approximately 0.1% of the SP500.
  - petesergeant 5mo ago
    One of the places you could have learned this would be the article itself: > most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.
  - HWR_14 5mo ago
    NASDAQ will be weighted by 3xfloat upto 100% when SpaceX goes public.
DanielHB 5mo ago
I don't know about your country, but in Sweden you can choose where part of your investment money (I think 40%) gets allocated. On top of that you can choose where 100% of your private pensions are allocated. Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets...
- f6v 5mo ago
  > Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets... And where will they go to?
  - saidnooneever 5mo ago
    maybe they will sell our pensions to BRICS :')
  - DanielHB 5mo ago
    I mean, the US public markets is about 49% of the worlds market so it is not like there aren't other options. Divesting doesn't mean moving everything out and pension funds also invest in non-public markets. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-market-by-region/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-m...

moffkalast 5mo ago

The reason they're doing that is because traditional European ponzi scheme pension systems don't work with shrinking populations, so actually we're working till we die in either case unless automation taxes pay for it.

saidnooneever 5mo ago
each few years the pension age rises 69 for me now, but it will likely go up further. much further up is beyond the average life expectancy...
- sscaryterry 5mo ago
  Yep, I'm sure in 25 years time, when I "should" retire, the retirement age will be 75, meaning another 10 years of work, so I have 35 left :) At least!
  - onemoresoop 5mo ago
    Too bad it's getting harder and harder to find employment after you're in your 50s
    - endemic 5mo ago
      Welcome to Costco, I love you.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  Which is why I have several different sets of savings for retirement. I have no choice about working now, but I hope to retire early in a few years, and my other savings just need to get me through until the official retirement income starts.
arkh 5mo ago
Originally pensions were created so people who could not work would not be destitute. The fact it became an all-inclusive all-year-round vacation reward is an anomaly which is getting corrected. Too bad for us we're the generations holding the bag.
- pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
  At 60/65 (women/men) years old pensioners could contribute a lot to society in their last decade or more of active life. Caring for grandchildren, running clubs and societies, giving their experience to local politics. At 60, women who had daughters at 30, whose daughters just had children would be well placed to help with childrearing. These sorts of things got lost in UK with equality and the pensions crisis.
  - MrMan 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
    There was a response about starting businesses. I consider those in their 60s to be capable of contributing to financial systems (eg businesses), I was just focusing on social aspects that have seemingly been lost with societal/political changes. So it was contribution in the non-financial sense I was particularly thinking of. I suppose when we look at things like the 4-day week, we imagine more time and energy available for social cohesion. Or I do at least.
Ray20 5mo ago
> unless automation taxes pay for it But this doesn't solve the problem in any way; it simply leads to production drop. I mean, this is literally the logic of every communist government in the 20th century. They had the same logic that "given the mechanization of agriculture, food practically produces itself; you just need to throw a seed in the ground and give it a couple of tractor rides, and the earth will do the rest. Therefore, we need a tax on such activity, because we have enough resources to feed everyone". In other words, it's literally a pure tax on automation. The results were mass deaths from starvation every single time.
- ab5tract 5mo ago
  There were so many contributing factors to those famines but my understanding is that it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping. There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with. Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.
  - Ray20 5mo ago
    > it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause. When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society. This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant. But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.
Arn_Thor 5mo ago
You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits. If we had a reasonable tax system that captured more of that surplus value (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more.
- Nasrudith 5mo ago
  Surplus value is a propaganda myth from Marx along with other trivially disproven delusions like LVT. Tell me what work is being done by whom in a wine cellar as the vintage matures after harvest? "Reasonable" is doing herculean amounts of work as usual, as it is implicitly operating under a thief's logic that the target didn't really deserve it anyway therefore if I steal all of it I will be justified. We see the same shit when regiemes 'nationalize' segments of the economy and then wonder why instead of miraculously getting better without the 'exploiters' things turn to shit and absolutely nobody wants to trade with them. Empathy such a foreign concept to them that they don’t understand why merchants refuse to trade with those who steal businesses wholesale. Whose only response when confronted about their crimes is lame whataboutisms and victim blaming.
  - Arn_Thor 5mo ago
    fine, strip out the words "surplus value" and "reasonable" if they truly blind you to the point. Let's say, "If we had a tax system that captured a greater share of the increase in profits resulting from higher productivity (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more."
- munksbeer 5mo ago
  > You've been told a lie. Productivity has increased every step of the way even as populations shrink and the elderly cohort grows. Most of those productivity gains, i.e. the added value produced by each worker, has gone to shareholders' profits. You mean our pension funds?

romanovcode 5mo ago

The gamble is that you either succeed or fail. If you try nothing you'll work until you die regardless. Current system: Work until you die. New system collapses: Work until you die. New system lucks out: Probably get returns (pension).

rvba 5mo ago
I doubt that a FAANG programmer from hacker news has to work till they die. You are doing something wrong. Current system isnt great but works. Just fear uncertainity doubt here.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Not everybody on HN is in a comfy FAANG role
  - Normal_gaussian 5mo ago
    Id go so far as to say that the majority are not.
    - nervousvarun 5mo ago
      I'd go so far as to say the VAST majority are not. "back of the napkin" logic: ~2M FAANG employees (source: Gemini & this includes all types of employees...is your avg Amazon delivery driver regularly reading HN?) ~10M HN users (source: Gemini (via HN post :)) )
      - rvba 5mo ago
        You mean 22k unique visitors per day making 13k comments and tons of web scraping bots? Data from 2022, so if we multiply it by 2 I would say 26k real hacker news users. Wasnt the stat that for 1 creator there are 10 commenters and 1000 viewers?

iLoveOncall 5mo ago

No, it's wrong. Amazon is worth $2.81T right now and only represents 4.03% of the S&P500. So a $1T share would represent less than 2% of the S&P500. This is significant for a single company, and 6% for 3 shit-tier companies (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) is even more significant, but we're far from "losing retirement if they go bust"-levels.

ben_w 5mo ago
I've recently learned a new finance term, "float", and I want to check if this makes a difference to this discussion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float I hear S&P 500 is weighted on float rather than on market cap, while Nasdaq 100 is based on market cap.
- eru 5mo ago
  Yes, that's mostly correct. Many indices are weighted by something like free float.
- outside1234 5mo ago
  Yes, and in this case, it means that SpaceX will only be approximately 0.1% of the SP500.
- petesergeant 5mo ago
  One of the places you could have learned this would be the article itself: > most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.
- HWR_14 5mo ago
  NASDAQ will be weighted by 3xfloat upto 100% when SpaceX goes public.

DanielHB 5mo ago

I don't know about your country, but in Sweden you can choose where part of your investment money (I think 40%) gets allocated. On top of that you can choose where 100% of your private pensions are allocated. Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets...

f6v 5mo ago
> Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets... And where will they go to?
- saidnooneever 5mo ago
  maybe they will sell our pensions to BRICS :')
- DanielHB 5mo ago
  I mean, the US public markets is about 49% of the worlds market so it is not like there aren't other options. Divesting doesn't mean moving everything out and pension funds also invest in non-public markets. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-market-by-region/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-m...