So what? One person isn't "most people". It's quite possible that one person has certain insights that the market generally doesn't have or isn't accounting for. I've made 20x what an index fund would have returned since 2002 because I've been weighting all of my investments heavily in tech, because I've believed in the growth potential for a long time.
This sort of logic reminds me how people like to say things like "Everyone thinks they're an above average driver". Yes, it might be true that many 80% of people think they're above the median skill, but that doesn't mean there aren't actual above average drivers out there.
> Yes, it might be true that many 80% of people think they're above the median skill, but that doesn't mean there aren't actual above average drivers out there.
An observation form Nick Maggiulli:
> Instead, I am going to argue that you shouldn’t pick stocks because of the existential dilemma of doing so. The existential dilemma is simple—how do you know if you are good at picking individual stocks? In most domains, the amount of time it takes to judge whether someone has skill in that domain is relatively short.
> For example, any competent basketball coach could tell you whether someone was skilled at shooting within the course of 10 minutes. Yes, it’s possible to get lucky and make a bunch of shots early on, but eventually they will trend toward their actual shooting percentage. The same is true in a technical field like computer programming. Within a short period of time, a good programmer would be able to tell if someone doesn’t know what they are talking about.*
[…]
> But, what about stock picking? How long would it take to determine if someone is a good stock picker?
> An hour? A week? A year?
> Try multiple years, and even then you still may not know for sure. The issue is that causality is harder to determine with stock picking than with other domains. When you shoot a basketball or write a computer program, the result comes immediately* after the action. The ball goes in the hoop or it doesn’t. The program runs correctly or it doesn’t.* But, with stock picking, you make a decision now and have to wait for it to pay off. The feedback loop can take years.
> And the payoff you do eventually get has to be compared to the payoff of buying an index fund like the S&P 500. So, even if you make money on absolute terms, you can still lose money on relative terms.
> More importantly though, the result that you get from that decision may have nothing to do with why you made it in the first place. For example, imagine you bought GameStop in late 2020 because you believed that the price would increase as a result of the company improving its operations. Well, 2021 comes along and the price of GameStop surges due to the wallstreetbets inspired short squeeze. You received a positive result that had nothing to do with your original thesis.
[…]
> This is the existential crisis that I am talking about. Why would you want to play a game (or make a career) out of something that you can’t prove that you are good at? If you are doing it for fun, that’s fine. Take a small portion of your money and have at it. But, for those that aren’t doing it for fun, why spend so much time on something where your skill is so hard to measure?
[…]
> I know I won’t convince every stock picker to change their ways, and that’s a good thing. We need people to keep analyzing companies and deploying their capital accordingly. However, if you are on the fence about it, this is your wake up call. Don’t keep playing a game with so much luck involved. Life already has enough luck as it is.
If it were illegal to generate a sunset, people would absolutely seek it out to generate a sunset, if just as an act of civil disobedience. Look at how people reacted to being told sharing a number is illegal[1]. Why would they act differently about an illegal computation?
Yes, but what if you puked and then kept eating? Hunger games joked about it but its not too far off the nose. You can find wanton consumption everywhere to some degree. Not everyone has the willpower to tighten the belt for themselves. Most of the time its money that keeps them in check from going on benders or being stupidly consumptive in some way.
Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
I suppose if you advertise a job for $20/hr and a bunch of people show up and apply for the job, you're probably not going to start advertising the job for $40/hr instead.
And whether $20/hr is a "living wage" depends entirely on your circumstances. If you're a solo adult you can probably swing it. If you have 3 kids you will probably be on food stamps. Should Amazon pay people with kids more? Or only hire single people with no dependents?
I agree the deal from when minim wage was established is broken. A wage you can't raise a family on is not a living wage, as it results in a dead/old age society, not a living society.
As such, this part of the new deal should be reverted as well "We are relaxing some of the safeguards of the anti-trust laws. The public must be protected against the abuses that led to their enactment, and to this end, we are putting in place of old principles of unchecked competition some new Government controls. They must, above all, be impartial and just. Their purpose is to free business, not to shackle it" since business has not held up their side of the new deal.
> What's a family? Should it be 2-3 kids max, and then you're on your own?
As far as the specific concept of a living wage, yes.
> A solo adult who doesn't want kids is going to have far lower expenses and "living wage" than a single mother with 6 kids.
The solo adult can enjoy the extra money. And if they start a family later they'll have extra savings to build on. The baseline should be bringing everyone up to the level that they could afford a family, whether they have one or not. We have more than enough productivity and wealth to make this happen.
For someone with 6 kids, they need help from other sources. That goes beyond living wage territory.
Keep in mind you are getting one side of the story. The company seems to be claiming that the franchisee sold the sets and (perhaps) did not pay the consignor for the sales. And that the consignor moved his sets out of the store.
> That said, after ownership of the Salem store changed, we thoroughly documented and assessed current inventory. A few days later, we became aware of the previous arrangement, and compared our inventory assessment to the limited documentation provided by the consignor. It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
> A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.
I read through all of this too. It just seems that 1. why would the consignor decline? 2. if he did decline, especially "in writing", then why not post proof?
As you suggest, maybe the reason is more complicated, e.g. some was sold, consignor not happy to have what's left returned and no compensation for what was sold, so refused to just have the smaller amount of stuff returned. If so that could have been much more clearly expressed in this letter. And again they could just post the correspondance.
Difficult to imagine why it would be declined. Did they perhaps insist on unreasonable conditions for doing so, such as fully indemnifying them in the matter? (Just wild speculation on my part since for whatever reason neither party seems interested in providing a full, clear, objective telling of events.)
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