> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
> In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
The entire economy is a pyramid scheme: the expenses of some people (shelter, food, clothing, entertainment, etc) are the income of other people (landlords/mortgages/property taxes, farmers/grocers, etc). It's why, during economic downturns, personal virtues (saving) can become vices from macroeconomic perspective: if everyone is saving, no one is spending, and so producers/suppliers lose their income (and generally start laying people off, which causes more saving / less spending).
At any given point in time, if no one spends, then no one has income.
This was the 'innovation' of Keynes in the 1930s: use government spending to 'induce' demand to get the cycle going again:
For a stocks point of view: if no one is currently saving, then those that need income will lose it. At any given point there are folks who need to save/buy and those that need to spend/sell.
> The logic is that the markets will almost certainly go up
The markets go up because people buy expecting that the markets will go up, which causes sellers to increase their price because they expect people will pay more because of FOMO, which people still buy because they expect the market to go up further.
I suppose it's the juxtaposition of saying "I think open source is important" and then building your business criticality on the least open software systems on Earth.
In most organisations which are building on open source there's a pragmatism that some elements ( routers, BIOS, phones ) won't adhere to the philosophy. But it's completely different to make unknowable, solidly opaque systems the core tools of a business.
Originally a zero-day exploit was one that was found by crackers on the first day of release of a software product. Like finding a licence crack for a new Microsoft program on the day it went on sale.
There used to be fierce competition to find such an exploit within those 24 hours, and great kudos for those who did.
Nowadays a zero-day can apparently be found years after release, which makes no sense.
Hmm… okay. What about routes that are under-served? Or where Ryanair is much cheaper?
Look, we hate Ryanair, everybody does. The seats are cramped. They keep piping stupid announcements. Dark patterns. Etc. But if we want to see family, it’s Ryanair or another airline. With a family of 3, it’s either 400€ or 900€, so we put up with it.
It used to be pretty easy going if you just paid up for everything you need. I preferred it over the traditional Airlines because with them you have to suffer first before you build enough points for fast boarding etc. With Ryanair you could just pay and if you did you would be given no hassle by the staff. Even onboard food and drink prices were pretty ok.
But recently they've reduced the carryon bag to unusable proportions and their staff is ever ruder and pushy.
"Profit" is surplus money that could have been invested earlier in R&D, product development, employee benefits or customer service.
Instead, many companies decide to forego developing themselves for the 'advantage' of a 'record profits' headline and the privilege of giving a quarter of the surplus away as tax.
The price of a growing business should go up because it has more options to create returns for shareholders.
Use Aldi (revenue ~$120B) as an example. Do you think a person would be a shmuck to buy a slice of it now versus when revenue was $1 million? If not, why not? Your answer will help understand why stock has value even without voting control or dividends.
Google and Meta have a reasonably similar corporate structure. Most of the voting power is concetrated in the hands of a few. They have both done very well since their IPOs. Do you exclude these companies from your portfolio?
The novel aspect is that it is being conducted by a satellite, rather than a ground station. Which is an escalation in sophistication which makes counter-jamming much more difficult and also gives global reach to the jammer.
And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.
It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.
reply