[FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

Whew! What a firehose. I do think there's a couple of fundamentals that are missed in your summary. It's touched on later in SteveS', Marcus', Roger's, and your own replies. But it isn't highlighted. So, I'd like to do that.

What *I* care about, here, is the thing Robinhood (even if backed by the hyper-elite Citadel) explicitly targets, access (and insight in-) to the playing field by the populace. This episode demonstrates that social media (for all the issues we have with it like American Insurrection and QAnon) is a participant. It's trivial for a moron like me to toss some extra cash into my Roth and play around with it. What's not so trivial is grokking the various technologies involved. If nothing else, this episode cracks open relatively mysterious things like the DTCC. (Or any of the details laid out in the thread.)

I think it's a bit hyperbolic to assert that rhetoric from people like AOC and EW is limited to "culture war". Sure, they rely on tribal identity. But they, literally, cannot speak and act like objective scientists. Its not what we pay them to do. That's not where their skills lie. (Maybe Warren a little more, but she's still a politician... is paid as a politician... was hired as a politician.) As politicians, they're coming at it, as they should.

Interpersonally, the whole thread (except maybe for the later part about opting out of NIH research and competitive collectives) seems to *assume* the only reason someone would purchase stock is to make a profit. And that's interesting, to me, because I've never bought stock to make a profit. I view it as loaning the company (my) money. The companies I think are doing good things get my money. The ones that aren't do not. [⛧] I'm privileged to do this because I don't have enough money for it to matter, at all. I briefly entertained buying GME, fully knowing I would be throwing that cash in the trash. But I don't care enough about the company and what it does.

Those 2 things seem to be missing from the thread, which is probably dead now, anyway. But the 1st is more important. Robinhood, especially by limiting trades and the Melvin bailout by Citadel, has shed a little light on the bureaucratic machinery involved. And that's a good thing, no matter which perspective you take. Those boils need some popping.


[⛧] Well, I also loan money to Evil corps so that they mail me their annual reports and I can attend their shareholder meetings. But, again, it's not an investment.

On 1/30/21 3:19 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> So is the above roughly correct?  Or do I misunderstand the structure badly enough that I am drawing the wrong macro-conclusion?

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ