wilkommen (u/wilkommen)

wilkommen commented on Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity baldurbjarnason.com/2025/... · Posted by u/speckx

Gibbon1 · 19 days ago

There is an argument that common stock is just a type of fiat currency issued by a non bank corporation.

wilkommen · 5 days ago

I agree. Common stock has basically become a special currency that by design experiences high, sustained inflation, which wealthy people use to suck wealth out of the real economy.

If the rules were changed such that every stock has to offer a dividend at a fixed percentage of earnings, or some other kind of rules were put in place that would tie the value of common stock to the real economy, the whole system would change overnight.

wilkommen commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera

jjice · 5 days ago

I'm sure trading on margin is for some reason actually a positive concept for the economy at large for reasons I can't understand, but god damn does it feel like a bad idea to see huge spikes of debt to prop up what already feels like an absurdly out of balance market.

I don't know how to actually tell if the market is overvalued, but man when I see Palantir has a PE of like 500, Tesla almost 200, and Apple is like 35, I can't help but think there too much hype.

But I have literally no idea. Macroeconomics is way out of my wheelhouse, and I'm usually wrong.

Here's to an index fund...

wilkommen · 5 days ago

> I'm sure trading on margin is for some reason actually a positive concept for the economy at large for reasons I can't understand.

Don't underestimate yourself! A lot of times when something seems stupid and socially corrosive, it is. I don't think there is any reason for margin trading other than it makes a few people a lot of money.

wilkommen commented on Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity baldurbjarnason.com/2025/... · Posted by u/speckx

ratelimitsteve · 19 days ago

the stock price thing at least seems like Goodhart's law. Stock price is supposed to be a measure of investors' confidence in whether a company will make money, because (common, non-voting) stock is nothing more than entitlement to a share of the profits. How much will you pay me today for a tiny slice of the pie periodically over the lifetime of the company? The problem w this is twofold:

1) You can sell stock after you buy it, which isn't itself a problem but introduces a confounding variable. Now stock price is a reflection partly of investors' confidence that the company will make money, and partly of investors' confidence that the stock price will go up. These two obviously feed back into one another: if a company announces things that make it seem profitable the stock price will go up, which can drive another round of investing beyond what the announcement warrants just hoping that they can ride the wave upward and get off at the peak. I personally did this with dogecoin when it went on its bull run a few years back. Despite my wholehearted belief that DOGE was basically worthless, I saw the price going up so I threw some money at it with the intention of bailing as soon as I saw any substantial growth. I tripled my money in three days and greater fool'd my way out of that position.

2) The tail starts to wag the dog. The perceived health of the company should make stock prices go up, but the stock price going up ends up influencing the perceived health of the company. What other measure do we have? The answer of course is "several, but none as easily summarized and delivered as a single number that has either increased or decreased since yesterday".

wilkommen · 19 days ago

Another related truth is:

3) The stock of most companies actually doesn't entitle you to a share of the profits, because they either don't pay a dividend (very common), or if they do pay a dividend, the size of the dividend that the stock pays has no fixed relationship with the profitability of the company.

So if the stock doesn't entitle you to a meaningful voice in the company's affairs (which common stock doesn't), and it also doesn't entitle you to a share of the profits, then from the perspective of the stockholder, there is no way to calculate its value on fundamentals alone, because there are no fundamentals! Common stock is a digital piece of paper no more intrinsically valuable than a rare baseball card. So in the current environment, with stocks being what they are, the value of all stocks are calculated based solely on people's expectations of what others will pay for them.

wilkommen commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

thrance · a month ago

Abundance liberalism still seems like a poor attempt to curb the populist left to me.

Let's look at it from a high-level. "Fixing" the housing criris would require a major depreciation of housing assets. Does anyone believe the companies and individuals holding onto multiple homes will accept this without fighting? Of course not. The same people that are arguably responsible (directly or indirectly) for the housing crisis have a vested interest in it persisting. And we know how powerful their voices are with the establishment democrats, the ones this ad-hoc "abundance" movement defends.

There is no simple solution to this crisis, it will require something more radical than just tweaking some numbers on a spreadsheet.

wilkommen · 25 days ago

I have the same view on it as you. The "abundance" people are carrying water for the establishment while trying to co-opt disaffected voters (who might otherwise find their way to the populist left) into a way of seeing things that won't meaningfully alter the status quo. Any solution to the real problems our nation is facing will require a shift of who holds power. The "abundance" folks are doing anything to distract people from the fact that this is all about power.

wilkommen commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

wilkommen · 25 days ago

Monopolistic activity and corporate consolidation are driving up prices in many industries in the United States. Why wouldn't corporate consolidation be a major factor in driving up housing prices, like it is in so many other sectors? I am suspicious of journalists like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein because their solutions seem to punch down on municipal governments and homeowners instead of punching up at our nation's corporate masters and elite class, who would be much more threatened by effective antitrust action against homebuilders than they would by a movement to deregulate zoning in cities. I am open to the idea that excessively restrictive zoning could be a part of the problem, maybe even a big part. But I am skeptical of anyone who wants to act like excessive regulation is the sole driver of skyrocketing housing prices. It doesn't hold water to me.

wilkommen commented on Fintech dystopia fintechdystopia.com/... · Posted by u/LasEspuelas

willguest · a month ago

> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions.

Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.

I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.

I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.

My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.

My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.

wilkommen · a month ago

I think you got it in one. Eventually there will have to be a sudden "falling off the cliff", but the main question is what will happen after that. If the right ideas are in the air, it's possible that the opportunity that the crisis presents could be seized for something good, similar to the way the Great Depression created the opening for the New Deal. The progressivism movement of the 1920s laid the ideological groundwork and ensured that the right ideas were in the air when the crisis hit. The best we can do is the same - make sure that the right ideas are in the air and be ready to pounce when the crisis hits and everyone is suddenly asking "how could something like this happen?"

wilkommen commented on It’s your friends who break your heart theatlantic.com/magazine/... · Posted by u/wallflower

enlyth · 3 years ago

You reminded me I really really want to get a cat. I have to ask my landlord for permission though and I'm afraid of them rejecting it.

wilkommen · 3 years ago

It's worth it, you'll be glad.

wilkommen commented on Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader cnbc.com/2022/03/07/steve... · Posted by u/ksec

svantana · 3 years ago

Artist Jenny Holzer wrote in 1999: "Monomania is a prerequisite of success", that quote has stuck with me. Most people (myself included) get distracted and change focus easily, which I think is healthy, but being long-term obsessed probably helps your chances of being really successful in late capitalism.

wilkommen · 3 years ago

I never thought about it like this. This really helped me, thanks.

wilkommen commented on Russians are trying to flee – data from Google Trends economist.com/graphic-det... · Posted by u/awb

selfhoster11 · 3 years ago

Independently of whether it's a rationalisation or not, it might be the actual reality of the situation. Maybe WW3 actually _is_ needed to unseat him (though I hope it's not).

wilkommen · 3 years ago

Well if that’s true then we just shouldn’t try to unseat him.

wilkommen commented on The war on gifted education fasterplease.substack.com... · Posted by u/paulpauper

qiskit · 3 years ago

Ideally, the basics ( reading, writing, arithmetic, etc ) should all be done at home with their stay at home moms ( or dads ). Once they reach a certain level, then schooling should start ( maybe 7th grade or high school even ). Not only would that be better for the kids, it would be better for family bonding and community building.

But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.

wilkommen · 3 years ago

I was homeschooled until 7th grade. If your parents aren't monsters maybe it can be good. But many if not most parents who choose to homeschool their kids are zealots of some kind or another, or have serious control/paranoia/narcissim issues. Exposure to people outside the home, who aren't hand-picked by the child's parents can go a long way towards teaching the child that there are people in the world who are different from their parents. I think that would have helped me a lot.