>I have heard a large impetus for the RTO push was to prop up commercial real estate. Permanent WFH would change the value of trillions of dollars of properties and reshape the commercial centers of cities.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
Those CEOs don't exist in isolation. There are boards of directors. Most tech companies have additional VC funding. The biggest myth of modern business is that the CEO is the boss. They're not. They're more often the person entrusted to curate the company which is ultimately for the interests of those who own it.
And those people own other things too. Sometimes they own commercial real estate directly. Sometimes they're just investing in it. But they all rub elbows with those who do own it. They sit on boards together. They have common interests and let me tell you -- those interests ain't about what's good for you and me.
>They could require government ID to sign up and an adult sponsor to certify accounts for kids. Plus a limit on how many accounts an adult can sponsor.
Requiring all online account creation to go through some government vouching system sounds far worse for privacy than OS doing age verification.
I see no such claim that comment said that the parent verifies the child. That that means that the parent must be verified. I don't see that approach having any chance of succeeding. It would be a much more invasive process to both verify the parent and the relationship with the child.
The points:
1. No new law is required, FB could do this voluntarily.
2. Meta has a vested interest in a low-friction solution that maintains engagement.
>Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively.
How does getting the OS to do age verification "get rid of anonymity online" or help "sell ads"? Assuming the verification is implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read), it's probably one of the more privacy friendly ways to implement age verification, that's also more secure than an "are you over 18" prompt on every website.
You've accepted the overton window shift that age verification is an inevitability and that we need to give up information to the operating system because any other way would violate our privacy! It's naive to see this internationally coordinated effort to "save the children" as anything other than the temperature in the pot being turned up.
> implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read)
What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
>You've accepted the overton window shift that age verification is an inevitability and that we need to give up information to the operating system because any other way would violate your privacy! It's naive to see this internationally coordinated effort to "save the children" as anything other than the temperature in the pot being turned up.
If you're trying to imply Meta is behind the "overton window shift", that's plainly not the case. The popular sentiment that smartphones and social networks are harming kids (thereby necessitating bans/verification) has been boiling over for a while now (eg. "The Anxious Generation, 2024", and the recent social media bans in Australia), and meta is just trying to get ahead of this with laws that favor them.
>What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities than web usb or web bluetooth , both of which gets some pushback here but nowhere as much an API that returns a number.
> If you're trying to imply Meta is behind the "overton window shift", that's plainly not the case
No, I'm saying the exact opposite: Meta is just one player in a campaign from intelligence agencies and other tech companies who want to normalize mandated prompts in your OS that collect information. Right now it's "just a DOB field bro" turns into "well... people can lie with the DOB field, let's just add a ID check step in that dialog" and build on it from there. Of course the pot has been boiling for a while and it's not just Meta looking for regulatory capture.
> Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities
I don't care about likelihoods, this "feature" inherently introduces more risk and for something I don't even want on my computer. Even a small chance that this can be abused is unacceptable.
I find it odd when people write off policies as using “save the children” or “protect women” as if this isn’t something people are really capable of thinking. You fail to understand why the Overton window has shifted because you fail to understand people really are worried about their children
I don't know of any surveillance state act that used "protect women" as their top line, but maybe I missed it.
> because you fail to understand people really are worried about their children
No, I completely understand but that doesn't give anyone the right to start mandating that we give up our privacy in pursuit of that. That's sorta the joke with "save the children", it's meant to tug at your emotions and make you look like a bad person for not consenting to massive overreach.
Okay, so not every single person pushing surveillance is a bad faith actor and there are some parents in there who truly want the best for children. How does that change the substance of my point about overreach?
I don't even know if that was much of a "reversal".
Blue states were paternalistic over both your property (business and social gathering shutdowns) and your body (masking, social distancing enforcement), while red states (particularly Texas, Florida) were very laissez-faire for both.
What's perplexing about this is that research has generally correlated higher amygdala activity (fear/worry) with political conservatism, and lower amygdala activity with political progressivism, but in this case, the effect seemed almost inverted.
In that case, I imagine that the response of mask mandates wasn't out of fear but was done do to the obvious benefit in controlling a disaster. The anti-masking movement is also I suspect a fear response. People are afraid of change, especially extremely visible change
When progressives become the status quo, they turn into conservatives. There's a meme going around about a 1950s Soviet communist vs. a 2020s American communist, and their diametrically opposed views on things like LGBTQ and immigration.
>Without all the government subsidies, a pound of ground beef would be closer to $30-$40 today instead of the $8-$10/lb it is now
Source? That seems implausibly high.
Using your $38B/year subsidy figure gets us $112/year in subsidies per American. There's no way you can get $30 unsubsidized price from that unless you think the average American only eats beef once a week.
Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.
Average includes vegans, and I'm pretty sure they eat it less than once per week. It’s just how much meat divided by population. The previous comment shows that the consumption is not anywhere close to equally distributed.
The subsidies are also paid by vegans. Both the average meat consumption and average subsidy can be multiplied by the total population to get the total.
A better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
>That is the scheme described: how to short squeeze retirement funds who do not even have shorts for fun and profit.
How many retirement funds use the nadasq 100 as the benchmark? The only thing that's really objectionable is the 5x multiplier, and so far as I can tell that's confined to the nasdaq 100 index. If the funds use a sane index without such shenanigans, it won't be affected nearly as much, and the whole debate just turns into the perennial question on whether [company] is overvalued and whether passive investors are being taken for a ride.
Most indexes will be affected. Two of the most common indices - the S&P500 and DJIA - are cross-exchange and include Nasdaq stocks. The biggest market cap companies on the market (MAG7) are all on the Nasdaq exchange and comprise about 35% of the S&P.
Is this grey cause it's wrong? They are all on Nasdaq; and also around 35% of S&P. What am I missing? Is it that the "Most indexes" part is wrong (cause there are more than a few thousand ETF)?
Nasdaq, Inc. is a company with a stock market ("the NASDAQ") and an index "Nasdaq 100"). They want SpaceX to be listed on their market, because they like having more things on their market for all the usual reasons. They are, apparently, offering to manipulate their index to win the listing.
Accordingly, anything that uses or tracks this particular index (Nasdaq 100), such as the QQQ fund, will potentially have to pay for this manipulation.
Anybody not holding or indexing to the Nasdaq 100 index contents will not particularly care and will not really gain or lose any more money than on an ordinary trading day. In particular, this will have zero effect on stocks that merely trade on the NASDAQ exchange.
Indexing to the Nasdaq 100 is pretty uncommon, outside of QQQ, so most people will not care.
What?! This absolutely affects more than Nasdaq 100 / QQQ.
The index is just a function of the stocks. It only moves if the underlying stocks move. Rebalancing Nasdaq will cause selling in the 100 companies that aren’t SpaceX. And those stocks are held elsewhere too…
The Nasdaq 100 shares 79/100 stocks with the S&P. So if those stocks move (probably down because they’re being sold so SpaceX can get bought) pretty sure that's gonna affect anyone exposed to those companies. Whether that’s directly or through other index ETFs. Many of which have a huge concentration in Mag7 right now, for example.
What you're saying is 100% correct, I fail to see how people are not aware of it.
We're talking about a $1.75 trillion (as per the article) company that is about to enter (a part) of the most important capital market in the world at a distorted price, of course that the market as a whole is going to become distorted, money and capital (and the accompanying money and capital signals) are one of the most "liquid" things in a modern economy (if not the most liquid), once you start putting a wrong price tag on them then those accompanying money and capital signals will for sure start doing their thing, imo that was one of the main lessons we should have taken from what happened back in 2008-2009.
Sorry, a lot of the comments around this have been really badly written and it's been hard to tell what they're actually arguing.
I countered a different argument (which does appear elsewhere in this thread). You are absolutely right that there will be general price distortion from this mess. I disagree that it will be extremely bad, but I do agree that it's a problem and needs attention. It's just been difficult to tell that this is what some comments have meant to discuss, instead of the more basic issues others have been talking about.
I don’t see that in the article. The only thing I see is about S&P is where they mention that the S&P 500’s rules would prevent this manipulation if SpaceX were added to that index. But that’s not being proposed.
That makes as much sense as "people buy iPhones because they own Apple shares in their 401k (it's #2 in the S&P 500) and want to pump the stock". At an individual CEO level it doesn't make sense, for similar reasons. The CEO and the company can reap massive savings from not leasing an office, which is presumably also good for their careers and make the board happy. On the other hand the individual benefit that the CEO can get by ever so slightly increasing demand for CRE is negligible.
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