Investors buy on the rumours and sell on the news. They make money as long as the numbers go up when they’re long and down when they’re short.

I think John Deere is seen as a pretty dominant company in its industry. It locks in tons of farmers into its repair/service program.

I don’t know anything about the specifics of the layoffs but I’d imagine the reasoning was communicated to investors.

No, it’s also bad for shareholders. Shareholders need to see the numbers go up in order to get returns on their investment, either in the form of buybacks or dividends. A company that isn’t seen as worth investing in will show a decline in share price, causing shareholders to lose money.

No, it goes on the left so that you don’t need to put down your coffee to shoot the TV!

Yes, these are Veblen goods. People buy them to signal status. The more expensive they are — and the more conspicuous they look — the stronger the signal they send.

And building liquified natural gas terminals to receive shipments in the US after getting caught with their pants down by Putin. I’m pretty sure Putin’s propaganda machine had a lot to do with Germany’s pullback from nuclear.

Bermuda Triangle!

If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative to human-sacrificing Bronze Age god-kings, I’m going to call you out as being a little bit unrealistic. Government isn’t just an idea, it’s a technology, and it relies on other technologies (communication, record-keeping, organization) to function.

The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other. Where things started getting difficult is when agriculture paved the way for population explosions.

Millions of deaths compared to what alternative? The difficulty with attributing causes in history is that we have no ability to conduct controlled experiments.

I delivered the newspaper when I was 13. Is that such an alien idea? I used the money to buy my first computer.

There is no Biden election gamble. US presidential elections happen every 4 years whether Biden (or any other president) likes it or not.

It’s a Macron election gamble because he actually called the election himself to try to benefit himself. This might turn out to backfire.

Yes, it’s actually huge. Especially for maintaining a weapon as complicated as an Abrams tank. If it can be repaired close to the front lines then that has the potential to cut days off the turnaround time compared to towing it over to Poland.

Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

*Uninstall Windows, problem solved.

FTFY

It makes me so depressed thinking about how many thousands of Ukrainian lives could’ve been saved by just giving Ukraine full and enthusiastic support immediately instead of dragging it out this long.

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.

“The other guys are even worse” is never a good excuse. That sort of thinking leads to a downward spiral; a race to the bottom.

It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.

Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.

If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.

How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).

Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).