foldingmoney

>the tells are in pretty much every paragraph.

It's not just misleading — it's lazy. And honestly? That doesn't vibe with me.

[/s obviously]

as depressing as it is to say, i think it's a bit like the year is 1906 and we're complaining that these new tyres for cars they're making are bad because they're no longer backwards compatible with the horse drawn wagons we might want to attach them to in the future.

exactly. when you're new, virtually any type of lifting you do is going to create sufficient stimulus to trigger maximum muscle growth, because you're going from 0 to 1. unfortunately, since the only people that researchers can usually convince to participate in their studies are untrained, this has led to an enormous amount of junk studies where they try to extrapolate the results to people who are not untrained.

>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?

the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.

(not the Ada Lovelace book of the same name)

>My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence.

Evolution just means change, and it includes genetic drift. In common parlance, 'evolution' generally implies improvement, but that's not the technical definition.

iirc the pilot retirement age is at least in part due to radiation exposure.

>A more fair approach would be a special assessment on net worth.

how would a wealth tax incentivise people to save more and spend less?

>Higher interest rates won't stop greed.

we've just come off ~15 years of stubbornly low inflation. if the cause is greed, did companies only just become greedy in the last two years?

>It'll hurt families who need to buy a new car or need to sell their home though.

but it'll also stop punishing families who have savings. can't please everyone.

yeah won't allow promotion on either mobile or desktop

>If you take the entire sum of your own unique talents, and find a way to combine them properly, you can become extraordinary simply by finding a new way of looking at the world, even if the individual talents you have are not outstanding compared to others.

maybe i'm too pessimistic in the opposite direction but this kind of argument always sounds like appealing nonsense to me. appealing because we'd like it to be true, and because the number of possible combinations is great enough that it's not immediately obvious that it isn't true. but in reality, skills don't generally exist in isolation, and as long as we're still attaching some kind of objective qualitative value to being 'extraordinary' beyond just being unique, most people who are mediocre at two things are not going to significantly exceed being mediocre at their combination, whereas people who are extraordinary at one thing are (in my experience) quite often at least near-extraordinary at a few others.

Most of the people criticising my points are glossing over the key word of my post, which is listed. Not every business is listed, and those can be run for all sorts of reasons, but a listed business is a stock first and a business second. The stock is meant to enhance the owners' wealth (whether by going up, paying dividends, or both), and the business is just the means to that end. At least in theory, when that happens in a well regulated society, it turns out that the best way to make the owners richer is to give people what they want, and to allocate capital in the most efficient and productive way. Obviously reality may differ.

>Removing any other expense will be detrimental to the business, that is, make it work less well. Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends.

I'd say two things.

1. A listed business wouldn't exist in the first place (or in its present form) if owners hadn't been enticed to put up capital in the hope of getting dividends.

2. The purpose of a listed business is to pay the owners, not to produce goods or services - producing goods or services is just a means through which to pay the owners.

>If you'd like a tale about the 1970-80s then feel free to ask and I'll tell you what I saw. With luck, my memories aren't too shot.

Please do.