“Socially Responsible Investing”, or how I told you so doesn’t pay the bills.

BFS : Roomate (a nice young lad named Eric from Vancouver) says that you very much for the articles!i Side question – do you still fuck with NYSE / TSX stocks anymore?
YEG : Eric’s very welcome. No, I gave up having any skin in the game of the fiat stock morass in 2013 when I “went digital”. I still follow some tech stocks on the NASDAQ, however, if mostly for shits and giggles. Why do you ask ?

BFS : Just curious really. I was tempted to buy Lockheed, Northrop Gummam and Raytheon stocks last night – but I resisted the urge to get blood all over my hands.ii
YEG : No such thing as a blood-free stock, nor blood-free assets of any kind besides. Your house is built on a sacred native burial site, your solar panel company stock supports toxic electronics production that when implemented still require balancing loads from sub-optimally operating coal plants, your fast food company stock makes people fat and chops down rain forests, and the mining of your precious metals results in arsenic pollution of groundwater. All things considered, TBTF defense contractors are hardly the most egregious environmental or humanitarian offenders. Doesn’t make them a good investment either way, but suffice to say that blood’s on your hands whether you see it or not, so might as well live life to the fullest, id est get paid and have fun. If you’re looking for stock picks, AMD, SHCAY, AMZN, and possibly even MSFT would be at the top of my personal list. Not sure I could recommend anything else out there at the moment, but then again anything other than tech stocks aren’t really my speciality.iii

BFS : Very true – I just had a feeling they were going to spike today, and they did just that!iv
YEG : Haha as I learned a few years ago, “I told you so” doesn’t pay for fine wines, fast cars, or the kid’s college tuition!v

BFS : C’est vrai.

___ ___ ___

  1. Eric wants to do his 3rd year law school dissertation on Bitcoin regulation, so I gladly sent him the following :

    http://trilema.com/2012/the-reasons-why-bitcoin-securities-cant-be-regulated-by-the-sec/
    http://trilema.com/2013/the-future-of-bitcoin-regulation/
    http://trilema.com/2013/the-state-banking-and-bitcoin/
    http://trilema.com/2014/interacting-with-fiat-institutions-a-guide/
    http://trilema.com/2014/the-idea-that-bitcoin-is-a-sovereign/
    http://trilema.com/2015/ok-so-what-is-bitcoin-disrupting/

    All of which are from Mircea Popescu’s blog, wherefrom you’ll nowhere find a deeper analysis of the present state of affairs nor a more prescient perspective of what’s to come, be it regarding Bitcoin, politics, or pretty much everything else besides.

  2. What my bon copain is looking for here might more properly be termed “Socially Responsbile Investing,” or SRI for short, which is ultimately little more than a far-reaching scam very much in the “carbon” vein, and one perpetrated to fleece the very same chumps, it so happens. SRI is pretty much how libertards excuse the fact that they can’t get a good ROI to save their lives BUT AT LEAST THEY’RE SAVING LIVES IN AFRICA. And since we’re all obviously equal, transfer payments to him are basically food for me. So win!

    The only socially responsible investment is the one that hedges, or even leverages, the coming fiat hyperinflation.

  3. In this sense, I’m more of a West Coast printing press connaisseur than an East Coast one.

    asciilifeform: In USA they keep 2 printing presses around, for redundancy, 1 in East (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc), 1 in West (Crapple et al)

    But still, why not AAPL, that on which the overwhelming majority of my pre-Bitcoin fortunes were built ? To quote :

    pete_d: Pretty sad that MSFT is the new AAPL anyways. CRAAPL can’t make own Cinema Display anymore* while the house that Gates built has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzMLA8YIgG0 **

    phf: For Apple people here, I guess, ben_vulpes? [tweet] “Touch Bar runs watchOS, and macOS sends it framebuffer data over USB. This presumably then relays multitouch events back to macOS.”
    pete_d: That’s one way to ensure your box isn’t compatible with unofficial OSen : give it two! Want to use gentoo or even so much as OSX10.8 ? Enjoy using an external keyboard on the airplane because there’s no other way to use F-keys.

    asciilifeform: Paying the crapple tax and then running linux is epic waste. Whatever point there is to buying the box, it is to use the sun/sgi-like vertical integration. (I can’t think of any other). Why the fuck would you buy the world’s least-documented x86 box to gentoo on..?
    pete_d: For aesthetes, it’s not what’s in the box, it’s… the box.

    asciilifeform: Mega-aesthetics when half of the peripherals dun work.
    pete_d: You clearly dun get fashion. That half the peripherals don’t work is ~ironic~. See ? Zhe didn’t even want them to work. So, they don’t. It’s a match made in heaven.***

    asciilifeform: http://www.thetoysavenue.com/ gallery/ vtech-learning -laptop /vtech _learning _laptop_ 1.jpg << Nah, this here is the correct laptop for such folx
    pete_d: Too poorfaggy.

    Just like everything else, design matters. And Tim Cook is a creativity-crushing accountant who literally takes it in the butt not an autocratic dreamer who parked his car in handicap spots because fuck you that’s why. There’s a difference.

    ___ ___

    Cook & co. are so robotically efficient and devoid of soul – Steve’s je ne sais quoi having been ruthlessly cleansed for a half-decade now –  that they’re now pawning off LG branded displays as ACD stand-ins for preferred accessories for the new MBP. The halo is gone now. High, high above it rests.

    ** The salient point regarding the Windows Surface Studio isn’t just that it’s a sharp-looking and at least mildly unconventional bit of kit, but also that it’s aimed up-market specifically at design professionals. These, after all, are the tastemakers that Apple spent forever (successfully!) courting but has since eschewed for the better part of a decade in favour of redditards who wear smartwatches and care passionately about how many black faces are in corporate advertising. That Microsoft is picking up the torch is surprising to say the least. Who among you thought that “the next Apple” would be from Redmond ?

    *** The other thing about “half the peripherals dun work” being meaningless and irrelevant to the discussion of consumerism is that most of the hedgehogs using Apple products are buying Apple-branded peripherals that do work, which speaks to the vertical integration point, but not the functionality of an arbitrarily sized pool of arcane peripherals.

  4. He’s right. They were all +5-7% following the dissolution of the US two-party system.
  5. FTR, if the kid goes to post-secondary at all – which I’m certainly not averse to for as long as there are no safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other associated development-stunting protocols – I’ll be paying out of pocket. The Canadian Federal Government “generously” offers Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) but I simply can’t get my head around making a 20-year deal with the devil. Obviously, my fellow upper-middle-classmen think I’m looney tunes for not taking such a “deal,” but I don’t see how you can make deals with non-entities. And a bureaucratic beast topped by a revolving door of social media personalities does not an entity make. Until the Prime Minister makes a PGP key and gets in the WoT, a sensible man cannot possibly enter into even a modest contractual agreement spanning decades with a counterparty no more trustworthy than a Tramborghini.  

6 thoughts on ““Socially Responsible Investing”, or how I told you so doesn’t pay the bills.

  1. mh says:

    “or the kid’s college tuition!”

    http://btcbase.org/log/2016-11-12#1566376

    Maybe it’s finding a place that has more sane people than most other places.

    • Pete D. says:

      I guess no one cancelled the yeshiva.

    • mh says:

      Anyway…

      I lived a decent chunk of my life in a country (and a few other countries for that matter..) where the notion of egalitarian is as foreign and out of place in the desert as the pale skinned northerners who are there to help pierce the sky with glass and metal.

      Visiting home, or even a few times online, people would question my morals just by living there. “How can you support and live in such a place? They take people’s passports. They let people die in the heat. It’s slave labor. Human rights abuse. Why do you support such a thing? How can you ..*insert moral high ground spew*.. ?”

      Well, did ya look at the entire human civilisation?

      I’d just ask them what phone they had. Iphone? Oh, how’s that assmbled? Where? Under which conditions? “yeah, but that’s not the same”…

      What pants are you wearing? Where were they sewn and coloured? Oh in Bangladesh by guys standing in formaldehyde in knee height? ..

      Oh, that’s right, it was out of your sight. I suppose your moral high ground isn’t high enough to spectate it.

      I used to give examples of the terrors of “the hegemony” and how under no circumstance was their “infringements” any better, but way way worse.

      People, even stupid ones, related rather quickly when pointing out the specific items they owned and what the life-cycle of such an item looks like.

    • Pete D. says:

      That leftism is a stronghold of the puerile, the infantile, and the feminine of mind is an ancient observation. Sorta why Babel had to fall.

  2. […] don’t own ? Fuck conflicts of interest,iii get skin in the game! So find a two or three prospective all-stars in an industry you understand and roll the dice.iv You might not win, but at least you’ll […]

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