also as long as im bitching about trying to learn accounting in a capitalistic hellscape, i wanna complain about the stock market.
so, the basic idea of investment was once upon a time, "i need money to start a business." "i will give you money to do that, if you give me some of the profits" "okay."
the stock market allegedly simplifies that process, and allows for massive amounts of people to invest in a company, and get profits, and a small share of voting power, in return. crowdfunding! yay!
except. except. people dont actually invest in companies in order to see that business flourish. they dont even KNOW what all theyve invested in because banks do all that shit now. the "stock" is just a really weird form of currency, and the rich assholes consolidate and do weird shit to still have all the voting power. the investment isnt for the investments sake, its with the hope that Number Go Up in the future, creating this stupid fucking infinite growth or bust problem we're running into.
again, i think that's obscene. i think its real fucked up to have money invested in the concept of money. i think if you crowdfund a shoe store or a computer lab or whatever the fuck, it should be because you actually want that thing to exist. what if kickstarter had fucking investment accounts like that. its garbage nonsense and im sure some fucking economist could tell me otherwise, but i cant see ANY practical reason to do it this way.
Oh No. You just put the cursed idea of a Kickstarter Perk resell market in my head, thanks.
to be fair, i'm like 80% sure that sort of "weird underground trading where it absolutely should not be" happens on neopets. not quite as bad as a crowdfunding site, but deeply strange, i'm sure.
Being more serious though, I think the big issue here is that on some level you're never gonna be able to fight against the (actually really reasonable tbh) urge to, like, if you have something that you know people are gonna really really want in the future, to hold onto it so you can get to have something Really Valuable Later, even if you don't care about it personally.
yeah, that's fair. i don't think that urge in and of itself is unreasonable either. i mean, i dont even think like ticket scalpers are doing something particularly heinous, in the grand scheme of things. its just like. once you reach a point where the value of the thing is entirely divorced from its actual utility, where people are only trading it amongst other traders and it never makes its way back out to someone who wants it, something has gone Horribly Wrong.
idk entirely how to solve the problem, perhaps some sort of time limit on things where they need to eventually actually be put to use or there's legal penalties. there's already some movement in that direction with housing. that wouldnt really solve the stock market in particular, since stocks dont have a physical utility and you cant really measure whether the person holding it actually "wants" it in any meaningful way, but honestly i think that whole system is such a dumpster fire it probably needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up.
