Funny how people complain about federal debt, when the people complaining benefitted the most from the system. It is your children who will be paying the interest, while the older folk enjoyed a heated economy with high government spending. Economics is just as fundemental as physics. There are conservation laws that cannot be violated. However you can make other people hold the bag.
> There are conservation laws that cannot be violated.
Modern Monetary Theory on line 2 for you!
There is no possible sense in which "economics is just as fundamental as physics": the latter concerns the behavior of the physical world with or without humans in it; the former describes the dynamics of a human created system featuring humans interacting with each other and the physical world.
It's simple accounting. Net money in must be more than or equal to net money out when adjusting for any temporal changes in the face value of the assets. If you use more than you produce, either you are going to have to pay in the future, or in the case of the government, you can die and let your children pay.
No, I was under the impression that foundations must be established with a non profit goal in mind. I thought you cannot just give beneficiaries cash. I see I was mistaken and that private foundations allow you to treat the structure the same as a trust fund.
It will hit their balance sheet. For the debt to get the credit rating they want, facebook must commit to spending money on whatever the special purpose vehicle is doing.
The system is too big and complex for there to be a notion such as merit. We are animals and just like all animals we must fight to survive. Some people get lucky, some get unlucky. Merit is irrelevant.
And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people. Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
> And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people.
How does a system that rewards people for being good at what they do 'take away liberties'?
> Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
Who decides this now? Its the people who already have more and this has resulted in our existing system being rife with corruption at this very moment.
> How does a system that rewards people for being good at what they do 'take away liberties'?
Define being good at what you do. It's not such an easy thing. IMO the best way we can do such a thing is let markets and trade define what it means to be good at what you do. If you provide value to others and your customers are willing to pay you a premium, that means you are good at what you do.
It's hard to explain my way of thinking to you in a comment on an online forum, if you are willing to look it up, the word to search is libertarian.
> Who decides this now?
The system is currently a democratic one, with a large state. The people decide who gets to control the state. The problem is, the government has so much power, it motivates greedy people to try to control it. So the rich and greedy spent their money on manipulating the democratic vote in order to get control of the government and hopefully make the money they spent back with some extra.
In my opinion, the government should be weaker in terms of its monitary power and stronger in terms of its policy power. Less taxes and more enforcement of competition rules.
Competition doesn't have to be merit based. My view on competition rules is that it should prevent winners, period. If there is a company so good that they can effectively monopolize a market based on merit alone, they should still be punished. How is that advocating for merit?
Monopolies form for other reasons than 'because they are so good', and without exception, monopolies go on to produce less-good products over time while simultaneously preventing better products from entering the market.
So in practice, rules against monopoly are fully consistent with merit-based ideals.
We aren’t talking about penny stocks we are talking about a tech giant. At the scales that any ordinary investor is operating at there will be no liquidity issues with shorting it and if it is in your index fund the short and long positions will directly offset if you size it correctly leading you to have net zero exposure to SpaceX.
They're saying if the stock goes up and you get margin-called on the short, you have to sell index shares, you can't just annihilate the Tesla shares with the anti-Tesla shares and walk away.
I think most people trade synthetic, just because it's faster and you don't have to wait for settlements, but maybe that is different if you trade onshore (I am a foreign investor).
Anyway if you are synthetic your margin is most likely shared between shorts and long on the same instrument, so no, you wouldn't be called.
Why though. This is a dead serious question, what is the difference in using financial derivatives and prediction markets. Both are a transaction between parties that is influenced by some other underlying event. Why is it ok for the event to be a stock price, but not ok for it to be a sports match?
The financial derivatives are (supposed to be) regulated, there's laws against insider trading that keep the market fair. For sports betting there's laws against match fixing.
The prediction market CEOs on the other hand seem to be actively encouraging insider trading and match fixing, it's practically their main selling point.
What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the love of the game, regardless of social status and money.
If you want to live in this world, you have to trade your time and provide value to others. You shouldn't get a free pass because, just because you convinced yourself and the government that you're smarter than everyone else.
"Decoupling science from the state" is just bullshit from "government icky, taxation is theft" morons.
No, governments should definitely fund scientific research. When it is public it is the only guarantee that it will benefit everyone. Scientific research done by private entities is kneecapped by their financial interests (and be very sure they will bury any advance that jeopardize their financial interests).
How are radio telescopes and mars rovers in my interest? How would you know what is in my interest? I worked for my money so the person in the best position to judge what is in my interest is me. I am sorry for you if that is such a hard concept to understand.
You’re free to vote towards your goals, or move to countries which invest basically nothing in research. There’s plenty of them. I suspect you may not enjoy such great quality of life there.
In case it wasn’t a rhetorical question, they’re in your interest because through the process of building them we improve our understanding of the world, develop new technologies which the industrial system wouldn’t have backed, educate the next generation of engineers and scientists, and inspire the kids that will form the second next generation.
Private research already exists and works well in some fields, mine included. But public research is just as important since it can afford higher risk and longer scope. You can’t begin to count the startups that were created as spin-offs of university research groups.
Frankly, your particular interest is completely irrelevant.
Scientific research is of societal interest, even if your particular interest differ. The best you can do is vote for parties that promise to shut down scientific research, or find another group of likeminded morons and form such a party with them.
If you disagree with the concept of taxes, well, sucks to be you. May your desires never come to fruition, because life would be hell.
It would be great if we had line-item vetoes on our tax forms. However, we don't. You have to fund some things you don't like or agree with, and so do I, and so do the rest of the taxpayers.
That's just how taxes work. Like capitalism and democracy, taxes suck, but nobody has come up with adequate substitutes that check all the necessary boxes.
Why wouldn't I veto everything except the give me back my money tax? Now, I'm not actually ridiculously selfish asshole that doesn't think of others or the long term consequences of my choices, but it's a prisoners dilemma, with everybody else in your country, and defecting gives you money back. Cynically I don't think that'll work.
It wouldn't be a "Give money to anyone you like" kind of choice, but "Allocate money to these departments." Funding that you assign to one category would have to come out of another. Think basic research is a waste? Allocate less to NSF and more to foreign aid, or to something else that you prefer. Don't want to fund welfare? Move the money to defense, and so forth.
Obviously still open to gaming and abuse, but it's not as if the current system isn't.
Agree this reminds me of the level my Herman Hesse “The Glass Bead Game”. Academics and researchers have a moral duty to give back to the larger society that enables their endeavors .
"Being linked to the state" doesn't always mean being bound by social status and money, but rather receiving support in terms of social status and money. For example, artist support, even if government support is contingent on "the work conforming to LGBT trends," is better than nothing. How can a scientist's passion for science remain connected to the 99% of the public who have no interest in and know nothing about science? As for whether it's a low-quality paper or genuine research, that depends entirely on the conscience and ethics of the practitioners; no policy direction, left or right, can solve this. Left-wing fabrication is plagiarism, right-wing fabrication becomes illegal fundraising and financial fraud. Right-wing fabrication is far more destructive and harmful.
Funnily enough, the future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access their local market. The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
You are right that getting Chinese households to invest in the domestic (Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong) stock market is also a key goal that they're rolling out incentives for.
> The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
Nonsense.
Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods went up 4.6% in the first 11 months of 2025. That is the number with spending on automobiles excluded. A total of 24 million cars were sold in China in 2025 with vast majority being Chinese brands. If 24 million car purchases a year is "aren't buying their own products", then car industry doesn't exist in the US.
I don't think many equipment makers are Taiwanese. The names I am familiar with are KLA from the US. Tokyo Electron from Japan and ASML from Netherlands. TSMC buys equipment from them and build the fabs. The PRC wants complete vertical integration.
Funnily enough, linear algebra is a good example of how doing doesn't lead to understanding. Just calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors don't give you the geometric view of what is happening. Also talk to some engineering students who learned how to do matrix multiplication, but can't tell you what a vector is (it is not just something with magnitude and direction).
