Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

@mikebabyak @morax @jkosseff It's important to recipe site *owners* because it increases their search engine rank. They started doing it because Google's algorithm deprioritized short results. So, by adding all that text at the beginning, they found that they ended up higher on the results list when people searched for that recipe.

@freemo
> I can share my ownership to someone else regardless of what the company wants

As I understand it, many private companies require board approval for major share sales for exactly this reason.

> they can choose to offer it to the investor they want at a discount from public

And they almost inevitably choose to use this power to offer it to fellow rich people or past investors, rather than use it to impose any kind of litmus test for positive intentions. Thus helping to rigidify the existing wealth structure.

@freemo The difference is that a private company (generally) gets to choose who invests. They can choose to only work with people who have the long-term good of the company in mind.

In a publicly-traded company, there is no such control. Anyone with the cash can invest. And stock market investors tend to have zero interest in the long-term good of the company; all they care about is getting a return on their investment as quickly as possible (see, for example, the very existence of arbitrage trading). After all, they can sell their stake any time almost effortlessly, so that, along with the massive dilution, doesn't create a sense of genuine ownership.

@freemo Investment, in its most basic form (i.e. finding a prospective business that seems like it could be profitable and investing to buy a stake and help it thrive) does work to create actual value in the economy (i.e. more diverse businesses, more innovation).

However, investment abstracted to the point of the modern stock market is just horse betting for the rich. The "value" created is ephemeral, based more on confidence than actual products or services created for consumers. It incentivizes companies to seek short term profits to please investors, to the detriment of everything else. It encourages a race-to-the-bottom in our overall economic model, and incentivizes companies to buy out and squash their competition instead of beating them in the field. Besides these many systemic problems, the stock market also creates an avenue for even more money to flow upward, from those who actually perform the labor, to those who sit on their asses and contribute nothing to society but that which their parents earned for them a generation ago.

@freemo Also, for the long-term thing: The longest term that should matter for wealth, in my opinion, is one human lifetime. Inherited wealth just seems to create assholes.

@freemo Except, again, if you have the wealth, it means it's not being donated to charities. It's still yours.

Charity would, therefore, be a limiting factor to wealth. Good people would donate enough of the excess to avoid being over that evil-wealthy line.

Moreover, charities are free to invest the money too. Why would a wealthy person hanging on to it for themselves to invest be better than giving it to the charity to choose to do with how they think best (including investing)?

@freemo No, but wealth is a marker of exploitation. A certain degree of wealth can be legitimately earned, but above that point, the wealth is grossly disproportionate to the value created for the economy and can only be obtained through some degree of systemic exploitation of the labor of others. Stock trading is the classic example of this.

So, in that sense, the sign in the OP is accurate.