If you don’t want to be surrounded by the sorts of people who made you want to leave the country in the first place I’d strongly suggest avoiding anywhere with a lot of US expats. They tend to be pretty horrible human beings.
Nice to be appreciated by my fellow Americans 
I mean it depends where I suppose. You’re more likely to run into a douchey expat at a nightclub than a group hiking in the woods.
I’m sure he’s not talking about you. A friend of ours lived in Costa Rica for a while. She, and her two little kids, lived in two communities that were made up of Americans and Euros (and Aussies). They weren’t necessarily awful people, but they weren’t trying to be in Costa Rica really. The first community she left because they were all super Christians and the second was better, but was all crystal worshippers. They went to CR because it was comparatively cheap and that’s it.
That’s why she lived there. She was raising two kids by herself, her brother gave her some money and it went further in CR. She has sinced moved back and lives somewhere in TX I think (my wife’s friend more than mine).
He made his fortune poisoning and exploiting people. Now he wants to buy his reputation.
He knows he has no chance of winning but people will now remember him as a voice of the people.
I’m pretty sure you’re not in the class of people I’m criticizing. I’m talking about the parts of the world that are lousy with early retirees living douchebag expat lives in douchebag expat enclaves whose only real attraction to the place is that it’s cheap and full of other douchebags just like themselves. Unfortunately, that describes a lot of Costa Rica these days.
People underestimate how hard it is to integrate into countries unless they significantly similar to yours. If I spoke fluent Czech, married a Czech woman, had a kid and bought property here, I’d still be looked at as a foreigner no matter how many years I lived there. In Spain, I had a flatmate from Uruguay and despite living there for nearly 20 years, almost all of his friends were Spanish-speaking South Americans living in Spain.
I remember Thailand being a bit like that. I remember cringing while on a train in Bangkok as I saw a 60-something Brit making out with a 20-something Thai girl.
Then again, I know those people well enough to know that they’re completely miserable and all they do is bitch and complain about everything in their lives no matter how hot the girl they’re with is.
1 Like
Link on the poisoning and exploiting people? I thought he was a bankster?
I don’t agree at all with the idea that you’re in any way responsible for the behavior of the companies in your stock portfolio fwiw.
You can’t exploit the rigged rules then say I was just doing what everyone else was doing.
You could make the argument that he Is sincere about the beliefs he has now but I am skeptical.
Obviously im just speculating on his motives.
Weirdly I think hedge fund manager / investor is one of the most likely ways you could become a billionaire without being a complete monster. Mostly because you don’t have to directly do the evil.
This should not be interpreted as me saying that no banksters are monsters. Obviously most of them are.
“A key liability is Farallon’s 2005 investment of $34 million in Corrections Corp. of America, which runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
"More troublesome for Steyer’s public image is the fund’s history of investing in fossil fuel projects, including a giant coal mine in Australia that generates vast quantities of carbon emissions.
The owners overcame protests by environmentalists and won permission to clear 3,700 acres of forest that served as a koala habitat and mine 12 million tons of coal per year. Steyer’s critics have long seen his past personal stake in coal mining as hypocritical."
My take - I don’t think this guy is evil and I actually like him compared to other billionaires. He says a lot of the right things. But you have to practice what you preach.
All of these people are so worried about their reputations that I am skeptical of any billionaire suddenly wanting to fix our system.
Really? That’s bizarre. They’re your companies. You’re an owner. You’re financing them. And going out of your way to do it. Hoping to profit off of it.
Not how it actually works. Someone financed them and created debt/stock to represent that financing. You bought the paper from that person. If you didn’t buy it someone else absolutely would have because you bought it for the market rate. The stocks are like the cards in a deck you use to play poker with. You hold them for a limited time and flip them to someone else, hopefully for a profit. You exercise essentially no control over what happens to the assets underlying that paper during that time period unless your strategy is to be an activist and leverage the power that paper gives you to make the people who manage the asset do something different so the paper is worth more.
You aren’t responsible for anything that happens with the underlying because it’s going to happen no matter what you do basically.
This is very different for instance than private equity, where you buy a company, load it up with debt, take the money the company borrowed as dividends/kickbacks, and then sell it to someone else for a profit. That’s extremely active and you usually control the company for some meaningful amount of time.
Blaming a stock investor that owns less than say 10% of the stock of a given equity for the things that equity does is a bit like blaming someone for betting on a sports team that has a reputation for doing bad stuff because they think they are going to win a game. I just don’t buy the transference of responsibility there.
Could not disagree more. Buying stock helps the company. You are responsible for that. Same goes for buying their products or services.
5 Likes
But the act of betting on a sports team doesn’t impact the outcome of the game. The act of supporting a company financially by buying its stock does impact outcome–it encourages the company to continue or expand its practices.
“It was OK if I did it because if I didn’t someone else would have” is not a strong enough argument.
1 Like
We’re going to have to agree to disagree here. I think your argument here is in the same category as ‘if you buy x you’re a bad person’. I think those arguments are thin, and by that standard we’re all guilty.
As ways to get fantastically wealthy go I can’t think of many that are cleaner… assuming you’re using clean alpha and playing the game straight up it’s as close to a virtuous way to get filthy rich as exists. I’m not saying it’s completely clean, but I also don’t know that being completely clean is even possible right now.
Am I a bad person because the trucks whose time I buy/sell emit a lot of CO2? Am I a bad person because the building materials on those trucks aren’t made green either? How much value do you assign to the fact that some of the shipments are solar shingles?
You see where I’m going with this? We all have to engage with the world, and the world is a pretty mangled gray color where there’s usually a mingled good/evil.
I choose to believe that the right way to judge anyones ethics is on a net +/- basis where you look at how they would have done vs a reasonable replacement. Using this standard the fact that I’m good at my job and shorten the number of miles that need to be driven by making the logistics I work with more efficient means I save CO2. It allows me to do the stuff I can do for good and feel good about it, and it lets me sleep at night.
I think Tom Steyer is probably as close to a ‘good billionaire’ as you’re going to get because of that. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that Mike Bloomberg, for his age and class isn’t a bad guy. He’s made some mistakes to be sure, but he’s also about to help the world a lot by fighting Donald Trump pretty hard… and I think his soft drink cup thing was super smart. I also think the way he made his money is relatively virtuous compared to any of the other ways you could make the third largest pile of money in the world appear.
Every bad, reactionary argument along these lines turns to complaining about being called a “bad person” instead of any legitimate defense of the actions in question.
2 Likes
Your posts are too long.
You can’t be perfect. You’re still responsible for what you do.
Maybe you’re a huge net positive with all your efficient routing. If so, buying stock in you could be a net positive. Buying stock in your competitor might be a negative. Stock buyer or consumer of either service is responsible for their choice.
The world is too complicated now to assign much blame for 2nd-4th order consequences I think. Plus that helps spread the blame from where it really belongs: systemic bullshit that needs to be reformed.
Speaking of CO2 in particular it’s insane to expect the system to change when every member of it wants to live in a 3000sf house, drive an SUV, eat a double-double and buy an endless stream of shit from Amazon.
1 Like