Of course I agree with you, but doing so has been used as ammunition to call forum enemies fake lefties and now, unexpectedly, anti-intellectuals.
I’m not a huge supporter of “ignorance is bliss” but this is definitely shaping up to be a year where I will shutting down my laptop and walking in the woods more. All of the frustrations of the past several years are going to get way worse if there is a sustained recession.
There’s almost no benefit to following the doomer shit. We can’t change it, so it just ends up being a drain on your life. You can make the needed adjustments with a cursory knowledge of what’s going on.
I take comfort staring directly into the void, but I often forget how much of a drag it is for other people to hear.
Investing in a way that one takes money from bad people/companies: good.
Investing (actively or passively) in bad companies: bad.
One example of the former might be sports betting.
One example of the latter might be buying Tesla (stock or car).
The issue is that at a great enough level of abstraction, it’s possible to find good or evil in just about any investment.
I’d be shocked if you could find a single public company that has only “good” people in the c suite and on their board.
I think of it more in terms of “does the company do good things”, generally.
At a simple level, I wouldn’t buy Mercedes in the 30s/40s.
How would sports betting take money from bad people/companies?
Books literally run a sanctioned racket charging vig on markets.
The money you make in sports betting comes from losing bettors.
Indirectly.
The fewer people that lose the less the book wins.
Before you get styled on I need to know you’re not gonna close or throttle the thread after you start getting styled on.
Sports betting being the vaunted example of ethical investing is a truly poker brained take.
Although I guess it’s useful in the sense that any ethical investing is basically a red herring and used to legitimize capitalism. My personal rules are (1) don’t invest in obviously heinous shit like fossil fuels and (2) don’t act like #1 or any other ethical investing practice will make investing have any loftier purpose than “because I want my piece of the pie to be bigger.”
I never said it was the “vaunted example”.
Just that it was “one example” of not obviously immoral investing. I even said “might” lol.
The notion that “ethical investing” is not possible because it supports the capitalist system (which is inherently unethical) is the sit on my brain-chair take.
Obviously angel investing for Panamanian shirt makers is not unethical despite the Panamanian
worker’s fealty to the almighty dollar.
Ok, then replace “vaunted” with “only one offered” and who gaf.
Grave misunderstanding here.
Investing is fundamentally different from going to the store or working at a job (which also support capitalism). Investing—at least in anything at the click of a mouse—is calling upon that sweet, sweet fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, ethics be damned.
This is just “yet you participate in society” stuff.
As money is fungible, you’re “investing” in General Mills when you buy cereal.
There are legal restraints to maximizing shareholder value. Many of these are grounded in ethical considerations.
Vote for the wrong candidate and you’re a piece of shit. Own part of a company and care nothing at all about what they do and, well, as long as you are just doing it in hopes of making money, you have no responsibility
Bro
That’s the “yet you participate in society,” sitting on your brain stuff. Following logic like this means the slum lord and their impoverished renter are moral equals.
If finding some green energy ETF makes you feel better about yourself, have at it. But let’s be real, you aren’t doing jack shit to help anyone or anything meaningfully unless you’re willing to compromise—by that I mean give up time and money to do something actually helpful.
Once you accept compromise is necessary, you can move onto the harder question of how to do something unambiguously helpful. But most are unwilling to compromise, so that question never becomes relevant. Instead they spend their energy researching things like ethical investing strategies, or black listing companies run by trump supporters.