We might not have infrastructure or a functioning economy, but at least we have really big make believe numbers.
Can someone please explain if there is any actual logic or rationalization behind the stock market because nothing makes sense
Corporations are run democratically with one vote per share/stock. When you buy stock you're buying a vote in what that company does, typically via a representative democracy (the company board) electing an executive (the CEO). You probably don't care deeply about the supply chain of Amalgamated Widget or whatever the fuck, so it's implied that your vote is to enrich the shareholders. The traditional (out of style) way is called a dividend, where the company takes its profit, divides by number of shares, and gives that much per share to all the shareholders. A newer way that depends on market stuff is a stock buyback, where the company buys some of its own shares to remove them from circulation, lowering supply and raising the price.
Shares can be bought and sold. The stock market is the place where people do that. The stock market is actually a service where you post an offer to sell a share of whatever for some price, someone else offers to buy at some price, and the exchange makes all the trades people would be happy with happen. The stock price you usually see reported is the average of the price of recent successful trades. The stock indices you see on the news (DJIA, S&P 500, etc) are just the sum of a bunch of stock prices. They tend to go up and down together, so it's a good way to get a rough idea of how good it is to be a capital-owner that day.
When a company does well, its profits go up, which means it's able to give more money to the stock holders (via dividends or buybacks or whatever). If you expect company to perform better in the future, that means a share of it is worth more than a share of a similarly profitable company that's not growing. Since people are willing to buy it at a higher price, the stock price goes up. But this involves speculating on the future, so people are buying and selling based on a mix of information, some good, some wild ass guesses.
Finally, since stock prices go up and down, and they can be bought and sold, you can make money off of them by buying low and selling high, even though that doesn't have anything to do with the actual purpose of the stock (voting to give yourself dividends). The ups and downs are driven by future speculation, and by other people trying to buy low and sell high, and by people trying to bet on what those people will do, so it's quite chaotic. You can keep adding layers of this until you're visiting /r/wallstreetbets, but this is more a style of gambling associated with the stock market than it is the actual purpose of the market itself (which is determining what different bits of the means of production are worth, so you get your money's worth when you buy some to vote on giving yourself dividends).
tl;dr: Stock price is the sum of how valuable it is to control a slice of the means of production, expected future growth, and wild guessing. The wild swings aren't that important in the real world, but the general trends are how our society allocates control of the MOP
How does a company benefit from its stock price increasing? because it can issue more stock at the higher price? are there are ways, too?
The company is run by the board and CEO on behalf of the shareholders. The company doesn't need to benefit separately from the shareholders, it's just doing what it's supposed to do.
A higher stock price is nice to have when issuing stocks, since it's a cheaper way for the company to compensate execs and certain workers, but this isn't the primary purpose of stock or the main reason the company would want the price to go up.
In a "properly functioning market" the stock price increase would be good only because it reflects that the company is doing better, right?
Not really?
The stock price should go up if and only if the expected value of owning the stock over the next few years* has went up. That could be because the company is "doing well" - maybe released a new product that's doing better than anyone expected, made an industrial process more energy-efficient, whatever. But it could be that they announced they're feeding all their employees into a blender and selling their blood to vampires and bones to werewolves - if that makes more money for the shareholders than whatever the company was going to do beforehand, the price still goes up.
*Really it's the lifetime value of owning the stock, but money you get in the future is worth less than money right now, until dividends ten years from now don't really matter. The "time value of money" is the concept that deals with this.
Ok, so the core of the stock value is because the stockholders can vote to provide themselves with the companies wealth, in some manner?
Yeah.
Like I said at the start, the traditional way of doing this is pretty easy to understand. Look at this chart. The squares with a D in them are when Exxon Mobile paid out a dividend. If you mouse over them, it'll say something like 0.87 - that means on that day Exxon sent a check for $0.87 to every shareholder (I mean... obviously if you have two shares you get $1.74 instead of two checks, but you know what I mean). A lot of companies (notably the big tech ones) don't do dividends anymore and use more convoluted systems, but this is the basic principle.
And if you own shares in a stock, you'll occasionally get mail from the company asking you to participate in the shareholder's meeting, telling you what the measures to vote on are, and giving you the board's recommendations for votes. Generally these are very low-participation though, since A - you can buy and sell votes, so some people have a lot more votes than you and B - shareholders generally are okay with whatever the board is doing, otherwise they'd put their money somewhere else.
Oh boy. That's quite a question. I'd suggest starting at the beginning / [PDF version]
This is what my decades working retail feels like. "Yeah that sucks would be cool if we - the people that keep the company running - had a say in any of this shit". Workplace democracy is a really good inroad to advocate for socialism/communism.
Fuck that, I thought they meant a single Boeing plane (but suspected otherwise).
Death to Apple. Don't even nationalize them, they're useless, just death them.
Yaaa, I hear that, that’s fair. Apple does have those sweet, sweet audio drivers. Fine, I retract my previous statement; we can nationalize Apple. We’ll just heavily reform its app store and open-source all it’s code o7
I would go as far as the hardware as well. I've always liked their hardware. Just make it so you can change material.
Ya, I agree there too. My only real issues with Apple are that they're really, really bad for planned obsolescence, and they keep their IP so locked down, both hardware and software. You can't really mod/update the hardware, and the software is similar, with the app store and all that being so central to the software ecosystem. Otherwise, both the hardware and software are quite powerful and functional. Though I will use linux until I die hahahaha
Really, all of my issues with Apple will be solved quickly when we nationalize it. Shouldn't take more than a year, tops. :red-fist:
Money is fake and all but they will develop new ARM based computers that by all we know are going to be exceptional and might even be economically sensible.
Their chips for phones (also ARM based) are best in class so I wouldnt bet against it.
Then there is the argument that Apple products, while extremely over priced, tend to las significatly longer, making the investment more sensible and helping out the environment a little bit, I am still daily driving my late 2011 Macbook Pro that I got second hand with a broken disk drive for basically nothing. 6 years of use and sttill trucking.
Then again, they are an incredibly unethical company in most metrics, no such a think as ethical consumption under capitalism after all.
I repair my own MacBook just fine, not sure what you are talking about. I know they put restrictions on private reapir shops to get parts and training but apparently they have lift that policy recently.
They admitted to slowing down phones that have low battery health, sure It might be all about slowing your phone to get you to buy a new one but If they wanted to do that (they most likely do anyway) there is a million better ways to do it than throttling the CPU, that is incredibly obvious.
As for Qualcomm having better chips, sure, right now the best processor is the one in the ROG 3, but that phone has just been released, the last Iphone was released almost a year ago.
There are engineering reasons for every single one of your grievances, Im sure you can find them if you ook for a bit since you seem versed on hardware, then again, It is also acceptable to think that they do it to hurt the repairability of their products to milk more money from insurance and official repair shops.
The problem is that often all other companies come to the same engineering solutions that seem at first "anticonsumer" but when Its not apple doing it people seem to be more understanding, perhaps because Apple products are overpriced or maybe because they often do it first or a combination of both.
I do not support Apple as a company in any way, I just think they do some cool products and Im excited about their upcoming technology, they spent a lot of RND money on it through this last few years of stagnation.
Yeah, I agree. But making products with a strong design motive is perfectly valid, they should give people more options to get a MacOs machine for power users or more value centric consumers but they wont, they are ruthless in that regard. The last Iphone SE though seems to be a step in the right direction.
I didn't know about the propietary Ram, the screws honestly I do not care that much about, you can get a screwdriver por pennies on ebay, no idea what they do it for though.
I've been trying to move my consumption away from supporting capitalism, just for my own personal sanity. Unfortunately when it comes to phones it seems there's no way to avoid Apple or Google, and both are awful.
There are a few Android alternatives out there already if you're willing to do some hacking.
And their phones get several 5 of software updates, unlike the standard 2 years on Android phones
100%
I still use a Galaxy Tab 2 with a SlimRom 7, overclocked and kept light it works great for youtube and movies.
Lineage OS is also another great option.
Unlocked phones are the way to go, there are more and more arm based distros coming out. Soon I think we'll have a Linux like os for phones. Unlocked ones at least.
There the PinePhone which has a few different distros available for it. Not that I'd really recommend it for a daily driver since its more of a development device more than anything else. But I trust that the community will be able to get things working even if it takes a while.
Fairphone 3 supports /e/. It's also totally repairable. As in each individual module can be replaced like your replace parts on a desktop PC.
I was debating between fairphone and the newest Zenphone (because it only has one camera that swivels). Ended up going with the Zenphine for the storage (have 500gigs on my phone lol) and extra power.
Still probably should have gone with the faiephoen just for the OS options and replaceable parts though.
Lineage OS, let me know if you need help finding tutorials etc
What would the main benefit? I've heard of Lineage but don't know anything about it really
You can get an overclockable kernel, a newer version of Android with further apdates, more optimization, get rid of GAAPS (Google Play Services and the Store) if you dont need it, FDroid and Aurora Store are more than enough for most people and do not hog your resources.
Also security updates.
and this makes them worth three times as much as the entire conventional energy sector?
Lol no.
They might be more profitable than the entire energy sector though.
But value and profit often go in different directions.
