The way all CEOs should be. Publicly-traded companies are a mistake.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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I don't hate the idea of stocks. You invest in a company that needs capital. You own a little piece and get a dividend based of the profits those companies make.
Its the constant growth model, where the value of the stocks have to constantly grow, the "If you are not growing, you are dying mentality." where the growth of stocks became the value and not the reliability of the dividends they provide.
I hate the idea is stocks. Ownership of companies should be split equally between all employees.
I agree, investing in a company is fine. It's when you have the ability to trade your investment without any consequence whatsoever that the madness begins. Investment is supposed to be risky for both the company and the investor! But we've managed to externalize that risk into a market in which no single actor can be held responsible when a company is looted and destroyed by greed. Publicly-traded shares are now an entirely tax-free substitute for money - but only for the rich who have turned this system into a game to enrich themselves.
I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It's like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.
Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don't think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.
And Arizona iced tea has been $0.99 for 30 years
Not in the last few years. They took the hard price off the can designs and now they're 1.39-1.69 depending on the place.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Arizona-Green-Tea-With-Ginseng-Honey-23-oz/15603565?classType=REGULAR
Walmart lists them at $1.
The official website also claims they're still $0.99: https://drinkarizona.com/pages/about-us
I think it's the fault of the retailer wherever you're seeing that price.
Except the Costco CEO retired years ago. And now Costco is even more greedy than it was.