We are living in an age in which value and profit are utterly untethered - the "financialized" age where making good things that people need and making a lot of money are not necessarily related to one another. It's Wall Street vs Main Street.
To get a sense of how absurd Tesla's valuation is, consider: for Tesla to earn enough to justify its $750b market cap, it would have to increase its annual earnings by a factor of 1600.
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Here's how @Jalopnik's excellent headline puts it: "Tesla Would Take Nearly 1,600 Years To Make The Amount Of Money The Stock Market Values It At"
Where did all that money come from? Jalopnik attributes it to unsophisticated investors using the Robinhood app and other self-serve trading platforms, pumping billions into the stock market where sophisticated actors are more than happy to take it.
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As the saying goes, "If you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, chances are, you are the sucker."
We've always had suckers in the market - but for the world's richest man to sit atop a mountain of their money feels like something new under the sun.
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With the deplatforming of forums where trumpists and right-wing figures congregate, there's a lot of chatter about whether and when private entities have the right to remove speech, and what obligations come with scale.
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The most important - and overlooked - area of this discourse is the role that monopoly plays, and the role that anti-monopoly enforcement could play.
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In short, the fact that being removed from Twitter and the app stores and Facebook and Amazon is so devastating is best addressed by weakening those companies by spreading out our digital life onto lots of platforms.
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The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.
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During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.
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Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.
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