https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Sexy_Yesterday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Besson#Personal_life

While I enjoyed watching the movies, I feel like I would have to point out this dynamic if I were to show the movie to my kids.

I thought "social Darwinism" might have also implied survival of the fittest on the society level. From the first paragraph of the wikipedia link above:

>Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics.[1][2] Social Darwinists believe that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease.

>This is exactly the data we don't have. We simply don't know social arrangements of most tribes or cultures in human history. Moreover, there is a huge gap between assertion that most societies in history had male leaders and rulers, and assertion that lack of merit always led to being left behind.

I guess that would be true for all of human history, but I would have thought the data from the recent previous couple thousand years would suffice (from whenever there are written records). Also, to be clear, in this case, I would assume "merit" means might, right?

>Using your spectacular reasoning one can similarly argue that it has to be necessary that males in all cultures live in polygamous relationships, because nature made sperm cheap, and optimal breeding strategy is to breed with as many females as possible. And yet, for some reason, monogamy exists in patriarchal societies.

I am also under the impression that men being expected/able to "cheat" without much consequence was a common thing until recent history where women gained the right to assets in divorce.

Also, the sperm/breeding strategy does not necessarily imply a polygamous future, because humans could have been intelligent enough to understand that the long term benefits of stability from at least the veneer of monogamy far outweighs the benefits of out right polygamy (due to stability achieved by not having significant numbers of single men competing for women).

Going back to your original claim:

>It didn't arise until rise of capitalism and bourgeoise (lack of) morality. For most of human history, and among countless cultures, social Darwinism wasn't the case.

My understanding of "Darwinism" is that there exists a need for animals (all living things) to compete for resources, and hence whomever wins the competition wins the resources and hence can procreate and further the genetic line. So I would think competition between and amongst members of society would be the natural state, because we are living things, and while humans might have understood the folly of physically competing for resources (most of the time), that does not mean humans would not desire to compete for resources in other ways (especially to attract the opposite sex).

Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not? Native Americans didn't choose to be moved onto reservations, enslaved people didn't choose to be enslaved, and colonized cultures did not choose to be colonized. And the ones making those choices always had the upper hand.

>There is no data to assert that.

What data could there be? It's not like the male leaders are going to write governing documents that state women will have fewer rights than men because we believe they will not be able to put up a sufficient fight. But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world, and women are physically weaker than men, and women would not choose to have fewer rights, then what other conclusion can be had?

I am under the impression that for most of human history, the ability and willingness to inflict violence was what determined the social hierarchy. Would that not be the reason that almost all tribes were patriarchal?

It seems to be a very, very recent phenomenon that simply selling goods and services can elevate one in the hierarchy, due to the advent of legal systems and policing (e.g. women’s rights).

Trends are important to learn about, but the regular person would be well advised to prepare for emergencies in advance of the emergency.

Most of the stuff you listed is probably covered under general financial education like not going into debt for frivolous purchases or not gambling on investments you know nothing about.

Inclement weather is probably the most pressing thing to know about, but again, you should probably be prepared at home anyway so you're not affected by people clearing out the grocery stores.

I'm looking at nytimes.com right now, and it's pretty much all meaningless in terms of what I am going to do today, tomorrow, next week, or next month. It's entertainment at best, which is fine, if you can mentally handle it. But if it's getting you down, then I see no negative consequence from skipping most of it. Obviously, come time to vote, it's important to be informed, but day to day, spending one's brain cycles thinking about stuff that will not affect them and they will not be able to affect does not seem like a good use of time.

Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.

For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla.

There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. That is about as objective as one can get about determining whether or not something was under or over valued (in 2010).

IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.

Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.

The company has recently successfully executed at making and selling a new type of product, so it is not unreasonable for investors to bet on further advancements.

Or maybe they think the leader is just sufficiently willing to be or adept at being corrupt that they will also benefit from his shenanigans.

> so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.

So SNAP executives IPO’d at $27B, and over the next 4 years, the market cap increased to $131B, which anyone in the public could have benefited from.

Yet now you are saying SNAP execs are wrong for selling their equity over time?

It doesn’t seem like there is any winning here for SNAP’s executives, even though they gave the public the ability to quadruple their money in 4 years. What more can you ask for?

Maybe, or maybe they are one of the few businesses people want to bet on to be able to create new streams of revenue. Intel used to be big, and now it isn’t. It being big didn’t help stop its demise.

> The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.

They didn’t. The biggest investors, the founders, still have almost 50% of the shares. Also, SNAP peaked at $131B in September 2021, 2 years after SNAP went public at $27B.

Would you have written then that “The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss”?

Of course not. Because index fund investors did not cause it to go to $131B, and they didn’t cause it to go to $6B.