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).
The social Darwinists that ran with nature red in tooth and claw and took survival of the best fitted to mean the physically fittest and most aggressively dominant win are the ones responsible for your impressions.
>As most things people today believe, this is not really true, at least not in such universal way as usually implied.
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?
> Might makes right is a rule of nature, is it not?
Of nature, maybe. Of human social arrangements, not really - otherwise elites would never feel the need of justifying themselves, yet they always do.
> 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.
You went from social hierarchy to interaction between societies and cultures. Slaves were almost always sourced from outside the group, and by nature of slavery they were not part of social.
> But you put the facts together that it was nearly ubiquitous around the world
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.
> what other conclusion can be had?
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.
>You went from social hierarchy to interaction between societies and cultures. Slaves were almost always sourced from outside the group, and by nature of slavery they were not part of social.
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).
The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom.
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.
The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?
I would separate out current events from "breaking news", the latter of which I think is pretty useless for 99% of people living in a developed and safe country.
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.
Options have some minor value in signalling that you're a true believer. You should in fact care only about base salary, but not telling the people doing the hiring that can be quite useful. Doing a fake come-down on base in exchange for options shows you are invested and surely worth hiring.
Tesla's highest market cap in 2010 was $3.3B. Tesla has more net income, sometimes multiples more, per year, from 2021 to 2025.
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).
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about.
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.
Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.
Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.
Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.
Tesla is a great example. It’s 30% retail, 25% elon and insiders, and the remainder institutional, mostly index funds.
The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.
The bigger issue is the death of small cap. Massive venture, sovereign wealth and PE funds don’t need the public market capital anymore, so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.
Snap, cool as it is, is a social media loser. The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.
> The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.
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.
The fact that founders still own 50% of the shares doesn't mean that they didn't sold some of ones they had. Also Snap gives very generous stock options to their C-team, meaning that they can sell overtime while keeping their large stash.
> 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?
you wrote "can you provide an example" and I provided an example.
If you wanted to say "I think the market mostly does this, with large caveats" then we're in agreement.
Sorry, I forgot how I phrased that. Although I disagree that Tesla’s sustained market cap over many years is what it is due to the market rewarding mass stupidity.
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.
Americans have been sold an image of the US being an omnipotent presence, due to its Navy. It is a legitimate question to wonder why a relatively weak, long embargoed country has the power to control the waters when the US has spent a pretty penny on all these warplanes and aircraft carriers.
If little Iran can prevent the US from being able to establish security in a little straight, it (ideally) shatters that image and causes some soul searching for what US taxpayers are buying with the military.
You can lose a game of chess to a guy with fewer and less powerful pieces than you if you play like a moron. The US has been playing the Iran situation like a gigantic moron.
Maybe I am misinformed, but I was under the impression that the US was so capable it is not even playing the same game as a country like Iran. As in they could brute force solutions due to superior technology and infrastructure, because that is how much more the US spends on it.
Brute forcing by spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on a military is not analogous at all to brute forcing in a game of chess, whatever that means.
Regardless of the analogies, the reality is that even with all the resources the US spent on its military, after a whole month, it cannot guarantee safe passage through a body of water adjacent to a small time adversary. Which, as an American, is embarrassing in terms of ROI on tax dollars spent.
> And is basically the approach the U.S. took in Vietnam.
And just like the Vietnamese, Iran doesn’t have to win against the US. They only have to not lose. They control the straight, and at $1 per barrel toll, they’ll be making $1 Billion a week. Trump owned himself. This is going to suck.
Paid in yuan, of course, because that's the currency they're allowed to use, because of the US. And then oil companies decide it's annoying to use two different currencies, and they would rather buy the oil with yuan as well...
Well, regardless of technology, the space of things you can accomplish without risking your own troops' lives is very small. (Unless you're willing to go nuclear, which has the pesky downside of ending the world.)
To put it in perspective - in Vietnam, opposition forces lost over a million troops and continued to fight viciously. The US lost around 50,000 and gave up and left.
Democratic countries simply lack the stomach for this kind of thing (which is a good thing, really).
As opposed to democratic countries like the US or UK which would just lay down their arms after a few tens of thousands of their soldiers were killed in the event of a foreign military invasion on their territory?
That’s obvious but you seemed to be putting down foreigners for being able to stomach a million or more of them dying to protect their country from invasion unlike the enlightened democratic countries who couldn’t tolerate so many of their own dying for any reason. I think if tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers from, say China, attacked the US, Americans would be very willing to fight to the last man to prevent becoming a vassal state of the CCP.
Perhaps the disconnect exists because some Americans have become too used to thinking from the perspective of invaders that they cannot possibly think from the perspective of the invaded?
You're reading something into my comment which isn't there. Hard to say what it is, but it's causing me to not really understand what you're talking about, at this point.
Maybe you thought I was disparaging Vietnam for defending their land? But in your own comment you indicate that you know I'm not talking about defense, that I'm talking about not having the stomach for loss of life as the invading force. So, IDK
I think being the "home team" makes swallowing those casualties easier (as easy as they can be, anyways); it's easy to perceive the situation as a fight for your life.
Obviously, there were other things going on in Vietnam (and Afghanistan and the larger War on Terror) to keep them fighting but it's much easier to muster up the manpower when a war seems existential because it's happening in your neighborhood.
You can lose in chess if you run out of time, even if you have an overwhelming piece advantage. US leadership has made some questionable decisions that effectively turned their game (and only their game) into ultrabullet kriegspiel.
Every time I try such strategies in Total War it results in an early success but long term failure. If you don't play every engagement like it could be your last you end up with multiple Pyrrhic victories and before long you are bogged down with loses and problems and start losing.
The situation is massively favourable to Iran, from a strategic point of view. The Gulf is narrow, bordered by Iran all the way and with mountains and rugged terrain nearby, which is very convenient to hide rockets. What a carrier brings is completely irrelevant in this configuration.
Iran does not 'control the waters', it is denying access; this is an importance difference. Lacking control means that Iran cannot make use of many of its naval assets, which they have invested in.
You over estimate the American publics capacity for critical thought and reflection. Most Americans will come away from this humiliation thinking we just need to increase the military budget
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).
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