I had to read the title several times before I understood that the article isn’t about Apple Jacks, the cereal.
Also I didn’t know Apple Jacks made juice profits, since when do they make juice?
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No one ever pays me in juice 🥺
It took me 24 hours, saw the headline yesterday morning and skipped over it. Didn’t realize it wasn’t about cereal until this morning.
And what are prices-to-juice profits? Like how much they make per balanced breakfast?
We need to abolish public trading, or at least vastly overhaul what it means to invest in a company
Minimum investment times and mandatory profit sharing might help.
Make investors consider long-term and create income for shareholders from all profitable companies.
Right now a company can lose money while making shareholders rich, or make money while making shareholders poor. This is stupid.
Stock buybacks should be made illegal (well, just don’t allow them) again.
Also short selling. Maybe I don’t have a full understanding of how it works, but I don’t think you should be able to place money down in hopes of the decline of a company. I don’t think that really encapsulates the spirit of the word “investment”.
Like I thought the whole idea of stock was to put money into companies thag you believe in so they can have extra capital to grow, and then you get a cut of it. How in the world did people figure out a way to bet against companies and profit off of them losing? It just opens the doors for even more insider trading and corporate sabotage.
There was counterpoint I saw that advocated for the value of shorting.
You see this big successful company. You know that if they are caught doing something illegal or wildly unethical, you could profit by shorting. So you fund a bit of research to see if there are skeletons. Selling to an embargoed nation, poisoning an area, bribing officials.
Shorting provides a motivation to dig for dirt instead of just cheerleading a company blindly.
I agree that it doesn’t rub me the right way. The mechanism is interesting though.
Essentially what it is is you borrow a share of stock of Company X from John Smith.
You now owe John Smith 1 share and you sell that share for current market value of $100.
You now have $100 but still owe John Smith 1 share of stock, and interest based on how long you take to give him his stock back.
The stock now drops to $10.
You buy 1 share of stock for $10 and return the stock back to John Smith as well as some interest.
You now have a net +$90 (minus some interest) you didn’t have at the start of this. Voila, profit from stock going down. John Smith’s share is worth less now, so he loses out.
Why would John loan someone a share of his stock? Well if it maintains it’s value or goes up, then it’s you who lost because you owe John a share that you have to purchase for the same or more than you got for it, plus interest too.
The heart of the mechanism is loaning stock, aka loaning property of value. So preventing it might be tricky.
Perhaps also interesting is the fact that a loan never happens.
Instead, a contract is sold. The contract is for an option to buy (or sell) 100 shares at a certain price (strike).
So there is no loaning of shares, really. But the seller of an options contract has the obligation to sell (or buy) the shares at any time until the contract expiration date.
Sometimes, market participants borrow the shares instead of owning them. This is what I consider the shady part. Certain participants get a long time to “locate” the shares and are given a lot of leeway to do so. Often in the name of liquidity, they will just sell contracts without even going through the trouble of borrowing shares. They are allowed to if they believe they can locate the shares later.
This entire process allows for certain parties to basically create infinite shares from nothing. Believe it or not, this often gets abused. Money is basically siphoned from public companies in order to enrich Wall St.
When the stock price moves too much, which would put the stock counterfeiters at risk of insolvency, trading is halted.
Yeah, the problem sounds like we should be not allowing recursion, or regulating how many levels of recursion of allows for a reasonable level of liquidity and velocity of cash in an economy. Allowing for it to infinitely nest guarantees a bubble is going to pop somewhere eventually.
Sounds like an excellent start to me 👍
It will never be enough. That’s the model of capitalism.
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I read the title 3 times before I realized it’s not about cereal
I am so happy that I’m not the only one that thought Apple Jacks were vastly more profitable than I had expected.
Or juice “profits.” (I’ve never understood people having cereal with juice, but maybe it works with Apple Jacks.)
Dang. That zany Kellogg’s cereal that the cool frog sells makes $19 billion a year 😳
Apple doesn’t make any kind of necessity. Every single one of their products is completely optional in life and has alternatives.
If people are willing to pay for it, whatever. It’s a luxury. It’s not medicine or housing.
You could even argue because no one needs to buy any of their stuff, it could be a good thing, because you could tax those extra profits and put it towards subsidising something everyone needs.
Oh wait we live in this world. My bad everyone.
Now tell us again how their devices are better than any Android.
As I remember cameras hardware is more advanced (correct me if I’m wrong)
Please vote with your money. Don’t waste money and buy overpriced stuff and certainly don’t support this kind of business practice. And fuck the shareholders too. If they want money, then work like most people.
Already do. Used to buy new phone every year. Now it’s every three years or so. That is completely due to price and lack of compelling innovation. Don’t care if shareholders make money or not. I just like good value.
You can try 5 years with Fairphones, it’s the length of their warranty and you can repair it yourself easily.
I’m the same. I just got a 15 as my xr screen is cracked and the batter lasts half a day.
I’m home sick and didn’t even open the box yet.
I’m not particularly excited for a new phone, but my xr is just not working well enough any longer.
Economic genius.
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The thing I loved about Apple 15+ years ago was that even though the hardware was expensive, it was semi modular and tightly integrated with the software and you got an offline product that you could also buy Apple server equipment and software for. 10 years ago was still ok but things were starting to erode.
These days there is no server software, no modularity, no ways to use enough of the new features without a cloud subscription and the hardware is just as expensive and designed with defects to limit it’s lifespan (in my opinion). They want to have their cake and eat it too. I was a proud Apple fan boy but not a blind one. Well now they can fuck off. Bye.
I’m now fanboying about Framework and Pine64.
Apple’s been ignoring professional users for a while now. Folks in sound and video production were the ones who kept them alive in the 90s. But they turned Final Cut Pro into iMovie+ and their professional machines are impossible to upgrade or repair.
Remember the outrigger cases? Or the G3/G4? Beautiful design, great airflow, and one latch and the whole thing opened up.
Remembering the G3 and G4s had daughterboards? So you can not only change out the memory, but also change out the CPU/GPU. It was a great time to be an Apple fan back then.
Yeah! IIRC there were even daughterboards with full Intel systems on them so you could run Windows/DOS applications
Oh ya!!! You could swap the IBM board or the Cirrix board. Oh man. Blast from the past.
Was also a fanboy 15+ years ago. First they got rid of the Macbook 17". Then they got started soldering memory to the motherboard. Thats when I left. It just got progressively worse ever since.
I do not understand all the rage, Apple does not provide any vital services or products. They can charge anything they want. If you don’t like it then don’t buy it.
but you still lock yourself in their offer space when you also bought devices that kind of depend on those services: music streaming for the homepod, fitness+ for watch, cloud storage for iphone photos…
every time you switch from apple to a third party, it’s ever so slightly less convenient, and they probably conceive their products around that notion.
None of the products that had the price increased are locked in. Apple TV plus doesn’t even need an Apple device and has many competitors, Apple News has plenty of competitors, there are games you can buy without Apple Arcade though most do stupid in app purchases.
Yes you have to decide if the cost of the convenience is worth the lock in and price of Apple products. At the end of the day you still have a choice.
That is their business model, no? The convenience and integration of their products is what makes Apple unique. Seems weird hold it against them.
That’s capitalism for you baby 💰💰💰💰💰💰
Yes, but what if company was worth four trillion.
In any case, dollar down, prices up.
Not sure if I was getting a sweet deal or what but I’m currently paying 4.99/mo. They are raising prices ro 9.99. In what universe would anybody think doubling prices is okay?
The costs of Apple subscriptions are probably part of the reason I left the iPhone ecosystem
