As someone who has chosen to not have kids, I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea that there should be some combination of societal financial disincentives to not have them or financial incentives to have them. Fertility rates are collapsing throughout the developed world partly because the cost of having children - both financial and in terms of lifestyle sacrifices - have become very large and more people are concluding they will be better off to not have them (there are also other reasons including disfunctions in the dating market). So for sure people that don't have kids are "free riding" to some degree and parlaying the costs and burdens of childrearing onto others. If this freeriding happens to an extent where a society is threatened with a major long term demographic crisis / eventual extinction, then policies are absolutely needed to more evenly distribute the costs of child rearing, to reallocate the costs and benefits of having or not having kids so as to move towards a more sustainable population replacement rate. That being said, one problem the world does not have at present is having an inadequate number of people, and the world as a whole does not have a major demographic problem. Smaller, desirable to live & especially English speaking countries such as Australia can easily accommodate demographic challenges with targeted levels of immigration. Countries like South Korea by contrast, which are non-English speaking (making it harder to attract migrants) and are facing very serious demographic risks, need to consider more radical action. It's hard though. You can't force people to have kids, and those that are footloose like myself can easily emigrate if you try to overtax them. There are no easy solutions and no country facing an impending demographic crisis wrought of low fertility rates has yet found a solution to turn the latter around.

Below for eg is pulled from a spreadsheet I put together when I was doing some analysis on BABA late last year. I'm not a holder but I did look at when it to $80-90. I concluded it was roughly fairly valued. Inclining on the cheap side of fair value but there are meaningful competitive and geopolitical risks and capital allocation continues to disappoint. Current trades adjusted EV/NOPAT of about 12x and closer to 15x on 1H25 PE run-rate though I haven't adjusted for any seasonality. A bit lower for the HK listing as BABA will trade down in today's US session.

@zoomyzoomm @Anssi_A Now include payables.

The cash often exists because it sits alongside large payables balances. It's best considered a permanent part of working capital; it isn't being paid out & won't be. So it is a valuation mistake to deduct it. Moreover the inaccurately computed 5x is then used to argue they could triple to 15x, but that's false because even without the payables issue, the "cash" portion isn't going to be re-rated to trade at 3x face cash value. Interest income on the cash is also already included in the earnings. There is a truly massive difference between a stock trading at 5x and 10x - a 20% earnings yield vs a 10% earnings yield. 20% a year investment return is Warren Buffett esque, 10% is prosaic. Greater precision is called for. There was loose talk for years about BABA's P/E etc, and it contributed to people losing a lot of money on it. When it was derating people would often say "its on <10x, ridiculous" etc, I went back and did the math including adjusting for stock comp and it was actually at 15-20x. That matters (and mattered) a great deal.

Fair arguments. To the extent an economy has higher taxes funding a larger government sector, this has the same impact of substituting high-productivity private sector jobs for low-productivity public sector jobs, driving weaker overall productivity and higher inflation. This is one of the reasons behind weak productivity growth in recent decades and why conservative economists argue for small government and lower taxes. To the extent DOGE is carried out to a meaningful extent, it could act as a productivity offset to the tariff impact and also free up additional labour. It will take time for DOGE to be implemented to this extent though while the tariff impact will be immediate. Noted also it is one means of raising tax revenue and the benefits of this should not be ignored - US fiscal consolidation is necessary one way or another. And yes you are right that the US has excess consumption and a large current account deficit. The higher real cost of goods will help to reduce both ailments. But there will be large costs. I guess we may be about to run the experiment and see how all these costs and benefits wash out.

1. The USD is overvalued. 2. As an economy develops, people on average become more productive so the cost of wages go up, due to higher productivity opportunity cost of an hours' labour. But some goods and services don't enjoy the same productivity improvements as others - for eg a haircut will require roughly the same quantity of labour in the US to Mexico to Kenya. Because the opportunity cost of an hour's labour is higher in the US than in Kenya, a haircut will cost more in the US than Canada. I don't know the economics of egg production specifically, but presumably the difference lies in its reliance, throughout the supply chain, on labour where the productivity gap between the US and Mexico etc is lower than in other sectors.

@Satoshis_Dragon Yes because there are a lot of greater fools in the world, including yourself. Idiots preening around like geniuses is one of the most reliable signs of a bubble there is.

But Bitcoin is not a monetary "good", its a speculative security. And that won't change. I remember having a debate with a friend a decade ago who tried to argue Bitcoin was going to become a global currency. It hasn't and won't. The "value" of fiat currencies is indeed somewhat complicated; their role/value comes from their widespread commercial acceptance and ability to retain purchasing power for long enough to facilitate commerce. But its important to remember that the fiat currency doesn't have any value of its own, its value is merely a temporal derivative - it acts as a transaction facilitator in things that do have *real* value. We measure real wealth in fiat but the fiat itself doesn't have any real value. Fiat is an institution/convention, not an asset. Bitcoin cannot/will not replace that for many reasons; the govt has monopoly power on legal tender; it is too volatile; and incumbent fiat currencies with network effects already fulfil that role. Hard money with fixed supply is also a terrible currency as hording can lead to scarcity that leads in turn to deflationary depressions. You need flexibility to increase the money supply to prevent hoarding and to accommodate economic growth. A modest amount of inflation/dilution of the money supply is a feature not a bug.

On a purely investment basis the intrinsic value of gold is zero. And yes, the "consumptive" element of gold is likely a small faction of its current combined market cap. So the majority of the gold price is indeed speculative. I don't think gold is a good investment have never/will never own any (Buffett agrees).

The descriptor "retarded" used to be a euphemism. Now its considered pejorative... These people will never stop, never learn, and as usual have their priorities all wrong. If someone is fat, they may take offense being called/described as fat, and that will not change no matter what word we use to describe "fat". Someone please fire the language police already, these people are a tiresome waste of space.

PS on a purely investment basis, gold also has no intrinsic value, but gold is a hybrid investment-consumptive item - it has real world decorative, ornamental and conspicuous consumptive benefits to people, that people will predictably value and pay for in the future, and have for millennia. Bitcoin has no such real world consumptive utility so is a pure investment asset.

@CannoliCapital

Either that or they have short investment time horizons - common in funds management as it isn't their own money so they care mostly about near term performance & bonuses. Stocks are long duration assets so you only realize the underlying intrinsic value (through dividends) slowly. If you don't plan to be around for the long term then long term intrinsic value becomes irrelevant to "value realization".

...while also making the world a more dangerous place. The hostility of many foreign regimes have had to America is not *because they hate our freedoms and values* rah rah, its because the US - through USAID - is always trying to actively overthrow regimes they don't like. The fastest way to make China, Russia, Iran, North Korea etc hate you, militarize, and clamour for nuclear weapons is to have them believe you are trying to overthrow their regime. Else they wouldn't give a fck about the US and would be too busy dealing with domestic political issues/threats.