Regardless of what good things other Israeli companies might be doing, it's clear that the Israeli government doesn't have a problem with these malware / spyware companies.
Totals since 2016
Country Total Spending
China $562,676,323
Japan $504,111,211
Liberia $432,968,270
Saudi Arabia $421,890,448
Marshall Islands $382,012,024
South Korea $363,237,700
Bahamas $293,205,139
United Arab Emirates $269,529,107
Qatar $269,260,794
Israel $215,168,616
So for small countries UAE and Qatar(no surprise here, they just gifted 1 billion airplane to Trump)
This excludes US based groups lobbying for Israeli interests, which does not count under official spending by Israel, so it is not an accurate representation of the lobbying effort in the interests of Israel.
That seems like the categorically correct thing to do, for the same reason that (for example) a domestic Korean-American nonprofit that lobbies for Korean interests doesn’t get counted as foreign money or influence.
(Perhaps it should be! But it should be consistent, whatever it is.)
> Perhaps it should be! But it should be consistent, whatever it is.
Agreed. Any lobbying that centers on the interests of a foreign country should IMO count as foreign lobbying, I have no problem in including Korean-Americans, Kenyan-Americans etc. in that too.
Well, so here's the question: what counts as the interests of a foreign country? AIPAC's entire lobbying stance is that its positions are mutually beneficial to both the US and Israel, and this is the stance that every other national/ethnic affinity group in the US uses as well.
Put another way: it seems very risky to allow the federal government to determine the propriety of political speech just because it happens to concern two (or more countries) at once.
The difference is the nature of the lobbying and the volume. Follow the rules.
An egregious, non-controversial example of things going poorly is NYC Mayor Adams and Turkey. He basically accepted bribes and favors from the Turkish government and their proxies for specific actions.
A “doing it right” example that wouldn’t have been controversial until recently is Denmark. They mostly focus on direct diplomatic policy lobbying, and leverage consultants to promote mostly tourism. Their affiliations are known and registered. Now they hire K-Street lobbyists to influence policy objectives re: Greenland, etc.
The difference is that when the papers found out about Adams being a crook… that didn’t turn into accusations of racism and fomenting sectarian hatred. In the AIPAC example, there will be a both a legitimate visceral response from Americans and astroturf from lots of prominent people.
> The difference is that when the papers found out about Adams being a crook… that didn’t turn into accusations of racism and fomenting sectarian hatred. In the AIPAC example, there will be a both a legitimate visceral response from Americans and astroturf from lots of prominent people.
I think there's a much more parsimonious explanation for this: the average American doesn't know that much about Turkey, know very many Turkish people, etc.
In contrast, the average American has been steeped in I/P and related proxy conflict news for their entire adult life. That, combined with the fact that the US has a large Jewish population means that there's a degree of salience to accusations around AIPAC that wouldn't exist if the equivalent Turkish-American political lobby entity[1] was caught bribing politicians.
I was adjacent to state level politics for a long time. The German, Korean and French economic development organizations would come around every now and again with promotional events coordinated with their embassy to promote partnerships and business opportunities. Sometimes they had lobbyists focused on general relationship building, more often for specific issues.
The Israeli ground game is different. American PACs affiliated with or specifically “not affiliated with, but always talking about” Israeli interests show up at every level of government - a good friend is a town board member of a big suburban town and they call on him, and he refuses the contributions so will likely get primaried.
The real difference is information awareness. There is a CRM somewhere the ground guys have access to, and relationships are cultivated and used. My buddy is being targeted becuase there’s a good chance he’ll be in the state legislature someday. There’s a pipeline to get targeted American politicians to tour Israel for whatever reason. When critical attention is focused on this stuff, the reaction is fast and painful for the media outlet or political actor.
The only thing close to this is China, who does similar stuff with a different playbook. They’ve been caught embedding agents of one sort or another in California and New York governments at a high level, as well as places like Florida or within government contractors with lower level people.
Note that we’ve purged the FBI counterintelligence division, so the brazenness of the “bad” stuff will get worse - nobody is watching.
That doesn't sound very different to me. It sounds like a competent ground operation; nothing you've described even approaches impropriety of the kind FARA is intended to our political system against.
(I also think this backfires spectacularly: there are now plenty of politicians running for office in the US on an explicitly "no AIPAC money received" line. That line clearly has pull with voters!)
I don’t know man, never heard about Finnish people decimating a population, starving kids, subverting countries, toppling governments... I’ve been in Finland last year and they’re so nice.
You mean in recent history? Because Finns were nazi allies during WWII and participated in Siege of Leningrad starving hundreds of thousands to death. They also organized network of concentration camps during the war.
Not to get into an argument, but most of the population in the Middle East are Muslim who don't give two shits who killed Jesus because they don't believe he was killed to begin with.
You can point to the recent invasion of Lebanon and the image of an IDF soldier taking a sledge hammer to a statue of Jesus. Those might be the upset neighbors. Rightfully so as they were told to evacuate their homes so the homes could be leveled for a "buffer zone".
If Israel wants to be taken seriously as a nation of "normal people", they need to do something about the extreme nationalism and hate in their ranks, and the racket of protecting settlers who attack Palestinians in their homes.
The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
What happened was the audience changed. Before, the audience for things about writing code was mostly software developers. Now it's the employing class. The collective wisdom of engineers? It has little impact on the conversation because the audience doesn't care. In fact, it's more than indifference; many are eager to no longer be "burdened" by it.
Not only do they not want to pay our salaries, which is an expense, they're eager not to have to depend on our expertise or judgement as well. That judgement and expertise is a locus of control that resides outside their own hierarchy.
I wish printers could have a mode like this to print random images from an album, or a calendar, rather than wastefully draining ink into a sponge every few days.
If nothing else, maybe it could be some kid's high school science fair project idea.
How about printing a QR code for a randomly generated private key for Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin wallet, then every few days you get a tiny moment of excitement, hope, and then disappointment. It's still wasteful, but it could pay off big time?
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I'm sure there was something on HN a few weeks ago about an electric typewriter that someone had connected to (I'm guessing) a Raspberry Pi? My search-fu is currently failing to find anything particularly recently, at the moment.
So in other words, while America is starting the most wars, it somehow gets credit for the hypothetical wars that weren't started? The assumption being that the natural state of the world is to have a world war every few years?
The norm of human history is constant wars, extreme repression, and genocide, yes.
Oh, and levels of taxation even Karl Marx would immediately agree are theft. In fact, ending the pre-pax-Americana period is what the manifesto is about. (the period stupidly referred to as "modern times", where the rich aren't fighting over who gets to mars first, but massacring poor people to gain a few square kilometers of land, which ironically Soviets know all about)
I get that that's hard to see for anyone born far enough away from the beginning of the pax Americana, ie. let's say 5-10 years after world war 2 but that's really how things work.
And that means that you just won't believe the consequences of any real victory against the US either: a return to the norm. If Iran wins, immediately, 50 genocides will start. Not just in Iran. Global trade will freeze 90%, not just oil. Inequality will explode worldwide. And that's just the start. In a way, that's what Iran is fighting for.
It's interesting to see the kind of nonsensical, evidence-free ideological statements that some people use to hand wave away decades of horrifying US perpetrated atrocities.
Ignore the genocide the US is engaged in right now, if it loses the war it started with Iran there will be 50 hypothetical genocides that I made up! Why stop at 50? Maybe there will be 500 or 5,000 genocides! If not for the benevolence of the US, we'd be having another world war every 2-3 years. It just stands to reason I suppose.
Since you've successfully moved into the blatantly absurd, how about I just let Captain Darling and General Melchett explain how the period before the Pax Americana worked. First, WHAT the rich were fighting over:
My grandfather explained this in much harsher terms to me (he's dead now, even though he got past 100 years), with explicit mention of which of 2 options is the better one: killing 100 people in your own city or returning to this situation again. He was a baby at the end of WW1 and lived through (with kids of his own) WW2.
(but even that beats how Iran's islamic government treats it's own citizens. Did you know primary school children make excellent demining equipment, and on top of that make very cheap poison gas detectors? The islamic mullahs sure do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_key_to_paradise )
Ah yeah the US would never demand young volunteers to be fed to the meat grinder
They would compel them, by law, to be fed to the meat grinder. And not to defend their homeland, but to murder civilians in another hemisphere, and apparently i must remind you, TO THE TUNE OF 4,500,000 DEAD CIVILIANS IN KOREA AND VIETNAM ALONE.
I've a friend up the coast, nearly 100 now, a ham operator who used to relay space shuttle calls, former operator in PNG, British soldier during the Mau-Mau uprising.
Back in the day, during WWII, he was defusing bombs and mines while a young boy scout.
You seem to be implying that the Israeli strike targeted or harmed dissident prisoners, rather than regime targets. The article doesn't say that. It says there was some "panic" about a damaged ceiling, "although they did not report any injuries". It also mentions some hearsay about "injuries to several men", with no further details like who said that or who the men were.
It seems pretty clear that Israel struck regime targets, and at worst there was relatively minor collateral damage (still unclear), which is a risk with just about any strike.
"When you are in prison, it becomes your home. When I heard this morning that Evin prison was bombed, I felt a sharp pain in my heart. When I was released, I left a piece of my heart there."
Oh, I’ve read it. Including this gem:
"When you are in prison, it becomes your home. When I heard this morning that Evin prison was bombed, I felt a sharp pain in my heart. When I was released, I left a piece of my heart there."
Racism really makes people dumb.
For those playing along at home, this is a quote from someone who was thankfully released prior to the bombing (in 2022), who is worried for the people still in there. I'm sure you missed this sentence which was hidden literally right above it?
> Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who was imprisoned for years at Evin, told the BBC she felt "sick" with concern following the strike.
You protect yourself by understanding that this is one infinitesimally small cost (expressed as a fraction of your portfolio returns) that doesn't overcome the benefits of maximum diversification and the ultra-low fees of broad-based ETFs.
Buy MSCI World, enjoy the 0.04% p.a. fees and minimal idiosyncratic risk, and relax.
Index rebalance traders will reduce your annual returns by less (probably much less) than 0.1%, but there is no better alternative for you at this moment in time.
I broadly agree. Though I'm less pessimistic: lots of people will pay lots of attention to SpaceX and friends, and with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly.
Remember also: index funds are some of the participants most keen to lend out their shares to short sellers. It's one of the rare ways they can boost returns above the raw index they follow.
> and with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly.
I know very little about markets, but: aren't the short-sellers just going to provide liquidity for the big index funds? Like, if the funds HAVE to buy SpaceX, and the funds are enormous, wont every single stock sold short be immediately gobbled up, as well as pretty much anyone else wanting to sell? Even if everyone else is selling like mad, it wont affect price much at all?
Maybe this is naive, but if these enormous funds are more or less forced to buy SpaceX, it seems impossible that "actual price discovery" is going to happen in any reasonable amount of time, and the short-sellers will be screwed.
Most index funds, and essentially all that matter economically, hold stock in proportion to the free float, and not the total market capitalisation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float
So if SpaceX only sells 1% of shares in the IPO, and the rest are locked up, then these index funds will only try to buy some fraction of this 1%.
For simplicity, let's assume about 25% of stocks by value are held by index funds. In our case, that would mean that index funds would buy 25% of 1% of SpaceX, or about 0.25% of SpaceX's market capitalisation. For simplicity, assume a SpaceX market capitalisation of 2 trillion USD, so that would be 5 billion USD. A big sum for you and me, but not all that much too worry about for the index fund industry and the stock market.
Later on, the lock ups will be lifted. That will increase SpaceX's weight in the relevant indices, but will also make sure that more stock is available to buy for them.
About the impact of short sellers: let me construct an exaggerated cartoon example. Suppose our index fund already has a 100 shares of SpaceX and wants to hold 300 more, but no else who holds SpaceX is currently allowed to sell for another three months.
Well, index funds are really, really keen on lending out shares to get a bit of extra revenue. So the index funds lends out 100 shares. They go to a short seller, who immediately sells them back on the exchange, where the index fund buys them. Now the index fund has exposure to 200 shares. 100 'real' shares it just bought, and 100 shares that the short sellers owes them. Well, the index fund can lend out the 100 real shares again, and repeat the cycle 2 more times, so that at the end they have 300 lend out shares and 100 real shares on their books.
In three months the lockups expire, and the short seller closes out their short position.
The above is an exaggerated stylised cartoon description, but it's not too far off what can happen in principle.
Well, the index fund would lend out the 100 'real' shares they have at the end, too, just to collect a bit of extra borrow fee on another 100 shares. So the index fund has an economic claim to 400 lend out shares, and doesn't currently hold any physical shares.
Other market participants can trade these 100 physical shares back and forth amongst each other (or loan them to each other, too) to help with price discovery.
There's also stock futures, where you trade the right/obligation to transact some shares at specific prices in the future. Economically, entering into a contract today to be obliged to sell shares in the future is equivalent to becoming a short-seller, but for regulatory reason you don't need to borrow the shares when selling futures.
So stock futures are another way to help with price discovery, even when there's scarcely any underlying shares available right now.
> with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly
It'll be virtually impossible to short sell the stock within the first month due to lockups, and it'll take 180 days for all the pools to be available: then, we'll have a more-or-less "accurate" price, as you put it.
Whatever float is available on the market can be made available for short sellers to borrow. That can even happen multiple times: ie short interest can exceed 100% of the float. Or even 100% of the market capitalisation.
With stock futures, you don't even need to borrow the stock to (effectively) short it: anyone with enough collateral can write stock futures, whether they own the underlying stock or not.
Not buy these index funds. If you don’t want to own the entire market, don’t buy funds that seek to own the entire market. Funds like ESGV which exclude companies with poor governance have existed for a very long time - I can’t find a clear answer as to whether or not it will buy SpaceX, but I’m sure you can find funds that cater to your desires.
That ignores the actual issue here, which is the change in rules. Index funds already seek to own the entire market, and when most people chose these index funds there were rules about when newly listed stocks get purchased by the funds. And now those rules are being changed.
Index funds generally try to match the performance of the index, but most are not required to hold the same companies as the index itself does. They typically do, but managers often have choices.
Yes, most index funds don't literally intend to own the entire market for any sufficiently broad interpretation of the word "entire."
But the point is that we have notable index funds which are marketed to customers as having the intention to own segments of the market according to certain rules, and they are changing those rules with relatively short notice and for reasons that seem suspicious to many customers.
> Yes, most index funds don't literally intend to own the entire market for any sufficiently broad interpretation of the word "entire."
I mean that your index doesn't even have to own a segment of the market. Just look at eg how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is constructed. When a company has a stock split, it changes its weight in that index. That has nothing to do with 'the market'. (Stock splits have approximately no influence on your weight in the S&P500.)
Or you could have an index that captures all the stocks whose ticker starts with X minus those that start with Y plus the current temperature in Frankfort, Kentucky, in Rankine degrees.
The problem is I'm already in a S&P500-tracking ETF, for a decently large amount of money. Selling it off would be a big taxable event for me, something I don't want to do.
Could you use a prediction market (or Spread Betting in the UK) to hedge against your ETF loosing money during the period? If the ETF lost value, the hedge would gain it back and vice versa. You wouldn't need to sell the ETF and you'd only be liable for tax on gains from the prediction.
Yes, because when you sell it, you get cash and profit. Profit is taxable, in Germany they tax it with 25% + Solidarity Tax + Church Tax (if you are a member of a church).
After, you can go ahead and buy another fund, but in between you "shed" a significant amount of money.
However they are literally changing the rules of what "the entire market" means to include those companies sooner that they would have been when people bought those indices.
I want to own the whole market AFTER the due process of price discovery. This was always understood as new stocks will have a couple quarters to prove themselves before being included.
There is a ton of research that almost every IPO on average goes down in the first 6 month. That's why they are not included by default.
If you intend to remain a passive investor, keep doing what you’re doing. If you have conviction that AI boom will bust and you want to become an active investor, follow the advice from other comments on how to prevent these companies from being part of your portfolio. If you're going to become an active trader, I suggest thinking about both upside and downside risks and look beyond the local echo chamber.
Here are some options for pre-tax retirement funds (ex. 401k):
1. Exchange your market-cap funds for S&P 500. Afaict, even with their own rules changing, they will wait up to 6 months (as opposed to 12) to let SpaceX in. This is the simplest solution that buys you time without losing other gains in the market, assuming your existing funds were broad market-cap funds. The idea here is to wait for ~5 months and see if you still want/need to exit S&P before they let SpaceX in, or pick another option.
2. Exchange your market-cap funds for RSP, an equal-weight fund. This is also simple and reduces your risk, as SpaceX's allocation of the fund would only be 0.2%.
3. Exchange your market-cap funds for a selection of different funds in order to replicate the previous allocation. Buy small-cap and mid-cap funds, and buy ETFs that cover the market without including tech. This is more complicated, but not really that complicated once you learn how to exchange funds. Still mostly passive, you're just actively managing your allocation into different indexes. Downside is you lose the gains from tech.
4. Exchange all your index funds - temporarily - for a money market fund or other low-risk, low-return investment vehicle, until SpaceX price settles down. This is the absolute simplest option, least risk, least reward. You lose all the gains from the market during this time, but a percentage of your fund doesn't disappear overnight. If you're nervous, it's safe to do this by June 11th and sit on it until July 5th and see what you'd like to do then.
You probably DO NOT want to do this for non-retirement funds, as you will get hit with capital gains taxes. You would have to estimate how much you think your portfolio would drop due to SpaceX's overinflated price falling, and compare that to your potential tax bill from rebalancing. It's almost certain that your tax hit would be higher.
1) You didn't ask 2) The guy who asked didn't say "make sure you don't use any tools to research answers to my questions, I only want unverified human ignorance", in which case I wouldn't have replied 3) The advice is free, you're free to ignore it
You could move your passive investment to an index that includes a great proportion of bonds or move to an entirely bond based index. You reduce the upside potential and downside potential.
I personally have moved my retirement accounts to bonds while being more aggressive with my personal investments.
Here are some factors I would expect to rule out the frothiest stocks:
"Quality Factor ETFs are made up of securities deemed to exhibit strong fundamental characteristics. These ETFs screen for stocks that have healthy balance sheets, encouraging growth prospects, and consistent improvements in their earnings."
"Value-centric ETFs invest in securities deemed to possess value characteristics, including those operating in stable industries with relatively low price-to-earnings ratios."
"Low Volatility ETFs invest in securities with low volatility characteristics. These funds tend to have relatively stable share prices, and higher than average yields."
Be sure to check the expense ratios on smart beta ETFs. Generally, the more sophisticated the stock screening, the more they will charge you in management fees.
Personally, I keep my portfolio extremely conservative. My bet is that if the singularity arrives, we will all either die, or get UBI. I don't particularly care about having more moons than the other guy: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-es...
That’ll do precisely zero to protect against the effect described. In fact the opposite - the dividend paying stocks will by mathematically necessity be among those ETFs sell down to buy these IPOs
I believe you may have gotten discussion threads mixed up, but in any case: I expect that as SpaceX investors sell their SpaceX stock, they will buy ordinary equities to diversify.
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