• Twentytwodividedby7@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    To put this in perspective, they lost an average of $2B per month in value. According to HUD, there were about 582,000 homeless people in the US last year. $2B per month is enough to house all of them nearly 4 times over if you assume $1k per month in housing expenses.

    What a monumental waste of resources that could have made a difference. Musk just sucks

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s not real money, though. It’s all just speculative value based on estimates of future revenue.

      The real barrier to ending homelessness is the large number of real estate vacancies that are held open to prop up the price of the housing market. Twitter’s lost value has nothing to do with that.

      • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        There is no “real” money. It’s all speculative based on what value people assign to it. For example, you may have noticed that the US dollar has become worth significantly less in recent years. Shares and fiat currency just have different volatility.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The US dollar has outpaced nearly every other global currency. Five years ago you’d get 100 yen to the dollar. Now you get 150.

          But cartelization of the supply chain means we don’t get to see the benefits of low import prices. The difference all goes to business profit, while real increases in material and labor get passed on to the consumer.

          Netflix buys anime for pennies on the dollar and sells it back at escalating rates. They spend less and we pay more.

          • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            The US dollar was just an example so this discussion is tangential to the point I was trying to make. That said, your argument does not support an increasing value of the dollar - it only says it has increased in value relative to other currencies. But I’m sure you know that inflation has been staggeringly high which means you get less food on the table for a dollar, and salaries have not been keeping up.

            Or put in other words, if you were to invest in US dollars instead of shares then you would have seen the value of your portfolio going down, in terms of what it can get you at Costco.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              That said, your argument does not support an increasing value of the dollar

              Increase in exchange value means the cost of imports fall.

      • timetraveller@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        all the people that imagine their home prices are as high as they are, will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. the empty house market is crazy, just look on a “social home sharing site”. houses are hotels for the few.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          As someone who sees my property tax bill jump 10% / year, I have no interest in rising real estate prices. I’m not selling any time soon and I use my house to live in rather than to invest.