The technological struggles are in some ways beside the point. The financial bet on artificial general intelligence is so big that failure could cause a depression.
The point of “you don’t lose money until you sell” is to discourage panic selling, but it’s total bunk. When you assets lose value, you do lose money, and how much that matters depends on when you need to access that money. As the article says, you may not care that you lost money if you don’t need to access the money, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now poorer if your assets drop in value.
That is basically Schrodinger’s cat. If you don’t open the box, the cat is both dead or alive. So you “could” interpret “lost money” as lost net worth. But if you read it litterally, it wasn’t money. It was an asset. You couldn’t spend it and it doesn’t meet the definition of money.
Poorer, I suppose, because you could borrow against that asset, but not as much as before.
Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is about things where observing state will impact the state. That would maybe apply if we’re talking about something unique, like an ungraded collectible or one of a kind item (maybe Trump’s beard clippings?) where it cannot have a value until it is either graded or sold.
Stocks have real-time valuations, and trades can happen in near real time. There’s no box for the cat to be in, it’s always observable.
And the legal definition, further down on the same page:
2 a: assets or compensation in the form of or readily convertible into cash
Stocks are absolutely readily convertible to cash, and I argue that less liquid investments like RE are as well (esp with those cash offer places). Basically, if there’s a market price for it and you can reasonably get that price, it counts.
When my stocks go down, I may not have realized that loss yet from a tax perspective, but the amount of money I can readily convert to cash is reduced.
Um… you can always observe the cat by opening the box, same as you can look up the stock value. Observing the cat doesn’t change it’s actual state. It only changes your knowledge of it. Same as value of a stock. No difference.
As for the definition, you hand picked 2 peices from that whole page. The first one when you read the example below doesn’t even fit your case, so you left that out.
Then you had to do mental gymnastics to make the second one fit. But it was a legal definition. None of this is a legal document, so it doesn’t matter. There is a reason that one is so low on the page.
But whatever. You want to consider stocks going down at any given second to mean you lost money in your head… fine. But when conversing with normal people, you will be hard pressed to find people who agree.
you hand picked 2 peices from that whole page. The first one when you read the example below doesn’t even fit your case, so you left that out.
Words have meaning given context, I pointed to the definition that fit the context. When talking about wealth and assets, “money” means anything that could be easily converted to cash. I didn’t copy the first because it wasn’t relevant to the context.
Then you had to do mental gymnastics to make the second one fit.
I provided two to drive home the point.
How about an example. If I said, “how much money does Elon Musk have?”, that would obviously include his stocks and whatnot because he probably only has a few million in actual cash, if that. If you ask how much money I have on the street, I’d assume you’re talking about cash in my wallet, or maybe cash in my checking, and I wouldn’t include my stocks or even savings balance.
Context matters a lot.
But when conversing with normal people, you will be hard pressed to find people who agree.
Are you saying that if I asked how much money you have in your retirement account, you’d say $0 because you only have stocks? If so, that’s really weird.
Meh, they come back up over time. Long term, the US stock market has only gone up.
Yup, I’m not worried, just noting that I’ll be among those who will lose money.
But if you don’t sell, did you lose money. My 401k goes up and down all the time. But I didn’t lose any money. Same with my house value.
Yes, my net worth went down.
The point of “you don’t lose money until you sell” is to discourage panic selling, but it’s total bunk. When you assets lose value, you do lose money, and how much that matters depends on when you need to access that money. As the article says, you may not care that you lost money if you don’t need to access the money, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now poorer if your assets drop in value.
That is basically Schrodinger’s cat. If you don’t open the box, the cat is both dead or alive. So you “could” interpret “lost money” as lost net worth. But if you read it litterally, it wasn’t money. It was an asset. You couldn’t spend it and it doesn’t meet the definition of money. Poorer, I suppose, because you could borrow against that asset, but not as much as before.
No, it’s not.
Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is about things where observing state will impact the state. That would maybe apply if we’re talking about something unique, like an ungraded collectible or one of a kind item (maybe Trump’s beard clippings?) where it cannot have a value until it is either graded or sold.
Stocks have real-time valuations, and trades can happen in near real time. There’s no box for the cat to be in, it’s always observable.
Look up the definition. Here’s the second usage from Webster:
And the legal definition, further down on the same page:
Stocks are absolutely readily convertible to cash, and I argue that less liquid investments like RE are as well (esp with those cash offer places). Basically, if there’s a market price for it and you can reasonably get that price, it counts.
When my stocks go down, I may not have realized that loss yet from a tax perspective, but the amount of money I can readily convert to cash is reduced.
Um… you can always observe the cat by opening the box, same as you can look up the stock value. Observing the cat doesn’t change it’s actual state. It only changes your knowledge of it. Same as value of a stock. No difference.
As for the definition, you hand picked 2 peices from that whole page. The first one when you read the example below doesn’t even fit your case, so you left that out.
Then you had to do mental gymnastics to make the second one fit. But it was a legal definition. None of this is a legal document, so it doesn’t matter. There is a reason that one is so low on the page.
But whatever. You want to consider stocks going down at any given second to mean you lost money in your head… fine. But when conversing with normal people, you will be hard pressed to find people who agree.
Words have meaning given context, I pointed to the definition that fit the context. When talking about wealth and assets, “money” means anything that could be easily converted to cash. I didn’t copy the first because it wasn’t relevant to the context.
I provided two to drive home the point.
How about an example. If I said, “how much money does Elon Musk have?”, that would obviously include his stocks and whatnot because he probably only has a few million in actual cash, if that. If you ask how much money I have on the street, I’d assume you’re talking about cash in my wallet, or maybe cash in my checking, and I wouldn’t include my stocks or even savings balance.
Context matters a lot.
Are you saying that if I asked how much money you have in your retirement account, you’d say $0 because you only have stocks? If so, that’s really weird.