More money stuff

Why, one might ask, do I play with the stock market, given that I hate money? Doesn’t that make me part of the oppressors, or at least indicate that I condone a ruling system based on resource allocation?

N0. It’s just that I’m pragmatic enough to recognize that I’m never going to convince the rest of you to give up money, or replace it with a better and more accurate system of measuring the use of resources, or (ideally) replace it with technology that gives everyone access to nearly infinite resources. And, I would really like to be able to work on the things I want to work on (writing music, designing battery management systems, doing nifty art projects involving microcontrollers, building robots, recording friends’ bands, bowling, etc) instead of having to work on the things that people will pay me to work on, and the only way I can see to easily get to this position is to work inside the system that’s already there. I lack the resources to make a radical enough change in the world, so I – grudgingly – use the systems the world has in place instead.

In the meantime, there’s this part of me that thinks if I could just buy enough stock of certain companies, I could vote in shareholder elections in ways that would make a difference. Of course, I vote in only about 10% of the shareholder elections of the stocks I currently own, and the amount of stock I own is so small as to be meaningless, so that probably isn’t a realistic thing to hope for.

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