Tag: Random Thoughts

Governments, tax, shareholders

Isn’t governments the invisible shareholder of all corporations?

Say tax is 25% , essentially gov will take 25 of 100 profit before tax, and the rest $75 are called profit after tax and is distributed to shareholders.

Does it sound odd?

Isn’t governments essentially a permanent 25% shareholder of the company, and the ratio is net by itself.

How convenient.

Btw, shareholders are should give their shares a 25% hair cut.. if they own 50% of a company, they just own 37.5% in case of 25% tax.

What concerns me (3)

Is that today’s major platforms like X and TikTok/Douyin can be used as “thought weapons”.

People/organizations can push a post (twit or video) to millions of people if it fits their interest, regardless of who creates the post in the first place.

At certain scale and with enough repetitiveness, this action can alter a person’s or a group of people’s thoughts.

This influence is sold.

People/organizations can buy the influence without disclosing the intention.

Common folks are blindfolded.

It’s not like an influencer wants  more people to see his/her posts to grow impact.

It’s paying for “thought weapons” to achieve certain goals inexplicitly.

And sometimes, these goals could be evil, or self-interested.

Meanwhile, users who “owns” the attention “sell” their attention for nothing; payers pay to the platforms – they are not even bribing the ones that have original ownership.

What concerns me (2)

Is that current companies or leader of companies at the frontier of AI and robotics talks about advancement everyday, but they said little about ethics, at least in the public domain.

Who to provide jobs if factories are run by robotics? and decisions are made without human in the loop?

How to preserve humanity in a world with automatic war machines / weapons?

BTC vs US insterest

I have a theory recently.

From US gov perspective, BTC is actually a threat to USD dominance and potentially US treasury demand.

Thus, US gov actually wants a volatile BTC market that is not very trustworthy.

How to do that?

BTC is designed to be decentralized, and there is no one single entity to tackle down.

MicroStrategy is the answer.

Well many people would be confused. Isn’t MicroStrategy one of the biggest buyers of BTC?

Sure.

But that is designed to be the case, as MicroStrategy needs to be influential in the first place.

However, MicroStrategy needs to add volatility and reduce credibility of BTC.

How to do that?

MicroStrategy added leverage to the game and used dividend tools like STRC.

BTC holders don’t have any obligation. But MicroStrategy now has dividend obligations, supported by a zero-yield asset.

In short, MicroStrategy adds a lot of risk to the system and makes BTC more like a Ponzi game.

That is exactly the goal of US gov.

Maybe that’s why Saylor and Trump are close.

PE multiple

PE multiple is not only a reflection of earnings quality, earnings growth/cagr, etc.

It’s also an encouragement or discouragement for value creation.

If $1 of profit is worth 10x in HK and 50x in A-share, companies could be more encouraged to create more value for A-share shareholders.

The same rationale also applies to upstream or downstream players – PE multiple can influence whether revenue or profit should sit more or less in supplier or customer etc.