In Norway the oil fund are actively arguing against boycotting these kinds of companies saying, and I paraphrase: "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals"
For some context, this Norwegian cartoon by a group that used to make satire for the government run news agency is a pretty decent summary of how things were discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs.
The old man is a caricature of Jens Stoltenberg (who seems to be running the Norwegian economic machine rather well nowadays, controversial or not)
I don't know the AUM of this pension fund but if the managers were doing their jobs they should have had at least a tiny bit of exposure to SpaceX years ago.
Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
The point is that in the secondary market, the oil will be extracted regardless. By you not participating, you actually increase the return on equity for others, making it more profitable. Buying the stock does not add money into the business.
The area for disincentivizing oil production is the political sphere, not the financial sphere. Refusing to participate in secondary market ownership does almost less than nothing to disincentivize the extraction. At least with ownership, you get a say in the firms harm mitigation.
To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".
I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.
The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
>Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
I mean that's fair, but it's also why I brought up the three major schools of ethics. The consequentialist likely won't care if it's going to happen anyway. The virtue ethicist will.
The sovereign fund of Norway also researches a lot of the state of the companies and then invests into the whole market vs the ones they dont consider good according to some metric. Sounds like this Danish example.
Pensioners should get the same amount regardless of investments, as long as there is enough funding, which it seems there is for the moment.
Of course, if someone wants to risk their own money, they can invest in whatever they want. They can even sell their pension for a cash lump sum and invest that.
It's maddening how quickly ESG and similar programmes have been thrown in the dumpster once the political climate in the US swung back to "anti-woke".
> "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals"
What these clowns conveniently forget is that their job is not just "to make money" but to make money over a span of decades and centuries in the case of the sovereign funds. A long term investment fund that optimizes for the next quarter at the expense of the long term is a bad fund.
And so the ESG and woke "hippie bullshit" is nothing more than the basic capitalism of maximizing your gains by 2100 by not destroying the one planet all your companies are on.
Long term funds do not have the luxury of being passive owners. If they take no role in management, that role will instead by taken by whatever short-term owner walks in next. They don't care about the value by 2100, they just want the company to tear the copper out of it's own walls so they can sell with a profit by next quarter, retail even sooner.
How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index.
ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. And that's why no one takes it seriously any more.
> How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index.
ESG is more than just the environment. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk's governance is a serious risk to the corporation.
> ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways.
Right now as we speak, a bunch of "arbitrary opaque committees" are deciding to rush SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI into the major stock indexes.
Even completely passive investment leaves one at the whims of said committees.
That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit.
In turn you also want democratically elected politicians above that saying “yes, but the people want their money made ethically, so you can’t do that”.
> That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit.
The job of the police is arresting people who break the law, but similarly to your money manager, you really don't want them to do this regardless of anything else, there is more things to consider than just "do everything you can to arrest people", and hopefully the same for your money manager. But also, I might be too European to understand the true value of "money grow regardless of society cost at large".
The point is that it's the job of the democratic legislature to codify what you just stated here into law, so that all money managers have to abide by this standard, not just those that have a personal conviction for it. That's the essence of rule of law.
There is room for both. Not every aspect of morality needs to made law, as significant portions are subjective and debated. Law should be a least common denominator.
This leaves room for individuals to act in accordance with their morals above and beyond the law.
SpaceX is headed by a person who is a strong ally of a politician who openly challenges Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland. Guess you wouldn't mind selling your organs to the same group of powerful people for a few bucks because you're not virtue signalling?
Right, you could disagree on which things to prioritize over dollar profits. My main point is that these preferences are not irrational like was asserted. At the scale of a sovereign wealth fund or pensions, you need to care about externalities; in the case of Denmark vs SpaceX you have something relatively concrete, in other cases we need to keep in mind that the goal of these funds are to improve the welfare of who they serve, and see past the dollar signs to take into account the consequences of the investments.
> Norway is the 5th largest weapons and defense manufacturer
Any evidence for this? Norway shows as 13th on the list of arms exporters, and is 1/42 of US exports [1]. If counting total manufacturing, Norway is 1/100th to 1/150th of US volume, based on how you count. [2]
> while the so called Oil Fund doesn't directly invest in them, Kongsberg is 50% state owned.
Kongsberg is a conglomerate with non-defense businesses [3]. The volume of defense-related product is not called out but Norway's total is just around $2.5B [4] compared to US at $334B [5] or about 1/133. Your point does stand as hypocrisy at the state level; though management decisions are likely separate between the two entities and not coordinated at the state level.
> Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes.
That is two claims: that the Danish fund lacks judgment, and that its policy is performative. Any evidence?
> so called Oil Fund
'Oil fund' is fair shorthand - it's funded by petro wealth. 'so called Oil Fund' seems to be a sneer. Combined with 'some sense' and 'virtue signaling,' it reads less like argument and more like contempt.
Based on any rational indicator SpaceX is extremely overvalued though.
Of course it does not mean that its stock price will crash after the IPO, stock markets in the US especially are not exactly behaving rationally.
> Norway is the 5th largest weapons and defense manufacturer
What's the issue with that? Unilateral disarmament would be an exceptionally stupid idea for any country and then you do need need someone to produce weapons for your military and those of your allies.
It’s not about virtue signaling. It’s that SpaceX (or xAi like it should be called because that’s most of the company) is a shitty deal where they changed the rules just to make large funds bail out Elon.
> Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes.
How would you know if they are doing those moves because it's what they believe in, vs it's just a position they'd like to broadcast publicly?
In my mind, a symbolic gesture would be to speak against Tesla and SpaceX without actually doing something, that'd be "virtue signaling" in my mind, but since they're actually doing something, a practical action to not just speak but also not invest into those companies, doesn't it stop being "virtue signaling" at that point?
I've always wondered, do people who complain about virtue signaling just simply not believe in the concept of virtues or integrity at all? Human nature is pure vice mediated by violence and contract law, that's it.
I get the cynicism about performative acts vs. authentic values but where's the line? Putting your money where your mouth is has to count for something.
You have a point. I'd hope most of us actually do care about virtues and integrity, but 90% of the time it doesn't need to be said. It's how we were raised. Now, true virtue signalling is saying X to change the perception but yet doing 100 evil things in the background.
I think this is part of it. I have heard some people turn to prostitution to afford working for the mickey mouse company in Tokyo. Second hand accounts. People go to insane lengths just to work at their dream place.
The other part of the problem not discussed in this article is that many services now require digital ID. Banks don't really have many physical locations any more, etc. So not having a digital ID is seriously impractical, and it didn't have to be this way. That is IMO a big factor for why digital ID is receiving so much flac: "Digital ID isn't something everyone can have, and for the corner-case people, the alternatives are drying up due to over-digitalization"
In my country during covid banks virtually eliminated the cash. There is maybe one branch left per major city dealing with cash. The few remaining branches are "lounge areas" where they tell you to set up their app and do everything by yourself.
Yep its basically the same in Norway. I live 20 min by train from the capitol - we used to have multiple bank offices in the downtown area. They are all closed now. My now retired father got a shock when he, not really keen on dealing with technology, was unable to find a physical office to visit.
To be fair a part of the problem here is that BankID is so common it has become the "Jacuzzi of EID" or the "Google of EID" or whatever your poison is. So all EID-related discussion in public is now "Why aren't we just adding BankID".
Sure, some policymaker will probably interpret this as "introduce EID" but it does color public debate.
I think it's a shame MinID doesn't have the same level of security as BankID, we are really missing out on a great opportunity. But something tells me the powers that are in Norway's socialite community doesn't want it. In Norway we don't have that much monetary corruption, but we have a lot of "kompistjeneste"
The Gathering used to be a demoscene event! Even hosted the scene.org awards in 2011. Looking at pouet.net, quite a lot of famous demos were released there, such as:
Today, the demoscene still lives in Norway albeit arguably on life support. Those that are still interested usually go to "proper demoparties". Solskogen, the old demoparty, had its last event during COVID. Black Valley is a replacement and it seems to be doing well. I was at Solskogen '17 and it was a great collection of hacker-minded people. There was also plenty of alcohol, I can understand why demosceners - an aging population, would prefer their own party to the alcohol-free The Gathering.
The Gathering currently has a mix of creative and e-sport events. I feel like the end of creative has loomed over our heads for 10 years, at least we definitely felt like a minority when I was crew back in the first half of the 2010s. But it still lives, and people still participate in the competitions!
It's an uncomfortable truth that even TG is failing to pull in participants lately, but LANs don't have the critical role in nerd culture they had in the 2000s. I'm happy it still exists and the board seem to be making some decent attempts at revitalising it for a modern crowd
I'm a huge fan of co-operatives for this kind of org.
It would be interesting to create WikiMedia as a co-op and transfer ownership to editors, staff, donors, on some basis. There would be a huge argument about that basis, for sure. But if anyone has the experience to manage an enormous argument, and then handle the mechanics of conducting votes across multi-million-people ownership groups, it's WikiMedia.
Recently, every time there's a discussion about single CEOs and/or private equity ruining good things, co-operatives seem to come up. Maybe they aren't such a bad idea. Certainly, for starting a company or org, it seems like a decent option.
The big problem from a startup pov is that there's no way of getting conventional/VC funding into a co-op that doesn't break the model.
WikiMedia is different because it already has funds - you could reasonably offer donors an ownership share for their donation, and it wouldn't flood the voting.
It doesn't seem to be anywhere close to where they're heading, however, which is a shame.
gnome foundation voted for a new president in 2010s who then hired several directors "specialized in fund raising" for obscene salaries, and then 4yrs iirc left, and the foundation declared bankruptcy or something
most devs in the board kept blogging what was happening, in kinda of an oblivious way. so it's a good insight on how those things are sold and how they happen.
That car, just like the SUV, is more for people who want to brag they own a Ferrari than for people who want a good car. It isn't as ugly as the Nissan leaf (still my favorite practical car!), but it isn't winning any beauty contests any time soon.
Good to see it isn't necessarily the case.
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