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People without seatbelts often end up in emergency rooms at public expense. People with bad investments won't often end up on welfare from their decisions.



Can you show this to be the case, or should I just take your word for it that bad investments don't have any negative impact on society?


I don't know of any studies on the subject, I'm just reasoning that if you have enough money to do actual long-term investment you must have some form of income, so if it falls through you still have income. It's not like gambling where you can addictively throw away every dollar you have in a day. If you 'invest away' all your money, you can uninvest it the next day.

Also: It's not 'negative impact' as a binary check, but looking at the massive cost of medical bills. And seatbelts are enforced on public roads, not private land. Investment is fundamentally a private action, which should only be restricted in very serious circumstances.


> It's not like gambling where you can addictively throw away every dollar you have in a day.

It's not?

> If you 'invest away' all your money, you can uninvest it the next day.

Not if it's gone.


Actual investment (to be distinguished from day-trading) is not an addictive action. There is no feedback loop.

What crazy definition of investing are you using where you have any reasonable* chance of losing all your money in less than a day?

Compare that to the near-100% chance of losing your money if you spend a single hour betting all of it at casino games.

*let's say 1% or greater


I know for a fact that you do not have a near-100% chance of losing your money in a single hour at the casino, so the rest of your data, and your logic in general I find suspect.

Your argument would hold some weight if you could provide some source or documentation for your assertions (that investment has no feedback loop and is therefore not addictive, or that the speed at which you lose your money on an investment is something that matters for the sake of this conversation).


I didn't say walking through a casino for an hour, I said betting all your money for an hour. As in, find a game, bet all your money, rinse and repeat. If you can win dozens of times in a row please take me with you next trip.

Compare to buying and selling stocks repeatedly for an hour. Except for transaction fees you're probably not going to move more than a couple percent.

What do you want documentation for? Buying a stock for three months is about a million times slower of a feedback loop than a casino game, and that's an unarguable fact. When I search for anything about addiction to investing, all I find is articles talking about addiction to speculating, which is not the same thing.

And of course the speed matters, because the core of my argument was that you can't do something like blow your paycheck on investments. Bad investment might lessen your savings over the long term, but they're not going to turn a working adult into someone that costs society money the way a terrible car crash or gambling addiction can.




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