Comment on What If There’s No AGI?
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week agoBut 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.
Comment on What If There’s No AGI?
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week agoBut 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
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.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
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.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.