Facebook debuts, social-networking stocks fall

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

FB generates tons of money, how could it not? It has over 500 million active users.

Yes, investing in any business is a gamble. You are taking a chance that the company will succeed and create value and profit. Just imagine you and I are neighbors, we live in a town where there is no taxi service and a lot of people who don't own cars. I may make a study and show that a taxi service would be a valuable addition to the town. I ask you to help me buy 4 cars, hire drivers, and radio equipment. You invest an amount with an agreement to share in the profits. If I run the business well and I am right about the demand, we make money and the town has a taxi service. A gamble? Sure, so is life.

Just creating money is not enough, Neal. Have you nothing learned from the abstract-value-hype of the past years? It's bubbles. Money needs to be covered by real value. But FB - amongst other stockmarket services - does not produce real value, just abstract value. Which means a devaluation of money.

You may take the gamble, and yes, in some case people can make a fortune. But only at a price. And that is the cost to the higher common good.

Alchemy wanted to make gold of lead. Stockmarkets want to make real value from nothing, which basicvally is the same thing. But all they do is make abstract value from nothing only (=mortagges on the future, that is), or real value that does not live beyond the moment, and thus is nothing to build a future on. Even if some ga,mbler makes a fortune from some present deal, the cost for that deal does not vanish - it just get shifted and hidden deepn inside the system, and produces a cost that gets payed by others, and/or the community. Such short-living welath that goes away again, we call hypes. A hype is nothing to buoild your community's future on. Once the hype collapses, the community'S gains from it collapse as well.

From nothing comes nothing. Do not spend more than you earn. Do not tansfer servicing youre debts endlessly into the future. Spend a little less than you earn, so that after servicing possible debts and hopefully kill them sooner or later, you have some rest left to save for bad times. - That is what reasons dicates a sane mind. Stockmarkets and endless-growth-apostles hate it. Which makes me conclude that the stockmarkets do not operate on the grounds of sanity and reason. Maybe that is where the troubles are coming from. Because some origin they must have come from, the problems do not come from nowhere, as if all by themselves.