That this is even legal in the first place is insane. Digital communication is at least as vital, if not more vital that postage. Image someone is just banned form getting post delivered or he gets throttled to only once every other week…
I think you misunderstand rich people. Why do you think they make PACs? Why do you think they make Ivy Leagues and send their kids there? Why do you think they keep up all these illusions. Do you think they are too stupid to realize that you can get an equivalent education for a fraction of that money?
Their “class” is not important when it comes to investing. If they could fire all the nepo babies and use AI instead, they would do it in 1 second.
Firing the nepo babys remains consistent with being the owning class. And they put the nepo babies so they dont have to put rising middle and lower class people there.
Expect? No.
Possible? With trading in puts and calls options definitely.
Still stupidly risky gambling where you loose most of the time? Absolutely
Ivy League, internships etc. prove exactly what you are critizising. They prove to have the connections. They prove to be part of the in-group. They prove that you will defend your class interests against the lower classes. And if you are one of the very few people who achieve upwards class mobility, they prove that you will be betraying them.
This is not about running the best company or running the best economy. It is about maintaining class power and privilege.
They can do that with a lot of them, but not all. You can’t really sell an oil platform when nobody is buying oil anymore. The “stranded assets” is a huge motivator for fossil industries to prolong the switch to renewables as long as possible. Problem is the governments being complicit. They could have made clear paths from when on no new fossil investments were allowed to create a proper phase out.
Problem with publicly traded is that there is no personal risk past the price you bought the stocks for. You paid $ 1,000 for some stocks of “evil chemical corp”? Now your financial interest, and thats the only measureable one, would want them to pollute for a damage of $ 10,000 respective to the stock value if that increases your stock price to $ 2,000, as long as the risk of them having to pay for cleaning it up is smaller than 50%. Problem is the same holds true for a damage of $ 100,000 relative to your stock. Or any arbitrarily large amount. Your share in the damage caused could be in the billions, but worst thing the company goes bankrupt and you loose your stocks buying price.
The only alternative would be holding shareholders responsible with their own money, if a company is forced to pay up for damages they caused, going past its bankruptcy.
This kind of reductionism is hilariously unscientific.
Many theories were only able to advance after we had the tools to experimentally review them and quite frankly often weed the bad ones out. Modern tools like computing enable the development of theories that before were unimaginable, leaving aside the necessity of modern communication to grow and share knowledge.
Or in other words: Nobody who now writes his theories on chalkboard would have done so with charcoal on a cave wall after hunting mammoths during the day.
Add increasing penalties to that.