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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday July 26 2016, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-not-actually-ours dept.

Bloomberg reports that Nintendo's stock price fell by 18%, the maximum amount permitted in one day on the Tokyo stock exchange. The decrease occurred after the company issued guidance that the popular game Pokémon Go should not be expected to bring in much revenue for the company. The game was created by Niantic Inc., of which Nintendo has partial ownership. Nintendo's stock had "almost doubled" since its release.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Tuesday July 26 2016, @08:47AM

    by arslan (3462) on Tuesday July 26 2016, @08:47AM (#380237)

    Even if people's figured it out doesn't mean they won't stop playing it. After all a free market or a fair system is not necessarily a pre-requisite for gambling. As long as a system where there have to be winners and losers, even if unbalanced, there will be folks who will take a punt. Heck, most folks know casinos have the odds stacked in favor of the house but they are still willing to participate.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 26 2016, @09:11AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 26 2016, @09:11AM (#380241) Homepage
    Good points well made. Unfortunately the bread and circuses that are provided mean that there probably won't be too much critical analysis of whether basing your social and economic system upon this game is a wise thing to do or not. Ooooh - shiny!
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:22PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:22PM (#380264)

      I'd extend and expand FatPhil's remarks to include the religious obligation to donate, err, I mean invest in 401K schemes. And just like ritual recitation of prayers in church, to recite to each other in a group the capitalist prayer of "The stock market only goes up and is the best investment"

      Something that people seem to miss is they'll recite to each other how its a post industrial economy but never understand what that implies, about, say, financial markets. An early growing industrial economy needs a stock market to channel staggering amounts of money into railroad track and oil refineries and chemical plants. Trillions upon trillions over the last century or so. A post-industrial economy needs no "real" capital. The occasional rich VC can act as a patron to pay medical insurance and food and SV rent while the "capital investment" of an internet company is limited to some desks and chairs.

      A century ago my ancestors needed the stock market to raise a thousand times their annual income to buy the steam engine that created a hundred jobs and steaming piles of profit. A generation ago my peeps needed the stock market to finance multiple $50K SUN workstations and servers to do what a raspberry pi could outperform today. Speaking of today, internet companies need the stock market to finance... um... the foozball table and the kegerator in the break room?

      Now its not completely useless, but being cast off and its irrelevancy rising by the day means irrational behavior in the stock market is inherently going to rise.

      I guess another way of putting it, is given that the game required no involvement in the financial markets to create and deploy it, it seems irrational to expect the market to have much response.

      The stock market is a financial construct of the industrial era. Its about as necessary to a service economy as a boilermakers shop.

      Much as nobody works in agriculture but its still important and we still eat, nobody working in industry means we'll still have robotically manufactured cars and stuff, its just not going to be very important day to day as long as nothing breaks down too severely. The chicago commodities markets are no longer the center of the entire nations lives because we're no longer an ag nation, but the commodities markets still exist and are still reported on. Likewise our grandkids are still going to be subject to propaganda about how incredibly important the DJIA is, because everyone knows that everyone knows its important, Kardashian style, even though its about as important as today's price of pork bellies is to me.

      • (Score: 2) by naubol on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:28PM

        by naubol (1918) on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:28PM (#380749)

        Warren Buffet, no friend of rational market theory, has basically said that the margins of irrationality are becoming ever tighter. Why should we believe you over him?

        The commodities markets still seem to play an important role in stabilizing prices for producers. Why should we not care about these markets? Because food is a "solved problem?" Commodities were part of those solutions. We are still an ag nation, in the sense that we're a net exporter of food and our political stability is helped greatly by our not needing to constantly import enough food to feed ourselves. So, the amount of money taken in by food companies is reduced relative to GDP, but you seem to suggest that these markets are negligable.

        Startups have to attract talent, which costs non-trivial amounts of money. Some of the most interesting, disruptive startups are using grid computing now. Ever tried paying for that hardware? What about all the new exciting bio-engineering companies. Their infrastructure costs can border on the ridiculous.

        I think you have a rather constrained view of what modern enterprise is all about. The need to pool massive amounts of money is still there. We can't run our entire economy on startups which can be built by two engineers and a two thinkpads.

        That's a cute characterization about 401ks. The skimming of the fund managers is somewhat obnoxious, but I think it a stretch to relegate the entire concept to "the capitalist prayer".

        I think there's a chasm of distinction between the idea that we have too much speculation and your perspective on the markets. The former is an easy idea to sell, the latter feels frankly crackpot territory.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 27 2016, @03:01PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 27 2016, @03:01PM (#380765)

          We are still an ag nation

          I don't think we have much common ground here to discuss. We both seem to agree ag is a rounding error and that a rounding error of a huge country and huge economy is still very large and interesting. Yes I agree its possible to do interesting things that nobody participates in; that's a tolerable definition of the fine arts. But you can not usefully base large scale centrally controlled economic policy on a mere rounding error.

          Your other theory seems to boil down to acknowledging that software and hardware costs always trend toward zero as they commoditize but for a very short window when a given capability is still expensive, its possible to profit for a very short time. Like smart phones, for example. The concept of non of our investments in the future will be sustainable or stable is interesting. Again a system thats built around raising cash to build factories full of people that depreciate over 20 years is not going to work with an economy of "in two years this will all be worthless, but we can cash in until then". Especially if it takes two years to get to the IPO, LOL.

          We can't run our entire economy

          You could have ended that line there. There's companies in legacy lines of work that have gone away, are going away now, and don't realize it but they're going away too. BAU is done. Large fractions of the population no longer usefully participate in the old economy. If you (in a wide sense) have a "good" job its is either automating, merger-downsizing, going overseas, going to an illegal or H1B, or there's fifty qualified under-employed folks looking to take it. But don't worry, only 75% of the economy depends on your consumption remaining high.