Just sayin…
If we want to start a constructive thread, maybe we can talk about how ESG/SRI are kind of useless or that we need voting rights on ETFs or something like that.
I must admit that some of your posts remain a mystery to me 
…
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thanks? 
some hints:
- Coffee group
- Google that company and be surprised
The rest is serious. ETF doesn’t allow me to vote in that company, even if I have a tiny bit of it.
Also SRI means "Socially Responsible Investing. VT isn’t SRI I believe, but I also wonder how can be a company defined SRI, who decide it. If I trust social media, that company is definitely not SRI.
You delegate your right to the ETF manager. If you want to vote, buy single stocks
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This may change in the future, at least for Vanguard ETFs like VT.
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I get your point of view @ma0, but I don’t think you can be socially responsible and target FIRE. Reaching FIRE is kind of the epitome of capitalism, where your aim is literally to grab an unfairly big share of the financial wealth of this planet, to remove yourself from the working population and let others earn your livelihood. There is absolutely nothing socially responsible about reaching FIRE (you may use your RE to be a socially good person but that is another story), and I don’t think adding a social perspective or constraint to your investment will change that.
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Thanks for expressing your thoughts clearly. I thought about it as well. FIRE is kind of using a loophole, but I’m not entirely sure it is. Especially here in CH. Yes, you stop producing for someone, but that’s a limited point of view. Of course you won’t be building widgets for your boss, but you might be doing something else as useful as the widgets or even more.
The other socially responsible part is different. First, the ETF themselves are sold as SRI, so we could discuss how much it’s true or not. Secondly, you can still be responsible even if you invest “hard”. It’s like when you are against animal cruelty: you can still enjoy a steak and be against some of the stuff they do to some animals.
Sometimes, I admit, it’s about giving yourself signals. I am tempted to invest in RE to balance my investments and because they seems to have a good trajectory, but at the same time I do know that RE funds are one of the reasons we have “costs issues” in CH. I said “signal” because I ofc do have RE funds in my 2nd and 3rd pillar…
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Philosophical, I like it!
I’d also paint this a little less black and white as some do here.
Say, if someone FIREs on dividends, they still pay taxes on this income, which socially benefits others. Is that person on the white end of the spectrum of being socially responsible? No. On the black end then? Also no, IMHO.
I’d say “never on the black”.
(well, if you leave CH we might discuss it, especially if you come back for an illness (definitely black-ish)
If a software engineer decides to stop working and just follow his/her/its hobby of wielding, is s/h/it “on the black”? What should a welder think? Was Van Gogh a socially bad? He just sold one painting his whole life.
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I think there is something important in this conversation.
Does working in a corporation is socially responsible just because you are contributing to the society workforce and, thus, paying your taxes? This is for me a big issue of the society: to be useful you must work. No matter what you are doing I guess. If you are working for a company selling guns, tabacco or wathever would that still be socially responsible? That is an extreme of course (and I don’t have nothing against people working at these companies).
From my point of view what matters is not whether you work or not and whether you invest in “ESG” companies but how you invest yourself in society, helping others, contributing to your neighbourgs, doing donations to specific projects,… I believe this have much more impact than your tax contributions.
Of course as Your_Full_Name said, in any case you are still contributing via the taxes on your dividends. If you have the wealth to FIRE in Switzerland you have a coniderable amount of taxes paid via your dividends anyway.
Another question is society perception on FIRE and people outside the workforce. It is clearly not well perceived in my opinion… At the end what matters is what you want and no what others think.
For the original question, ma0, voting rights are restricted to individual stocks and that makes sense because voting for 9000 companies inside of an ETF will be a nightmare, right?
By the way, can we see what Vanguard voted in each of the companies in VT for example?
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Probably here
https://vds.issgovernance.com/vds/#/MjAxMA==/
If social responsibility was measurable and codifiable it’d have been codified already. Like dropping trash on the street is fined if caught is. Usefulness is relative and subjective. Was I useful to my parents in any situation other than skipping the line in the airport?
I call sour grapes, it takes effort to save and not spend. The flipside is that some (quite a few) FIRE people are egotistical miserly rats to the point of psychopathy, that naturally rubs normal people the wrong way!
Is it unfair? What is unfair, actually? Is being born rich, white and straight in the 1950s US unfair? Is being born rich anywhere unfair? Is being smarter/more beautiful than others unfair? If you didn’t steal the money then it’s not unfair. Again, the law decides what’s fair and what isn’t, people have enough inventiveness in trying to be unfair to others that investing in stocks doesn’t make the cut 
Edit: I am not a libertarian, I’m actually a social democrat at heart.
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Can somebody explain to me what’s so terribly wrong with this company? I mean except that its CEO has just been shot by a far-left lunatic who thought about ESG maybe a bit too much… The shooter probably also was a fan of Mao (Zedong).
Only a wee bit off topic now … sorry, @ma0 
… is it, though? If you live in a country at war you’re probaby cheering for that person working for a company selling guns.
Without wanting to become political here there were and still are nations, even empires, that codified social responsibility in their constitution.
Chat-GTP claims these are the current ones: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea.
It also lists these as former countries: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and “Ethiopia, Angola and other African nations during periods of Marxist-Leninist influence.”
As I tried to argue before, there is a spectrum of being socially responsible. People have different views where they (but especially other people) should be on that spectrum. In democracies, politics hopefully works towards finding the consensus that most people don’t fully agree with but that more or less works for everyone?
Same here. I don’t even regret already having paid several millions into the collective of federal, cantonal and municipal taxes and the AHV, and I expect I’ll pay a couple more until I’ve completed my miles to go before I sleep.*
* (c) by Robert Frost. Look at that, we’ve also weaved poetry into this topic!
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I’d like to flag you but maybe you just wrote that without thinking too much.
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There’s this
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Probably many things, none of which will be solved by a murder.
There’s a trendline I can see if I squint hard enough…?
Edit: a few days ago, while chatting about this story, a US-based colleague told me “most Fortune 500 are in fact extremely competent financial managers cloaked as companies that do other things”.
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I like this threat! I want to add my thoughts
Beeing FIRE could be socially responsible if you take into account one of the points is to live frugally, which also means reducing your consumism impact in the world.
But I agree is not socially repsponsible in the sense is just an accumulation of wealth and surfing the wave of capitalism (making money just for the sake of having money).
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Well, go ahead. Exactly zero wrong with my post (except that it’s probably not in line with your opinion, which is not against any rule).
Seems like YOU wrote this post without thinking too much.
Your comment about him being a Fan of Mao is dumb imho. Especially because you seems not to know the whole story. That’s it. Nothing against you, but of all the bad things that we can say about him, you picked a weird one. There are enough ppl on the internet that keeps playing the card left against right.
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