We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Ned Beatty explains how the world really works to a doe-eyed crank in Network. A wonderful parable for our times, and still spot on 45 years after it was made. The Wall Street Bets kids will be cozened into Janet Yellen's boardroom shortly, and get Citadel's version of this speech.
It was kind of wonderful to watch Peter Finch ramble and rave for two reels, lulling you into the false idea that this was as far out as a man could get. Then Ned Beatty goes intergalactic compared to Finch's low Earth orbit. They gave all the Oscars to everyone else in the movie, so there were none left for him. Well, real boardrooms are supposed to be filled with faceless men.
Television's mesmeric effect was very real, but it's nothing compared to the internet. No one was walking around all day, every day, with a running television in their hand in 1976. TV was an alternate reality, a reality more beguiling than real life was, surely, but not a replacement.
There is no life outside the internet. It's Arthur Jensen's wildest dream, fully realized.
Much of this is down to the idiosyncratic nature of the Reddit investment phenomenon, which is the key difference between this deleveraging episode and others spurred by economic anxieties or macro shocks such as the pandemic. While the retail crowd can whip up a trading frenzy in a few stocks through its message board, the targets tend to be concentrated and relatively small.
I'll explain the GameStop/Reddit/Wall Street Bets frenzy in the simplest terms possible. They've all joined a joint-stock Amway.
The agreement came at a cost. In a six-page statement of facts, Smith acknowledged evading more than $43 million in taxes over a decade and repeatedly filing false tax forms. He agreed to pay a penalty, forsake tax-deduction claims for $182 million of charitable contributions and cooperate for five years with prosecutors on investigations, including their case against Brockman, whose web of opaque Caribbean entities was allegedly used to hide $2 billion in income earned from Vista.
His company manages $73 billion in assets for public pension funds. Public pension funds are about to get maybe a third of a trillion or so in bailouts, masquerading as aid to state and local governments. He won't be eating ramen anytime soon.
IBM’s blockchain unit missed its revenue targets by a wide margin for two years in a row, said a second source. Expectations for enterprise blockchain were too high, they said, adding that IBM “didn’t really manage to execute, despite doing a lot of announcements.”
I guess IBM is being haunted by the ghost of Romettys past. You will be visited by three spirits. Listen to them, and do what they say, or your (block)chains will be heavier than mine.
Together, these hieroglyphics give archaeologists hints about where the workers came from, what their lives were like, and who they worked for. Nowhere have archaeologists found signs of slavery or foreign workers. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence of labor tax collection throughout ancient Egypt. That’s led some researchers to suggest workers might have rotated through tours of construction, like a form of national service. However, it’s also unclear if that means the workers were coerced.
Got that? "Researchers" say it wasn't slavery. It was "national service." Give them another couple years to research the topic, and they'll be able to explain it was just like playing Minecraft, only with real blocks. Loads of fun for the whole conscripted family!
Women in China's "re-education" camps for Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured, according to detailed new accounts obtained by the BBC.
No sweat. Xi will just get some researchers to rename it "national service."
The Justice Department withdrew a lawsuit that alleged Yale University violated federal civil-rights law by discriminating against white and Asian-American undergraduate applicants, the latest indication that the Biden administration is shifting the federal government’s stance on civil-rights enforcement from that of the Trump administration.
Pretty soon, we'll perfect bizarro world college admissions where the only way a white male can attend is to make the football team.
The character trait that typically accompanies fame is extreme narcissism. Many friends quickly went messianically deranged when their social media accounts exploded with followers. I remember being in the ‘backstage’ area of a Bernie rally thinking that it felt less like a protest and more like the greenroom at a pop concert. People chatted to each other distractedly, glancing every few seconds at their phones or over each other’s shoulders for someone more famous to talk to before going on stage to passionately expostulate on the evils of inequality. For all its supposed utopianism, this is a cynically competitive and rigidly hierarchical scene.
I've been accused of being a narcissist. But enough about me. What do you think about me?
“They're going to get rid of the infrastructure that allows individualized tracking and profiling on the web,” says Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They're going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising—just doing it a different way.”
Cookies for me, but not for thee, says Google, and every toddler's mother.
Last September, India was confirming nearly 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. It was on track to overtake the United States to become the country with the highest reported COVID-19 caseload in the world. Hospitals were full. The Indian economy nosedived into an unprecedented recession. But four months later, India's coronavirus numbers have plummeted. Late last month, on Jan. 26, the country's Health Ministry confirmed a record low of about 9,100 new daily cases — in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. It was India's lowest daily tally in eight months.
Flu season in India runs from October to February. It's February. You're welcome.
In new research published in Advanced Materials in December, the QUT team describes a design that uses a capacitor-style titanium carbide-based negative electrode and a battery-style graphene-hybrid positive electrode. The result, says the team, is a hybrid capacitor with a power density (and thus charging capability) "about 10 times that of lithium batteries", and an energy density "close to that of nickel metal hydride batteries."
People mistakenly believe that designing electric cars is an electric car problem. But electric cars are about as old as gasoline-powered designs. They didn't catch on because the batteries sucked, and gasoline rocked, and was damn near free. The batteries still suck, and only work on a boondoggle basis. Supercapacitors are the future of electric cars and solar storage.
Well, that's the links for this morning. I hope you found them enjoyable or informative or amusing. But remember: It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.
I'm sorry. Did I say that out loud? I meant to say, "Have a nice day!"
Glenn Reynolds wonders if India's crash in COVID numbers has anything to do with the cheap and over-the-counter-available supplies of hydrochloroquine and ivermectin. There are hospitals in India that have been routinely prescribing safe, cheap ivermectin for many months and showing good results.
Others guess that India got to herd-immunity levels really, really fast.
I'm not confident it will be easy to find out, given the hysterical politicization of any attempt to draw rational conclusions from data.
Reddit's REAL problem is that they dared to stand against the filthy tribe swill who run the markets in the West. When THEY do it to the mere peons, everything is fine. But when somebody dares stand against THEM, well...
First, consider the source... Aljazeera. Then examine the theme: most of the article compares that one trade with the broader market which comparing apples and oranges:
QUOTE:
Even after the worst-ever short squeeze forced professional speculators to deleverage by the most in more than a decade, the smart money is staying invested in the U.S. stock rally with exposure near a record high, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. prime brokerage data show.
Then consider the numbers. Funds shorted 140% of the total shares. That’s a lot. GME went from $76 to over $400 in two days. From what I’ve been able to find out, funds were shorting GME down at $40. The explosion from $76 to $400 was probably largely fueled by funds getting out of positions that were already losers and were disasters when they finally got out.
Finally, consider that hedge fund managers are not known for their humility. What would it take for them to go public with their rage at some amateurs complaint that they had been snookered?
No, the funds didn’t have to close down, but you can bet the Reddit gang hurt them A LOT.
Talking about "Beating the hedge funds at their game" is a bit misleading. It looks like there may be as few as five funds that were hit hard by being over-leveraged in short GME positions, and most of that loss seems to have been borne by a single fund, Melvin.
#3.1.1
Another Guy Named Dan
on
2021-02-04 12:25
(Reply)
re It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.
Agreed. Our overlords merely see us as cogs in a machine, to be modified, lubricated and discarded as they see fit.
I'm one of the odds of the millions, but I'm odd in my own way. Which will remain secret! hahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha.
OH! Sorry, that was supposed to be BWAHahahahahahahaha.
The teachers union needs to be disbanded, no more unions for public employees. But first the states need to change the law and allow every parent to place their child in any school they wish and use the funding that would have been spent for their education to do it. Allow the funding to follow the child.
Re: The transgenders in women's sports. Parents need to boycott women's sports. Don't put their children in them until the politicians reverse this stupid decision. And if schools allow transgenders in the girls locker room they should boycott gym classes. Community action can overturn this mistake.
Things I bet you didn't know. Slavery was a basic institution in Korea for most of its history. It started to decline in the 19th century and was formally abolished by King Gojong in 1894, but did not actually end until the 1930s, during the period Korea was a colony of Japan.
Slavery persisted until the end of WW2, with the defeat of Japan. Korea was less a colony than an occupied territory with all things Korean forbidden. Men were forced to labor for Imperial Japan; most women were enslaved as "comfort women" -- sex slaves confined in military brothels ("comfort stations") throughout the empire. The treatment of women by the Imperial Japanese Army is still a source of tension between Japan and Korea to this day.
I've always wondered what would happen if you shot a hole in a supercapacitor and released all that energy at once... What kind of energy release takes place? It's all stored in there, and not in chemical form. Does it go boom? Does it get white hot? Anyone know?
