@femmenietzsche

any thoughts on the ridiculous gamestop shorting/Reddit thing? it’s wild and i can’t get “the stock market is fucking FAKE” out of my head because of it

It’s pretty funny. For those unaware, a bunch of Redditors with Robinhood accounts have been buying Gamestop stock as a meme, thus sending the price of the stock skyrocketing. This has, for the moment, majorly screwed over professional hedge funds who had more rationally shorted Gamestop (betting they’d do poorly, in other words). Shorting stock is a super risky game, and they made the exact wrong bet.

But it’s also been frustrating seeing people react to it because I can tell a lot of people don’t really get what’s happening. All the “the stock market is FAKE” memes are a good example of this: there’s nothing fake about what’s happening here! Real people are using real money to buy real shares of real stock, thus negatively impacting other real people also investing real money. I’m not really sure what people mean by the stock market being “fake,” but if it was literally fake, as in stock prices just being picked at random out of a hat, none of this would be possible!

I think what people mean by the stock market being “fake” is simply that A.) this whole thing is silly, and B.) the stock market isn’t functioning the way it’s expected to. Both of those reactions are correct: this is example #10 billion of how the stock market is not fully rational, meaning it isn’t acting how you’d expect given a market full of informed individuals making wise decisions according to their self-interest.

The purpose of a financial market is capital intermediation: matching people with money they’re looking to invest (supply of capital) to people looking to borrow money for their business, etc. (demand for capital). Stocks are one form of this: companies issue ownership shares of their company, and investors looking to earn a return buy those shares if they think the company will do well. When they think the company will do poorly, they sell their shares (or short the company, which is a slightly different process). This buying and selling of shares determines the price of the company’s shares, and thus the total worth of the company. 

A lot of free market ideology is based on the idea that markets are highly (if not perfectly) rational, that no one would make a move like the one the Redditors are making right now. What we’re seeing with the Redditors here is a deviation from this. Investors are “irrationally” buying Gamestop shares not because they think the company will do well, but just for the fun of it. Irrational investment (buying shares based on something other than a calculation of future profit) is actually fairly common in the stock market- John Maynard Keynes called it the “animal spirits” of human behavior, and the field of behavior economics has done tons of research building on this insight.

 But because this is very simple irrational behavior without any higher market manipulation, the natural tendency will be for this to self-correct.* No one seriously thinks that Gamestop is going to do well enough in the future to justify their current share price, so the Redditors will begin to sell their recently-purchased shares at the current high prices, expanding supply and sending the price downward, thus screwing over all the other Redditors who don’t sell quickly. Most of the Reddit investors will lose their money.

“But Brett,” you ask, “couldn’t any coordinated group of people cause havoc on the stock market like this?” Yes, they could, and the combination of widespread access to stock markets (Robinhood) and semi-serious internet investing forums (Reddit) clearly makes this a possibility. But they’ll have little success in achieving anything by doing this beyond causing a lot of people in Southern Manhattan to sweat more for a few hours. You’ll have to have a large group of people willing to invest a large enough amount of money to compete with the rest of the stock market, and most will have to be willing to knowingly lose money each time they do it. It just introduces a new form of potential volatility to stock markets, it doesn’t fundamentally change anything about them. 

*Note that this “it will eventually self-correct” thing is true of a simple incident like this, but does not necessarily hold for larger-scale or more complex phenomenon in financial markets. Indeed, in larger and more serious situations, it rarely does hold.

I like the part in Evanescence Wake Me Up where the guy goes “don’t let me die here ACROSS THE SALAD BAR”

femmenietzsche :

lordlyonmain :

Manifesting a tulpa so I have someone to watch Babylon 5 with

discoursedrome said: apologizing to the tulpa, “no, it gets better after the first few episodes. yeah, the cgi is really dated, but at the time it was groundbreaking”

Just watched the first episode (not the original pilot that people said to skip, the one after that) and it was fine. Better than Encounter at Farpoint, worse than the DS9 premiere.

Next episode is a sci fi version of Mormons posthumously baptizing Anne Frank, which I appreciate

lordlyonmain :

Manifesting a tulpa so I have someone to watch Babylon 5 with

discoursedrome said: apologizing to the tulpa, “no, it gets better after the first few episodes. yeah, the cgi is really dated, but at the time it was groundbreaking”

Just watched the first episode (not the original pilot that people said to skip, the one after that) and it was fine. Better than Encounter at Farpoint, worse than the DS9 premiere.

Love how Dominion Voting Systems has filed defamation lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages from like Rudy Giuliani and the MyPillows guy. There’s a great line of business: sell voting machines to purple states below cost and make all your money suing pundits every two years

Happy for the day traders who are getting rich, but I’m content with my 23% stake in Valve

mapsontheweb :

Baseball fields close enough to hit a home run across US/Canada or US/Mexico border.

“Important ideas about building a kinder, better society getting repurposed as classist shibboleths” is such a funny problem for a country to have

AIUI the channel islands seem to be a remnant of a composite monarchy that also included England, medieval Wales, 17th c. Scotland, the Pale of Ireland and the left half of France. England Wales, Scotland and Ireland got consilidated into a unitary state, French firefdoms were lost during the 100 Years' War and the Crown Dependancies were left to do their own thing.

In 933, the islands were granted to William I Longsword by Raoul King of Western Francia[11] and annexed to the Duchy of Normandy. In 1066, William II of Normandy invaded and conquered England, becoming William I of England, also known as William the Conqueror. In the period 1204–1214, King John lost the Angevin lands in northern France, including mainland Normandy, to King Philip II of France, but managed to retain control of the Channel Islands. In 1259, his successor, Henry III of England, by the Treaty of Paris, officially surrendered his claim and title to the Duchy of Normandy, while the King of France gave up claim to the Channel Islands, which was based upon his position as feudal overlord of the Duke of Normandy. Since then, the Channel Islands have been governed as possessions of the Crown and were never absorbed into the Kingdom of England and its successor kingdoms of Great Britain and the United Kingdom.

Really bothers me that no one over the last millennium ever went “hey let’s get rid of this constitutional awkwardness”

The same could be said of Mann, Jersey, and Guernsey's relationship with England/the UK, just on a much larger scale.

That is an interesting comparison I never would have considered

The United States has been a country since 1776, for 245 years. The US took Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain in 1898, 123 years ago. 2 times 123 is 246, so it just recently became the case that these two territories have been ruled by the United States for more than half of its history. The annexation of American Samoa began in 1900, 121 years ago, and it will soon pass that milestone as well.

This has been stuck in my head for the last day. Maybe I can get it stuck in yours as well.

But some areas are more historic than others

Sure, you could make adjustments for like Washington DC vs. San Jose. Obviously in practice you’d need rules more complicated than a single number, the important thing is just to have some limiting principle that keeps it from being another NIMBY tool.

Historic preservation of important buildings makes perfect sense, it just should be limited to like <1% of the buildings in an area, so you have to pick and choose

2MASS J21265040−8140293, also known as 2MASS J2126−8140, is an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf TYC 9486-927-1, 111.4±0.3 light-years away from Earth. It has both the longest (~900 thousand years) and the widest orbit (>4500 AU) of any known planetary mass object. Its estimated mass, age (10-45 million years), spectral type, and Teff are similar to the well-studied planet β Pictoris b.

Million year orbit…

Think I’ve run out of trans-Neptunian objects to read about on Wikipedia :(

How do countries with rotationally symmetric flags indicate distress?

For hundreds of years inverted national flags were commonly used as distress signals.[3] However, for some countries’ flags it is difficult (e.g., Spain, South Korea) or impossible (e.g., Japan, Thailand, and Israel) to determine whether they are inverted.  Other countries have flags that are inverses of each other; for example, the Polish flag is white on the top half and red on the bottom, while Indonesia’s and Monaco’s flags are the opposite—i.e., top half red, bottom half white. A ship flying no flags may also be understood to be in distress.[4]

If any flag is available, distress may be indicated by tying a knot in it and then flying it upside-down, making it into a wheft.[5]

Would be cool if a murderous cult set up a compound in my home town but with housing prices what they are I just don’t see it happening

lucifersstupidwhore:

by Billeils

One bad thing about Christianity is that if you make a joke about cannibalizing God everyone will assume you were just referencing communion

My two main points of reference for art are “is it better than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe put together” and “is it better than the Bible”. For example, I just watched the 1968 sci fi sex comedy Barbarella, which was much better than the MCU but not nearly as good as the Bible.

thecalminside :

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal

You know, I am actually really good at this, and I have to say it’s made my life worse, not better

Someone chooses to interact with me once every 4 to 6 hours on average

One of the worst types of interaction on social media is when someone shares a mildly embarrassing anecdote in the spirit of humorous and self-aware self-deprecation and people all act like they’ve inadvertently owned themselves

if vaccines came in pill form countless lives would be saved, but on the other hand we’d have to put up with endless jokes about being “vaxxpilled” so it’s a wash

What if in The Matrix it had been the red and the blue syringe and people talked about being redshotted. That’s not really an interesting hypothetical it’s just the first thing that came to mind

I wonder how much more receptive people would be to vaccinations if they came in pills rather than shots

femmenietzsche :

femmenietzsche :

I own three pillows. Two of them are identical, normal, medium firm pillows I got from Target maybe a year ago. They’re pretty cheap though and already getting thin and lumpy. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have to replace them by the end of the year. The third pillow is a memory foam pillow that’s curved on one side but flat on the other. It’s designed for people with neck pain, but I just use it to prop up the other two pillows when I’m reading in bed, so that they aren’t slumped against the wall. (You could also use one of those upright pillows with arms for this purpose, but I could never find one that was comfortable, and in any case my three pillow setup allows me greater flexibility in terms of shifting them around as needed.) This third pillow I purchased from Amazon, also for cheap, but because of the way I use it, and because I don’t rest directly on it and so don’t care as much about how it feels, I expect it to last quite a long time.

That seems like a reasonable amount of pillows to me.

elefantnap said: what about a body pillow, or do you hug a large plushie instead?

finestoftheflavors said: body pillow body pillow body pillow

I sleep more or less flat on my stomach, so a body pillow would be of limited use to me.

tototavros said: Ok but you can hug body pillow

tototavros said: When not asleep

tototavros said: Or have it rest on top of you

This is perhaps unfair, but I sort of assume that everyone who owns a body pillow has it because they’re not-so-secretly a dry humping freak.

femmenietzsche :

I own three pillows. Two of them are identical, normal, medium firm pillows I got from Target maybe a year ago. They’re pretty cheap though and already getting thin and lumpy. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have to replace them by the end of the year. The third pillow is a memory foam pillow that’s curved on one side but flat on the other. It’s designed for people with neck pain, but I just use it to prop up the other two pillows when I’m reading in bed, so that they aren’t slumped against the wall. (You could also use one of those upright pillows with arms for this purpose, but I could never find one that was comfortable, and in any case my three pillow setup allows me greater flexibility in terms of shifting them around as needed.) This third pillow I purchased from Amazon, also for cheap, but because of the way I use it, and because I don’t rest directly on it and so don’t care as much about how it feels, I expect it to last quite a long time.

That seems like a reasonable amount of pillows to me.

elefantnap said: what about a body pillow, or do you hug a large plushie instead?

finestoftheflavors said: body pillow body pillow body pillow

I sleep more or less flat on my stomach, so a body pillow would be of limited use to me.

I own three pillows. Two of them are identical, normal, medium firm pillows I got from Target maybe a year ago. They’re pretty cheap though and already getting thin and lumpy. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have to replace them by the end of the year. The third pillow is a memory foam pillow that’s curved on one side but flat on the other. It’s designed for people with neck pain, but I just use it to prop up the other two pillows when I’m reading in bed, so that they aren’t slumped against the wall. (You could also use one of those upright pillows with arms for this purpose, but I could never find one that was comfortable, and in any case my three pillow setup allows me greater flexibility in terms of shifting them around as needed.) This third pillow I purchased from Amazon, also for cheap, but because of the way I use it, and because I don’t rest directly on it and so don’t care as much about how it feels, I expect it to last quite a long time.

That seems like a reasonable amount of pillows to me.

I own an autographed Ann Coulter book

This got me wondering how much an autographed Mein Kampf cost, and apparently they can go for $65,000–70,000. Also, someone bought Hitler’s personal copy (non-autographed) for just $28,400, which seems low to me.