Sorry to be the little grey raincloud on this Hate The Hedges party, but you might want to understand the implications of what just happened

Y'know that fund that's getting all attention, Melvin Capital? Yeah, fuck them, right? Fuckin' shorters all shortin' and shit -- they played, they paid!

There's a reason they were bailed out and with all due haste.

Here's the issue: they were VERY good at the shorting game. So good that they actually had to turn away business. They made money like horses makes shit. When clients couldn't get in at Melvin, they went elsewhere. That opened the door to a lot of other firms basically mirroring exactly what MC was doing, which included shorting the fuck outta GME.

Fuck those guys too, right? It's their money, so why should I care?

Let's go back a few year, shall we, to the glorious chapter in finance and economics that was the 2008 Crash. Remember when Paulson lost his shit because he realized that in about 36 hours, the basic system called Western Capitalism was going to shit the bed; the bedroom; the whole house and pretty much every surface above the ocean within a planetary radius? This is sorta like that. Only worse.

The thing about short squeezes is that the losses can be infinite, and that's exactly why WallStreetBets did what they did. They knew if they bought and held -- diamond hands -- the stock would have to rise as the shorters had to cover their bets. Melvin Capital and a shit-ton of other, smaller firms had to do that and ran out of liquidity long before GME was even at $50. For every share of stock they shorted, they need to cough up another share at a higher value -- and they HAD to actually have the higher-priced share.

And here's where things get VERY ugly.

Shorting GME was such a sure thing that a huge number of shorts were placed. In fact, more shares of GME were shorted than actually existed. Oops. But hey, SURE THING, BABY and what's the worst that can happen?

Yeeeah, y'see where this is going now?

So these firms, not only are they broke, they don't have the shares, either. They need to come up with shares, pronto, at any price, because contractual obligations are a motherfucker in the finance world. But again, more shorts than there are shares and the people who have the shares, WSB and 4chan's /biz/, aren't letting them go. The longer they hold, the higher the price will go as short after short faces having to cough up the shares they borrowed.

A lot of people are about to lose a LOT of money -- the kinda losses that have so many zeros attached that looking at the number bores the eyes.

Back to 2008: the reason the whole world almost started Mad Max LARPing back then is that a narrow number of highly-important financial institutions were a wee bit thin on liquidity because they were having to pay it out by the boatload. That's bad. What would be better is if risk were more distributed, and how could that little plan POSSIBLY go wrong? Maybe a Black Swan event involving a huge amount of money that needs to be paid out by all of them due to this annoying bird.

That's where we are now, but no one even remotely knows what that figure is going to be. Again, (potentially) infinite losses multiplied by 150% times the number of shares actually available, multiplied by the dogshit risk factor on the loans and the leveraged payouts -- your best case scenario might be a loss of about $500 billion. Someone has to come up with that money, be it the Fed or other banks/investors, but that latter group has to come up with the money themselves, which is generally accomplished by selling profitable holdings. We all know what happens when a lot of people have to sell, right?

I always wanted to live in interesting times, thus proving what an utter fuckwit I am.

Ha! In high school my brother played "gotcha", a spy game, and his best trick was an altoids box with a battery, a mercury switch, and a buzzer. Pick it up, it starts buzzing loudly with a note inside that said "boom, this was a bomb, you're dead". Not something to do now, but in the 80's, that was LARP. It was simple, easy, and worked every time. You're nuts if you think it's difficult to build, it's ridiculously simple.

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Pretty common too. There's a paintball field where I go and airsoft/paintball, and about once a month or so they have a big medieval LARP event where people wack on eachother with swords and stuff. I haven't actually seen it and it's a newish thing, but apparently it's getting more popular too.

There's also zombie themed LARPing where they use airsoft guns.

By the way, a Tornado doesn't have the range to reach Russia, especially not with a B61-12 as payload. So it doesn't really come as a surprise that our Eastern European neighbours are not particularly pleased either, given how it would be either them or us who this shit would be dropped upon when zealots in uniforms get up on the wrong side of the bed.

Nuclear proliferation, the cornerstone of future Fallout LARPs.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/college-of-wizardry-a-larp-for-witches-wizards#/story

Okay... but with that 2 pound draw bow, where are any of these skills useful outside of LARPing?

I mean, all he needs is a friend with a tinfoil covered wooden sword, and another with a funny hat, shouting, "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" for this to be complete.

"Ah fuck this I just realized you tricked me into LARPing"

>> ^mxxcon:

1st of all, this isn't Russia. This is Ukraine.
This is not LARPing.
This is Ukraine's military wargames.


Updated! Sorry.

LARPing is always more fun when nature joins in!

1st of all, this isn't Russia. This is Ukraine.
This is not LARPing.
This is Ukraine's military wargames.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Red Fang, Metal, Beer' to 'Red Fang, Metal, Beer, LARP' - edited by residue

*nod*

No justice is going to come from it, Dalton McGuinty isn't saying anything about it, yet, and he's not going to run again in the election. Probably because he's going to lose badly. Your point about being angry at the government was my first spot of anger. I'm all for debate, I love it, I love to do it, and when you leave it out of the process, I get angry. I've already sent my written letter to the Premier, I doubt I'll get a response until the winter time =P

The other areas of concern are the Steve Paikin incident, which connects to the Detention center and the Queen & Spadina incident, the rights abuse lump them all together. This also needs an independent investigation. I'm trying to find the video, but apparently the weapons on display also had some LARP'ing foam weapons seized from a LARP'er and put on display *hand/forehead*

The dog is actually doing some Morrowind LARP.