More like this, please.

You tell 'em Karen and don't take "no" for an answer when they say the manager is busy right now!

"That's not anti-scientific, that's just dumb."

She's looking at YOU, America!

1. Is he a true Savant or is he "just" incredibly gifted?
2. What's the over/under on this getting DCMA'd?

You utter fuckwit.

(not you, Morhaus, the dude in the video).

What exactly do you think happens to the people and funds holding those shorts? They have to pay the difference. They are contractually obligated to pay up -- period.

Everyone involved in the short was probably broke long before GME even hit $50. But, as we all learned from Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me!"

They're broke and on the hook for shit-tons of money. Guess where they're going to get that money? By selling solid assets. They're gonna dump everything they have to make up for the short loss. Who's holding the shares that're about to start tanking? The funds 401ks are invested in because they have to hold solid, reliable assets. The same funds people are relying on for their futures. These are the people who'll REALLY get fucked by this. If you've got a long enough timeline, hopefully, you'll get your money back (although at a loss of compounded value). If you're 65 and looking at your golden years through a lens of 20%+ returns, you're about to find out what happens when an irrational market decides to return to sanity.

Those are the first order effects. The second order effects range from the merely worrying to the outright fucking terrifying. There's a reason Goldman sent out its little missive last night after Mark Cuban pulled his stunt. This isn't just playing with fire, this is sitting in a room full of gasoline while Skippy, The Face-Ripper Ape On Meth, goes berserk with a blowtorch. God help us if this triggers some latent long-tail event.

The good news is that the idiocy of the crowds has apparently decided to dump GME in favor of silver. GME tanking will be bad, but mostly to people who should pay the price for dabbling magic they didn't understand. GME dumping will be good if you're worried about 2008 repeating itself, only without the whole "not letting AIG" fail thing.

People do not understand how fragile and insanely-interconnected the markets are, and how easily the whole goddamn thing could be brought down. We never solved the problems of 2008, we just dumped money on them; we never solved the underlying issues that lead to the Temper Tantrum of December 2018; and we sure the fuck didn't fix the fundamental issue that almost brought the whole show down on September 17 of 2019. And all this was before Covid. There's a reason I went all-in on bonds back in August and that Warren Buffet is sitting on a mountain of cash, and this is pretty much it.

So yeah, congrats to the little guy and all that shit, but don't think for a second that people at the top are going to be the ones who pay.

"(...) I wonder why you believe he should he be coddled?"

- I'm not saying he should be coddled anymore than anyone else here. He did something humane and cool, and that's what everyone here has been asking him to do (each in their own way; mea culpa etc), but instead of saying "hey, that was really a cool video. Thanks.", it was time to take shots at him. I make no secret of where my feelings are on him, his politics and the world at large, but I also feel that cool things should be rewarded, especially in this case and in this place and at this time.

"Are you saying he doesn't follow the golden rule, to treat others as you would have them treat you? I thought disingenuous discussions dripping with disrespect was what he wants."

- Congratulations, then, you just gave him everything he wanted and lowered yourself in the processes. It's not for others to follow the Golden Rule, the point is you're the one who's supposed to live by it even if others don't. If you blame him for not being the bigger man, you should at least try to be that man himself.

Christ knows there'll be enough ugliness for everyone involved the other 364.

FWIW, Merry Christmas to you, BSR, all the fun and raucous people who make Sift a daily view -- and that includes Bob.

Please don't.
Just don't.
Everyone yells at Bob because they say he brings politics into things, then he posts something really humane and cool and he gets this in response.
Spirit of the season, spirit of the video, just plain humanity, whatever reason you choose, just one time let it go.

Probably Right Whales. They have enormous testes because their reproductive strategy is to flood the sperm out of the female that another male might have deposited. I think they have the largest 'balls', both in physical size and in ratio of weight:body mass, of any mammal in the world.

Merci!

The French numbering system exists wholly as a FUCK YOU to the entire English language.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

Yet the Dems run the most insipid candidate since Dukakis and not because he's the best candidate, but because it's his turn.

The worst part is the DNC is looking at a truly momentous election where they could lay the foundation for a generational political shift in the US the same way Reagan did in 1980, but they utterly fail to understand why some of the same people who voted for Trump in '16 voted for Obama two elections earlier and have decided to play party politics instead.

The worst thing that could happen to the Dems right now is to win this election. The GOP is going to blame them for the wreckage left by Trump, pile on Biden every chance they get, and exploit the DNC's blindness to push the Dems into political oblivion.

I dread to ask, but why should protesters be denied health care?

Apropos of my name, Stuka pilot Hans Rudel provided input to the original construction of the A-10.

Your day in "Aw, FUCK!"