Only (5) is speculation. ISTR (2) is true.
Oh yes, I did know that (2) is true. I should have just said (1).
I've heard him talk - he inspired hopey changey stuff.
If he really cared, he would run for Senate in a purple state.
My kid told me Biden is the oldest US president ever and I didn't believe it because Reagan always looked twenty years older than his actual age.
And at the time it was a big, historic deal how old he was. Now they're all that old.
It's almost like the movement that summited with the 18-to-vote amendment aged along with its members rather than sustaining itself on the ever-renewing enthusiasm of youth as we were promised.
I blame society.
The upper class stops smoking, gets exercise and Lipitor. Boom, it looks like the Soviet Politburo but really it's fifteen years older.
I support whatever will best preserve the institution of the presidency.
So much depends on Biden's cardiologist.
Maybe Bernie and Hillary will challenge Joe in the 2024 primary. Youthful energy!
Harris / Mayor Pete. I'm going to be miserable.
Biden still seems to be basically of sound mind and has younger and reasonably reliable surrogates if things start to slip. That makes him less concerning than at least a dozen septuagenarians and octogenarians in our ruling class these days. Breyer and Feinstein, for starters.
I don't want to try to forecast 2024 until we get through 2022, if not later. He might currently sincerely plan to run in 2024, but change his mind; he might only be saying he plans to run again and is already planning how best to step down to usher Harris in; Democrats might get shellacked in the midterms and Republicans might impeach both of them on general principles; or to be optimistic for once, we might actually be happy with Biden by then. If he does run again, I'm glad his VP is 20 years younger than him.
At what point does the establishment recognise preparations for a more serious coup and do something about it?
14- Hi, I'm still younger than all of them.
And Naomi Wolfe is probably available to consult again.
No idea, but a Trump-Stefanik ticket looks pretty likely, as long as Trump's health holds out (risky bet, that).
At what point does the establishment recognise preparations for a more serious coup and do something about it?
Several years after the coup has occurred.
There won't be a coup. It will be like Hungary -- they will just make impossible for the Democrats to win for a generation.
Harris sucks and is unlikeable. Biden sucks but is likable. since elections are popularity contests; they will run Biden in '24
I like her. Doesn't mean I agree with her about everything, but she's clearly someone I'd get along with in person.
24: Had you been old enough to vote in 1972, I suspect you wouldn't have known anyone who voted for Nixon.
Ooh, sick burn. Now that we've reminded ourselves once again that people who live in big liberal cities aren't real and don't have political opinions worth considering, let's try and think about whether that makes any sense in the context of who's likeable.
Harris is a sardonic middle-aged lawyer (I mean, it's not hard to see why I like her) who seems to me to have a real sense of fun; in a context where something's amusing her or she seems happy, she really lights up. Her whole demeanor changes in a way I find very appealing. I refuse to believe that this is a personality type that doesn't exist outside the seething ant heaps where my degraded kind scuttle: there are middle-aged professional women all over the country, even outside the big cities, and some of them are like Harris, and some people like them.
I'm not saying, and didn't say, that her likeability is an objective fact. But I don't see any justification for claiming that she's objectively unlikeable. Lemmy dislikes her, fine, but he's not stating the opinion of the American people any more than I possibly could.
I'm going to be optimistic and guess that someone on the Biden campaign did some actual polling on exactly this and liked the results.
26: I think "likeable" in this context is kind of a term of art. I don't personally like a lot of people deemed "likeable". The only people I knew who had strong negative feelings about her were Progressives from the Bay Area. I'm fuzzy on the details.
I keep wanting to like Harris. I like Michelle Obama and love Elizabeth Warren, so I'm not sure what my dislike stems from.
To the extent it's a term of art, though, what do you think it means? If you want to talk about national polling about what percentage of the population has a positive opinion of her, fine. If you want to talk about whether you personally like her, or people you've heard from like her, also fine.
But if there's a way other than that to objectively measure "likability" -- Lemmy seems to be claiming that, but I don't know what his basis is for it, or if you're making the same claim what yours is.
29: I think it means non-threatening white guy who doesn't challenge the power structure.
If that's what we're talking about, I think it's clearer if it's explicit. And I do think that's a factor: call it likability or not, I think "pleasant non-threatening old white guy" is how Biden won the primaries. But when the argument is that the electorate is uniformly going to reject women (like the winner of the 2016 popular vote) and minorities (like the most popular president in the last generation), it's worth picking at whether that factor is going to control in any specific case.
I think Harris made a bunch of mistakes in her campaign because she wasn't a natural at being a national figure. Biden also made a bunch of mistakes when he ran for President pre-Obama, because he wasn't a natural at being a national figure, but then he got some practice at it as VP, so he got better at it. I think the same will be true for Harris.
I don't like a lot of "likeable" people. I think it privileges people who have had more privilege, because they come off as more easy going.
I actually find Harris super likable, but I'm also well aware that my views on nearly everything don't generalize well to the larger population, so.
I'm off on that too. I found Bill Clinton not very likeable.
I'm trying to think of a politician who I find annoying and yet it's not their policies or actions that piss me off. I never watch unscripted interviews and barely watch speeches, so it's at most sound bites or memes.
I agree with the problem of "likability" as a term and find Harris more likeable than Biden, but let's not forget that the reason Biden won the primary was *not* that he was a pleasant non-threatening white guy, it's because he was very popular with black voters in the south, due to his association with Obama and his lifetime experience of running in a heavily Black state and working with Black leaders.
I'm not so sure that those black voters didn't look at American, decide a pleasant, non-threatening white guy was the only winning option, and go for Biden.
If they did think that, I think they were right.
Also, the "likability" candidate was Mayor Pete.
I maintain that it isn't possible to really like someone from Indiana.
Maybe he was a transplant?
36.last is me also, so I've never heard his voice even.
41: That Bob Knight guy seemed nice.
Everyone in Big Ten athletics is rated on the Jerry Sandusky scale.
You know who was extremely "likable"? Jerry fucking Sandusky. I assume any adult human using the term is a probable serial killer, and any using it about a female politician is worse.
Take that fucking bullshit and send it to the Moon, Alice.
I thought everyone found him really creepy but just said he was likeable because the alternative is admitting they did nothing to stop a suspected moltester for the sake of the team's defense.
My impression is that they forced Sandusky to retire and prevented him from getting a job elsewhere in the NCAA, but did nothing to stop him after that because it would embarrass the team. So they covered for a child molester, and he wasn't even helping the defense.
37 is right, of course. Pleasant non-threatening white guy fits in there too, but being the candidate supported by black voters is how he won.
That's what "critical race" means in "critical race theory."
Who is there, beyond Mayor Pete? Hasn't Newsom checked all his boxes yet?
The Constitution says the president can't be either from California or named "Gavin."
51: Reagan and Nixon were elected before Scalia discovered originalism
A Jewish guy claims to have invented it, but if you read carefully, you'll see he didn't figure how to exclude women completely.
I don't mind liking and disliking movie stars, but liking and disliking politicians feels like staying in a rigged poker game because it would be rude to leave.
Biden has 63% approval rating and Harris has a 41% approval rating. Most people people who like Biden like Harris; but enough people don't that it could easily lose the 2024 election if they run her, so they won't
I don't think the numbers in 57 are correct, Biden is at 53% approval per 538. Harris is below that, but the 41% poll you're looking at seems like it's an outlier, most recent polls have her in the high 40s. So Biden's clearly a little more popular, but nowhere near what 57 would make you think.
This is were I got the numbers https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/553555-heres-why-joe-biden-polls-well-but-kamala-harris-does-not
they is the democratic party
Reciprocal bipartisan isn't completely gone.
That article is garbage. Did you read it?
The later poll is better that the first one, but I won't be shocked if Harris' numbers among non-college white men and people over 65 stay pretty low. I wonder what could be causing that?
If Biden isn't running in 24 its going to be a contested primary, for sure, and it won't ever be clear from now to then whether someone can beat Harris. "They" weren't behind Biden until Clyburn's demonstration of the power of his endorsement -- which involved actual votes, not money or social media engagement or national polls, or whatever else other people had been measuring. And from that moment, Biden's nomination was assured. It'll happen differently in 2024, I think we can be sure, but the nomination in 2016 was decided in the South as well, and the reasons that happened that haven't gone away.
If you know of a better article about the political views of foot fetishists, please post.
I figured. Because The Hill is pretty hit-or-miss.
Harris was the early establishment candidate in 2020 but she fell out pretty quick because nobody wanted to vote for her. she would definitely do better as the sitting vice president.
You are right that the establishment made the call to support Biden after SC and before super Tuesday causing all the other moderates to drop out.
If there is an apples to apples comparison of Biden's to Harris's popularity other than that article I found I can't find it. The popularity difference could be smaller.
I guess I thought Warren was the establishment candidate.
I see that Rep Greene is out there saying that Covid can't be real because God would never create a deadly virus that kills people.
A whole lot of our countrymen and -women are pretty far gone.
A Response: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3shvBMWYAEuWOh?format=jpg&name=900x900
He really owned that role. I can't really picture ancient Egypt without seeing him.
God would never create a deadly virus that kills people
Or bears or lions or alligators or snakes, obviously.
70: Did she really say that? The actual quotes I've seen aren't that coherent or falsifiable.
Warren was the college professor candidate
72 The Ridley Scott version is pretty interesting. God as a young boy might appeal to you.
And now Bree Newsome Bass has a tweet up about people who think slave ships are a myth.
70: I agree with peep here. I don't think she meant God couldn't do it. She was trying to say that it couldn't have arisen naturally.
I think there were large outbursts of craziness all across the spectrum over the coronavirus period. It was just a long list of nutty things -- CHAZ, ripping down random statues, GameStop, another Bitcoin bubble, Q Anon, 1/6.
Hopefully, as things return to normal the tide of crazy will go out, and take people like MTG with it.
73: I would pay cash money to see someone actually ask that. "Representative, what about...bears? Alligators? Help me here. Rattlesnakes?"
What she said was, she doesn't believe in evolution, so it must be a bioweapon. This seems to be the source of the specific phrasing "COVID is a bioweapon because God would never create a fatal illness that harms people".
I went to a Catholic elementary school, and I'm thinking that's when I first came across The Problem of Evil.
There's a lot of discussion, here and elsewhere, about how we don't need to be sending folks to college who aren't academically inclined, but I think there's a value for society in it, even if it doesn't directly lead to employment. Colleges aren't just trade schools. (Counterargument: MTG apparently has a degree from the University of Georgia.)
82: I would say, folks don't need to be going into debt if they're not academically inclined. There's societal benefit for sure, but it shouldn't be shouldered individually, especially on the people most likely to run up a lot of debt without a degree.
79 "random" statues? Not exactly how I remember it . . .
86: You don't remember the bizarre random statues that got ripped down or trashed, at the same time as other statues that deserved it?
The Bree Newsome tweet confused me because I had only just started running into "Slave ships weren't real" last month and that from Black men who think Black people were indigenous to the Americas. But the comments to her tweet to seem to treat it as a theory common among white supremacists. So I'm not sure who she is calling out.
You'd have to be pretty far gone into conspiracy thinking to believe in the scale of deception necessary to have pulled off a myth of slave ships.
I'd have thought the WS view would be 'slave ships were real and they were awesome' but any contrarian theory is as good as another, I guess.
Slave transport/sale records and concentration camp prisoner lists were two of the most thorough primary documents of atrocities but apparently there are plenty of people willing to deny both.
"Slave ships were a myth" is not a belief I have ever seen expressed or even referenced before now.
You still haven't seen it, because you too, are a myth. We are the dream of a butterfly that dreamed it was a comment section.
I honestly just spend way too much time on Tiktok.
||
https://www2.archivists.org/node/25433
>
Pleased about the award. Not so pleased about how this is credited, but that's the reality of consulting in this sector.
I should probably have anon'd that link, I suppose.
Congrats! It's a very cool project; glad to see it getting recognition.
It was just a long list of nutty things -- CHAZ, ripping down random statues, GameStop, another Bitcoin bubble, Q Anon, 1/6.
OK, I'd like to discuss Gamestop, actually. A person I'm close to is very, very into it, and how it hasn't happened yet, and I've gone into the weeds a teeny bit on their behalf - ie, read the things they've sent me - and I'd like to know if it's really a thing or not. It all sounds plausible, but what the hell do I know?
Anyway, I thought the kids moved on to AMC.
but will there be a terribly short squeeze squeezing unbearably hard?
If not, I'm ready to believe it's because hedge funds cheated.
I was sort of hoping someone who knew something was going to pipe up.
The case against GameStop is that the highest its stock price over the 5 years before January was around 20-25, and now it's at 225. Did we learn something about the company since January that means it's likely it will do 10 times better going forward than it did in the 5 years before?
I don't get that part. The squeezing a naked short thing makes great intuitive sense.
107: what I'm told is that that's the difference between GME and AME. GME's new CEO is Ryan Cohen, who turned around Chewy, and has plans for a digital gaming exchange or something.
I never even heard of Chewy before GME people started telling me about it.
My neighbor with a cat gets boxes from them.
109: You're making two distinct arguments here: 1.) That GameStop, as a company and on its actual merits, is worth more than $16 or $17 billion (comment 109) and 2.) That the market for GameStop can be manipulated in a way that will force short-sellers to cover (103). These two theories aren't mutually exclusive, but I think it's important to keep in mind that they are different theories, and both are dependent on your knowledge of the future being superior to that of market professionals.
I don't actually know anything about GameStop, but a quick look at the data suggests that this is a company that doesn't make money by selling anything other than stock. (The company printed and sold a half-billion dollars worth of stock in April, but lost $66.8 million otherwise in the first quarter). If I thought GME had a business plan that would suddenly vault the company to a billion dollars of profit every year, I'd be interested on merit -- but I'd also wonder why some other company couldn't execute that plan. As they say, nobody leaves a billion dollars on the sidewalk.
As for the stock manipulation aspect, my guess is that this has already been accomplished -- any short that is going to be squeezed is out of this stock already. Short interest (measured in dollars) peaked at the end of January. The days-to-cover ratio is currently less than 2. That seems like a poor candidate for a short squeeze.
And the ideological aspect of this -- that this is an opportunity to hurt the evil hedge funds -- is absurd. If there is money to be made by hurting hedge funds, you know who is going to take advantage of it? Hedge funds.
Now that you've got me looking at this stupid company, I'm really wondering why the short interest isn't higher. Looks like the short-sellers got really screwed in January, and are maybe intimidated by the demonstrated ability of Redditors to suddenly mobilize big dollars. As the wise man once said: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
But what do I know? I didn't buy bitcoin either.
I agree that there are two arguments. And I'll try to present my shaky rebuttal without really understanding what I'm saying:
GME's fundamentals are now different and it's got a reasonable shot at a functioning business model, which is different than a year ago. So it's less likely to go under, which is what the short squeeze is counting on. This is what makes it different from AMC.
Two details I'm very shaky on:
- There's an organization (the DTC?) which has lent out a wild number of fake shares to be shorted somehow?
- The shadowy cinematic showdown is taking place between hedge funds which hate each other? Maybe Black Rock and Citadel, with Reddit Apes loosely being on the side of Black Rock?
I'm in the situation where there's a long complicated answer to any question I can come up with, which means I can't ever understand it enough to put my finger on a contradiction. (Or it's solid. I can't tell)
This is the kind of thing I'm being sent to read.
Fair warning: it's written in the male version of the obnoxious recipe-website speak. Like Pioneer Woman had a Reddit Ape baby.
I have no idea but a bunch of assholes on Reddit buying stonks that are overpriced seems like a non-problem. Naked shorts with borrowed money sounds like it might be.
My embarrassing confession is that I was convinced to buy a little bit of GME. I didn't put anything in that I can't afford to lose, though, and my best guess is that it just goes sideways or drifts down until everyone gives up. BUT, I do have a dog in this fight.
A call for speculation on your speculation, in the call for speculation thread?
You will grow rich in experience.
114: After a skim: This anonymous internet person knows a lot more about DTC than I do, but let's look at the structure of the argument: It's purely Argument 1 in 112. Not only does the author not make the case that GME is worth its stock price; he explicitly argues that investors should hold GME regardless of its fundamental value. The author argues that short-sellers are trying to kill the company -- send its stock price to zero -- via manipulation. That can't be done to a company unless it needs to sell stock to survive. By the author's own logic, this is a retailer that can't make money based on its current business model.
So okay, let's go to the manipulation argument. The author contends that the shorts are manipulating the stock, creating an opportunity for counter-manipulation. The vast bulk of the manipulation argument, however, centers on making the case that DTC and others allow manipulation -- not that they are manipulating Gamestop in particular.
When the author gets around to discussing actual GME shorting, you get some crazy stuff. At the end, the author argues that abusive short-selling situations -- the ones where share prices are artificially driven sharply downward -- are characterized by unusually high trading volume. He says that in January -- when GME stock was skyrocketing -- there was huge trading volume, so therefore ... therefore what? The stock was being driven down by short-sellers? What's his argument here?
There is no mystery whatsoever about a stock experiencing high trading volume during a period when it's being pumped on Reddit and short interest (measured by the number of shares) is falling dramatically as shorts frantically covered their positions. The author, who heebie in utterly sexist fashion assumes is a male,* is making a case that short-sellers are abusively damaging the stock price during a period in which the stock rose by more than 10 times. It's nuts.
*Of course he's a male.
I feel like you don't think I'm about to make millions, but maybe you need to read 112 a little closer?
116: There are two steps in pump-and-dump manipulations: 1.) Get in before the pump. 2.) Dump.
At what price did you buy? What is your plan for selling? The Reddit author is actually advocating for a pump-and-hold strategy, which is not how these scams work. (People do get rich on Ponzi schemes, but only if they cash out before the crash.)
I'm not a speculator, so I won't be shorting GME myself, but at this moment, the stock is trading at $216 a share. This Reddit pump is something new under the sun -- who knows how long it can be sustained? But it's only gone on for six months so far, which isn't that long as these things go. I don't see this lasting until the end of 2022, and I predict that by then, the stock will be closer to $20 than $200.
who knows how long it can be sustained?
We're well past the safe 4 hours.
I got in at $140, so I've already done fine.
123: What did I miss? Even accepting the DTC argument in its entirely, the Gamestop argument is ridiculous for reasons that I have already described -- while only covering a fraction of its absurdity. This is something that really interests me about motivated reasoning. You see it illustrated with the climate-change deniers, whose beliefs become more firm as they become more educated. Education can allow for the invention of elaborate rationales for nonsense.
Look again at my characterization of Anonymous Internet Guy's argument in 121.3 (see pages 35-37 for the actual argument). I'm not saying his argument is dubious. I'm saying it can't be right.
Can GME stock continue to go up for a long time? It can! But that's irrelevant to my point. If you argued that Trump would win the presidency in 2016 because space aliens would hypnotize voters in key states, your argument got only trivial support from Trump's victory.
The author here is a nonsensical bullshitter. There is no circumstance in which he is correct, barring something like space-alien intervention.
126: Step 1 accomplished! Don't fumble Step 2.
Until it drops to $20. Then I'll be sad.
Mostly this is reassuring, because I couldn't quite figure out what I was missing as to why this is a slam dunk. Answer: it's not a slam sunk.
To hedge, borrow $800,000 and invest it in baseball cards and bitcoin.
114, 121: When you see people yelling about fake shares and naked shorts, that's generally a sign that they are confused, crazy, or trying to rip you off (or some combination of the three, a la P*trick B*rne, the deposed head of Overstock.com who has moved on to MAGA-land). In the case of GME, I think part of it is that short funds, having realized that they're in the danger of having their faces ripped off any time /r/wsb decides to do so, have moved on, and the true short interest is overstated due to a combination of reporting delays and shorts being written by (hedge funds, investment banks) hedging options, who are not positioned short. (You never know, though; the wonderful columnist Matt Levine noted yesterday that Mudrick Capital, having earned hundreds of millions of dollars flipping AMC stock 24 hours after they bought it from the company, failed to close their calls and lost a lot of money.)
134.1 conforms with my experience also.
I earlier said "Even accepting the DTC argument in its entire[t]y ..." but that argument strikes me as super-dubious. It's just that I'm not sophisticated enough to rebut it except via the heuristic proposed in 134.1.
128 wasn't explicit enough: you've made an obscene and unjustified profit already. Sell now. Don't FOMO yourself into a loss from where you now sit.
You're a winner! Accept the W!
136 - I saw a Twitter thread with someone who seemed to know what they were talking about breaking it down in detail in a way that confirmed our priors. Twitter being Twitter, I'm sure it will be no problem to find this month-old series of tweets and share it!
I have maligned @jack! This guy is a Tesla short (also Clover, a recent SPAC run by the, uhhh, colorful Chamath Palihapitiya, who has been harnessing /r/wsb to make him ever-wealthier), and so talking his book, but here's a discussion of why short interest numbers are misleading. The parts that I know enough about to be informed on are correct, and I don't see any howlers obvious enough that I can spot them in the other parts. (tl;dr: It's inflated by a combination of reporting lags and the mechanisms used for retail stocks sales by big brokerages like Schwab and Fidelity.)
I truly didn't think I'd make money except that I have a faint twinge of disappointment, so I guess on some level I was hoping it was true!