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bg4u 4 points ago +4 / -0

Also, the post has nothing to do with the post it's replying to. It kind-of looks like a bot to me, tbh.

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bg4u 14 points ago +14 / -0

The only reason Josh is there is so Jay has someone to talk with about obscure art and horror films. Jack is pointless.

3
bg4u 3 points ago +3 / -0

Eh. Abstraction isn't a problem in and of itself. Abstractions are just tools. They ultimately do represent something real, or else they have no meaning. The problems start when people assign some meaning to the abstraction beyond what it represents, or think of it as a concrete thing. Or really just don't completely understand the abstraction.

Its like that SA Minister of Agriculture (or whatever he was) that said they didn't need farms because all their food came from the retail stores. The problem wasn't that they had abstractions. The problem is that they were too stupid to understand the abstractions they had.

These clowns at Melvin could have hedged this bet. They could have bought options in the other direction too so that they limited their exposure (that's assuming they could find someone willing to be on the other side of that contract, and if they couldn't, maybe that should have been a big clue that they were doing something retarded). Instead they took a position that had UNLIMITED downside. I'm guessing they just were betting that they'd be bailed out if they fucked up badly enough.

4
bg4u 4 points ago +6 / -2

Yeah, I think your ire is somewhat misplaced. All these contracts have 2 sides to them. This stuff might all seem really abstract, with people trading contracts and doing it all on credit, but people aren't just printing money here. There are (normally) real consequences for fucking up, bad analysis, bad planning, bad luck, stupidity.

Having said that, real problems start when the government bails people out (or there's an expectation that they will), because it distorts the market. People start doing irresponsible risky stuff that they'd never do otherwise, because hey, free money basically (since risk is a cost, and lower risk = lower cost). And yes, everyone is paying for that. So maybe that's what you are getting at.

7
bg4u 7 points ago +10 / -3

As far as I'm concerned, short selling isn't investing. It's gambling.

Well sure, that's one way to look at it. Other people use shorts and options as tools/insurance.

Fuck the people who choose to gamble, and especially fuck them for forcing everybody to participate in their game because they've made every other form of investment unaffordable or uncompetitive.

This, I don't get. I don't get why people get so upset about contracts, options, etc. Some people want that risk/reward. I'm not into that personally, I buy and hold stuff very long term, and that's worked out very well for me. But nothing is free here, they are accepting the risk that they get wiped out. I mean, did you see the panic like a year or two with oil? Where the contracts went negative 'cause people were going to have to take delivery of hundreds of barrels of crude, and there was nowhere to store it? It was hilarious, people were paid thousands of dollars to take the oil.

2
bg4u 2 points ago +2 / -0

Dorohedoro: Crazy series, never slows down. Fights tend to end quickly and brutally. More will happen in one episode than 4 or 5 episodes of another series. Just the first season is out. Seems to have a lot going on beneath the surface. You will notice a lot of little things on the second and third re-watch (little hints as to what is really going on).

Kokoro Connect: Highschool drama, but with complicated characters that have attracted the notice of... something. Some kind of entity that pushes them into interesting situations.

Re:Zero: Popular show about a guy who gets pulled into some sort of fantasy world. Don't want to give too much away. More complicated than it appears at first. The first season came out quite a while ago, and they are most of the way through the second season now.

Witch Hunter Robin: I don't really remember all the details (did this really come out almost 20 years ago?), but it was quite good.

4
bg4u 4 points ago +4 / -0

I did stuff like that too. I would mostly say things like "Oh I that true? I thought I read something different once. Maybe I'm wrong though, it was a long time ago." And I had no problem admitting I was wrong about stuff, which I did occasionally misremember.

Mostly the point was to get people to question the stuff they were parroting from John Oliver or whoever. A lot of the time I think people just repeat that stuff because they don't have anything else to talk about or want to sound smart. It becomes some sort of charade where people are just high-fiving each other over how well they can recall the latest propaganda.

4
bg4u 4 points ago +4 / -0

That's how any sufficiently large site stays up. Not because they are being taken down, but because they need to be able to seamlessly add capacity and deal with outages/maintenance.

The real question is what is TD going to do when (((Cloudflare))) inevitably deplatforms them (i.e. exposes them to ddos attacks).

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bg4u 21 points ago +21 / -0

Blacks and hispanics cope by hyping culinary wonders like "Chicken, fried" and "Rice mixed with Beans", while constructing juvenile fantasies in which White people can only cook bland boiled things and would otherwise die without taco trucks.

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bg4u 11 points ago +11 / -0

I think that's because deep down the boomers still believe in the institutions and bureaucracy. They may complain about individuals, but they don't support disbanding the FBI or the Justice Department. They know Israel is our greatest ally and nothing can convince them otherwise. They know racism is the greatest sin, and will abandon every principle and liberty to avoid being called a racist.

I think that's why Q appealed to them so strongly. Yes, all the institutions have been subverted, but the good guys are stronger and if you just follow the Q's Clues, we will win somehow without getting our hands dirty.

4
bg4u 4 points ago +4 / -0

I agree. Tim interrupts a lot. On the other hand, Ian is a dummy. Some of his brainlet-tier takes make my head hurt. I don't think he's a bad dude, but he really needs to take a second and think things through before just spitting them out. I do think Tim is better when he has guests to talk to, but some of them are even dumber than Ian.

I really wish we could recapture the vibe of the Sargon/Spencer/Styx/JFG debate. Damn that was fun. Spencer just trolled Sargon the whole time and threw out absurd arguments. Sargon was completely unprepared and basically had little to no foundation for his arguments, so he just kept telling everyone to read Locke. Styx and JFG were great. I don't remember what Warski was doing. Mostly just yelling out dumb reactions, I think.

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bg4u 10 points ago +10 / -0

Yeah, it's stupid because it accepts the leftist premises and narrative. They're unwilling to abandon their precious leftist ideology, so their arguments just end up being about how actually they're the true leftists or whatever.

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bg4u 4 points ago +5 / -1

I'm pretty sure the end actually was written by the author. Sanderson filled in some of the stuff leading up to the end, but he did a pretty inconsistent job of it.

You unfortunately quit right before things turned around. Some of the best and craziest scenes were either at the end of that book or the next (can't remember which). (edit: It's possible I'm remembering the wrong laundry conversation - I think there may have been several).

7
bg4u 7 points ago +8 / -1

What did Venti do that was so great? I'm legitimately asking, since it was pretty much impossible to catch everything that happened. I would have said that guy that baited Shia into assaulting him on stream was possibly the best troll of HWNDU.

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bg4u 11 points ago +11 / -0

I think some of them are probably doing it for trolling purposes, and for the purpose of satire- mocking other supposedly scientific (but anti-critical) theories.

I don't really have any evidence that those are anyone's reasons. They're just the reasons I'd be doing it.

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bg4u 18 points ago +18 / -0

Interesting. I wonder what the demographic breakdown looks like for that. Surely nothing like these stats. That would just be crazy. Almost like some kind of pattern or something.