Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[y66]

Just got an email from the Post Office telling me stamps I ordered on Jan 2 and received the following week have been shipped. I hope these guys aren't involved in vaccine distribution.

I just got a second batch of stamps today which I had forgotten were included in my original order but not issued until a few days ago. Sorry USPS. I am the one who should not be involved in vaccine distribution or record keeping, not you.

[Winstonm]

I just got a second batch of stamps today which I had forgotten were included in my original order but not issued until a few days ago. Sorry USPS. I am the one who should not be involved in vaccine distribution or record keeping, not you.

 

I'm glad you received stamps instead of a batch of vaccine!

[shyams]

My last post on the reddit investors saga

 

How WallStreetBets Pushed GameStop Shares to the Moon (Bloomberg: Link here)

By Brandon Kochkodin

 

Twenty-two months ago, inklings of a bull case started showing up on WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that has become synonymous with retail zeal in the pandemic age. With GameStop’s shares and profits both falling for years, a thread by user “delaneydi” said detractors were undervaluing the retailer’s cash, with which the shares were deceptively cheap. “My thesis is not contingent on a turnaround or business expansion, this is solely a deep value play,” wrote delaneydi. “Even if we assume double-digit top line sales declines and gross margin contraction, the companies valuation does not reflect the current earnings power, especially when considering the companies large cash horde.” (WSB posters are not distinguished by their spelling or punctuation.)

 

The view fell mostly on deaf ears as the shares continued to tank and enrich bears. GameStop fell 15% in April of that year, 12% in May, 28% in June and 27% in July. Yet two things happened around that time to lay the foundation for the events of this month.

 

One was Michael Burry –- of Big Short fame and the veritable spirit animal for internet stock gurus hoping to hit the big time –- saying he was long the shares through his fund Scion Asset Management.

 

Second was the surfacing of an idea, first in jest, that eventually evolved into the blueprint for the crowd-sourced short squeeze that has blown up in January. Could GameStop fall so far as to make a takeover possible -- by WallStreetBets itself?

 

...

...

 

 

Just three weeks after an Aug. 19, 2019, press release from Burry’s Scion urging GameStop to buy back $238 million in shares and a Seeking Alpha post warning about the dangers of shorting GameStop, the forum’s future hero showed the goods.

 

Another online watershed occurred when user “Senior_Hedgehog” alerted the YOLOing masses to the “biggest short squeeze of your entire life.” It was April 13, 2020, and, according to the elder Hedgehog, 84% of the retailer’s shares were held short. The final all-caps sentence imploring GameStop owners to call their brokers and tell them to not lend them short opened a new theater to wage war against short-sellers.

 

 

,,,

If the above is interesting, please do read the rest of the article by following the link.

 

Also, please don't get involved in these type of deals. They can be incredibly toxic and can turn very hugely loss-making very quickly!

[Zelandakh]

If the above is interesting, please do read the rest of the article by following the link.

Alternatively, just watch

and

. Or for something more serious and detailed aimed at stock market newbies, there's always

.

[thepossum]

 

Also, please don't get involved in these type of deals. They can be incredibly toxic and can turn very hugely loss-making very quickly!

 

I tried to avoid getting dragged into all the media hype over recent days but actually weakened somewhat and started reading a little today (ideally not in the media outlets beating it up for bait and advertising revenue)

 

Thanks for your few posts on the issue too that dont require me to waste my time and contribute to anyone's profits AFAIK

 

One thing that concerns me all ways about this stuff and the seeming attitude among some that the share market only benefits the wealthy, if the big funds are smashed there goes much of ordinary workers and small business wealth too

 

I'm very curious about zero fee platforms allowing people to essentially play without caring about consequences. I wondered how they made their money - seemingly they make money on your credit accounts, they sell your data to bigger players and make margin loans to those who dont understand risk

 

I'm a bit of a gambler and risk taker with very small amounts or with fake money, but all my trading activities had a rather conservative risk approach. I may not be a billionaire but I still have a home to live in and something of a life. You cant have it all all the time. But if I had cash back in March last year I would have done alright going long in a very safe market. From memory when I was starting to get anxious about the plummeting market, I checked my funds and found the managers were increasing exposure to shares at that time. Pays to let people manage stuff who have a clue

 

Of course the most frightening thing for me is firstly there are always extreme risks from time to time nobody forsees or can plan for, you never know for sure when your life is going to be turned upside down. But when those risks to your hard earned savings seem to come from irresponsible and/or downright criminal quarters manipulating markets its gets a bit concerning. I have good reason to believe I was personally targetted many years ago when trading by some malicious unknown trading entity unknown - who knows why. Maybe just something personal. Its not just a case of feeling that way. In my case I received information or evidence that someone was doing it to me, following my trades and selling against me personally. Still dont know who and why. And also from limited knowledge I dont think you have to be a big player to personally attack a target through market manipulation. Depends on the shares of course

 

I know this will be of no interest but I need to say it somewhere. I used to trade quite regularly (always long short-term trades), I even tried different "expert" rules on porfolio management, handling of risk, using some of their buying/selling rules (turned out not to be as good as my own) etc Then as you all know if someone starts going against you personally it becomes a game theoretic exercise. After observing for a while and getting information from several confirmatory sources of what I observed you basically just have to change your game - even withdraw without losing much if any - I still dont know who it was and why. The market should not be a personalised targetted game. Say someone does decide to target you maliciously, works out your strategy, your rules etc. If they are too predictable as they were once they can use your rules against you. Pays to be flexible and unpredictable. I never used rules again, certainly not that "expert"'s rules. They were all about avoiding profits and losing anything you made - crazy rules :)

[thepossum]

But sorry, getting back into more conversational mode

 

Are all those funds "bad" in that sense. I remember getting into a quite passionate debate when learning about trading. I was of the more investor trader type looking for value and investing/trading long - I used to think short-trading was somehow unethical. However it was pointed out that when something is overvalued that controlled and disciplined short-selling is necessary to correct markets

 

I'm curious about all these supposed "evil" funds and what they do

 

But given that I stopped trading when intelligent software was starting to dominate trading there was not much chance for small retail traders to trade safely unless you monitor everything very closely or had smart software of your own. Unlikely that your own software could compete though, and relying too much on automation can kill you too. Long time ago. Dont have time resources or capital to burn

[Zelandakh]

I'm very curious about zero fee platforms allowing people to essentially play without caring about consequences. I wondered how they made their money - seemingly they make money on your credit accounts, they sell your data to bigger players and make margin loans to those who dont understand risk

This is simply not really true, at least for the reputable ones. These companies make the biggest chunk of their profits through PFOF and typically supplement that with optional paid services that provide additional tools and possibilities.

[y66]

Donald Hall received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2011.

 

Reading some of Hall's stuff now. Love this photo.

[thepossum]

This is simply not really true, at least for the reputable ones. These companies make the biggest chunk of their profits through PFOF and typically supplement that with optional paid services that provide additional tools and possibilities.

 

I disagree. As far as I can see I represented exactly how they make money. My perspective on the level to which people understand risk is a commentary

[thepossum]

This is simply not really true, at least for the reputable ones. These companies make the biggest chunk of their profits through PFOF and typically supplement that with optional paid services that provide additional tools and possibilities.

 

I disagree. As far as I can see I represented exactly how they make money. My perspective on the level to which people understand risk is a commentary

 

There is a cost associated with trading. If a platform does not charge you they are making money from you some other way. Its simple and obvious

 

In fact the costs of the transactions were the biggest impediment or cost against my profits when I used to trade. I should have used a zero cost platform :)

[y66]

A different take on GameStop:

 

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/gamestopulism?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3NTkzNjUyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozMjAwODY1MSwiXyI6IlFBcEZlIiwiaWF0IjoxNjEyMTc1NjUwLCJleHAiOjE2MTIxNzkyNTAsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0zNTM0NSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.mHQGHIsn7H0FriG5b7SHMIK_eEA6WxTIGjQx7JZ0hfE

 

Among the many amazing things about the GameStop episode is how various populists of both the Left and the Right have tried to present the struggle of day traders against hedge funds as a revolt of the people against the powerful. Here’s Alex O’Keefe, the creative director of the Sunrise Movement (the radical environmentalist group that famously confronted Dianne Feinstein in her office):

 

The Gamestop saga is one of the greatest direct actions. The people are seizing the means of production. In America that's not a factory it's the stock market. Where imaginary value gets put on our labor, where speculative capital gets to bet & believe in many possible worlds.

January 28th 2021

AOC got in on the day traders’ revolution too:

 

This is unacceptable.

 

We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.

 

As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary.

And amazingly, Ted Cruz agreed!

 

Tucker Carlson came in with his economic-populist-but-from-the-Right bit: "Don’t miss the point of all this".

 

Even Andrew Yang was feeling it: "GameStop has changed the game forever".

 

Now, first of all, just to be clear, a bunch of day traders putting the short squeeze on some hedge funders, while fun to watch, is not a revolution. It is not even really an uprising of the popular and oppressed; it’s just some people wanting to make a bit of money. Now, wanting to make some money is perfectly fine, and making it by successfully trading against hedge funds is a perfectly good (and funny!) way to do it. But this kind of thing is not going to materially effect the distribution of wealth and power in the United States of America, not even if it happens a hundred times.

 

But the really interesting thing here is the spectacle of a bunch of people rushing to try to lift the banner of the GameStoppers as a populist cause. After seven years of protest, unrest, Trump, terrorism, Nazis, pandemic, and insurrection, it gives me a profound feeling of relief to see people getting riled up over something so utterly, hilariously inconsequential to the future of the nation.

 

Which makes me wonder. If America’s populists are running around trying to feed off the energy of anything that smells vaguely like revolution, does that mean that their usual food supply is shrinking? After those seven long years, is a growing chunk of the American populace simply tired of being up in arms about things?

 

Ages of unrest rarely end because all the problems that sparked the unrest are solved. Often there’s some progress, but mostly people just seem to get exhausted, or other events intrude. Recently I’ve been reading a bunch of books about the late 60s and 70s — America’s last big age of unrest — to try to get a preview of what might happen in the 20s. Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Days of Rage have been especially helpful here. One insight is that although Nixon and the Vietnam War didn’t begin that age of unrest, a lot of the popular anger came to focus on them. People might have gotten tired of the unrest before 1973. But as long as we were still fighting in Vietnam and Tricky Dick was in the White House, it felt like people couldn’t just go back to their lives. But when we withdrew from Vietnam and Nixon resigned in disgrace, a lot of people seemed to think “Well, OK, that’s enough of that,” and increasingly went back to focusing on their daily lives. The mid and late 70s featured far fewer riots than the late 60s, and the frequent terrorist attacks of the early 70s trickled off.

 

Of course, not everyone did that. In fact, a shrinking fringe got more radical in the 70s — think of the Symbionese Liberation Army. There were two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford within the space of three weeks! That steady trickle of nutcases on the news probably made the normies feel like they were still living in an age of mass unrest (the good old Availability Heuristic). And that in turn might have deepened their own exhaustion.

 

So what’s the analogy to the 2020s? The unrest began over Black people being killed by cops and women getting sexually harassed at work, in addition to some more longstanding and diffuse economic and social issues. There has been some progress on those fronts, but the problems haven’t been fully solved (and may never be). But Trump, who became the focus of popular rage as well as its generator, is gone, and after much vigorous debate and a few exploded eyeballs and cracked skulls, the country has generally decided that both police racism and sexual harassment are bad. As in the 70s, the most flagrant irritants have been removed, even if the underlying maladies remain uncured. Also, years of general catastrophizing and despair tend to reset people’s expectations, which probably dampens popular anger, at least if you believe the Revolution of Rising Expectations theory.

 

If the 70s analogy holds, we can expect to see increasingly concentrated insanity among a shrinking extremist fringe (QAnon, etc.), accompanied by scattered acts of stochastic terrorism, while the great mass of people slowly shuffle back to their quotidian concerns and settle in for a decade of malaise. Ambient populist energy will continue swirling around for a while, latching onto goofier and goofier causes (like day trading!) until it finally drains away into a general goofiness.

 

But “general goofiness” as a means of recovery from an Age of Unrest is a topic for another post. Incidentally, I’m now reading Reaganland, the sequel to Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge…

[shyams]

AOC got in on the day traders’ revolution too:

 

And amazingly, Ted Cruz agreed!

Isn’t Noah Smith glibly conflating Alex O’Keefe’s tweet “on power struggle” with AOC’s tweet (and Sen Cruz’s) even though the two are largely unconnected topics?

 

Alex talks about revolution, seizing the means of production, etc. whereas AOC and Ted Cruz are merely pointing out the hypocrisy involved when Robinhood steps in to protect the mega-rich hedge funds even as even as the very same 'Hedgies' talk(ed) about “fairness” or “open/transparent market” or “short-sellers help regulate the system” in other situations.

 

But the really interesting thing here is the spectacle of a bunch of people rushing to try to lift the banner of the GameStoppers as a populist cause.

I vehemently disagree with this interpretation. The large masses of people speaking out in favour of the day traders are doing so to ensure the hedge funds don’t rig the market against these day traders via some underhand methods.

 

The rest of the article --- where Noah stretches the tenuous connection further --- does not merit too much analysis. It has its basis in a faulty premise and if one pulls away that premise, the rest of the talk is irrelevant. This is NOT about populism.

[y66]

Isn’t Noah Smith glibly conflating Alex O’Keefe’s tweet “on power struggle” with AOC’s tweet (and Sen Cruz’s) even though the two are largely unconnected topics?

 

Alex talks about revolution, seizing the means of production, etc. whereas AOC and Ted Cruz are merely pointing out the hypocrisy involved when Robinhood steps in to protect the mega-rich hedge funds even as even as the very same 'Hedgies' talk(ed) about “fairness” or “open/transparent market” or “short-sellers help regulate the system” in other situations.

 

 

I vehemently disagree with this interpretation. The large masses of people speaking out in favour of the day traders are doing so to ensure the hedge funds don’t rig the market against these day traders via some underhand methods.

 

The rest of the article --- where Noah stretches the tenuous connection further --- does not merit too much analysis. It has its basis in a faulty premise and if one pulls away that premise, the rest of the talk is irrelevant. This is NOT about populism.

Smith isn't saying that the GameStop revolution is about populism. He's saying that the fact that populists on both sides of the aisle are jumping on this "goofy" issue suggests they don't have anything better to jump on and that maybe this is a sign of weariness and a return to normalcy.

[thepossum]

Just reading the sad news about a group of newbie traders finding out that (risky) trades can involve losses as well as "gains"

 

I think the most amusing headline I read recently was part of the continued growth of the Elon Musk mythology where he was described as being an "anti-establishment hero" or words to that effect :)

 

Just reading one of the amusing comments above where playing the sharemarket is regarded as some great revolutionary Marxist act too. Too funny

As far as I can see the workers keep being sucked into scams and losing their means of production. Thats my take :)

 

On a slightly related topic, a few decades back Labor and Business here worked out some scheme (scam) where workers (and small businesses)sank all their spare cash into this wonderful superannuation scheme (scam). From what I can see for many of them they have absolutely no control over those means of production when they need them at all. Others enjoy those benefits. It would be wonderful to be connected to any of those "looking after" our savings :) The best thing about our scam was that it was trusted because there were players from organised Labo(ur) and Business involved so we didnt have to worry. I think they all have very comfortable lives :)

 

Don't get me started on that other revolutionary scam (the gig-economy) which is tantamount to peasantry as far as I can see where workers do indeed own their means of production (like a few farm tools equivalent) and till other people's lands (for other's profits) under immense competition and even a variant of a tragedy of the commons etc

[y66]

I wrote yesterday that what I really want to read right now are accounts of how hedge funds made decisions when confronted with the weird price action in GameStop Corp. stock in the last couple of weeks. Clearly some hedge funds were trading the stock in incredibly choppy Reddit-driven markets, and I just want to know what they were thinking. Did they have some sort of robust tested process for trading based on momentum or social-media sentiment or technical factors, and coolly apply that process to the craziness around GameStop? Or were they distressed-credit or global macro funds who were like “this is too crazy, I cannot resist a trade like this”?

 

The Wall Street Journal came through in a big way with this story about Senvest Management LLC, a (now) $2.4 billion equity hedge fund that made almost $700 million on GameStop. Their process for deciding how to buy GameStop was sort of boring and normal and pre-nonsense: They got interested in the stock after hearing “a presentation from the new GameStop chief executive at a consumer investment conference in January 2020,” did research, “spoke with management, sussed out competitors and noted the involvement of activists in the stock.” It took them until September to start buying, and “by the end of October, Senvest owned more than 5% of the company, paying under $10 a share for the bulk of the stock.”

 

Their process for deciding how to sell GameStop, however, really rose to the weird occasion:

 

After the market’s close on Jan. 26, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted “GameStonk!!” a rallying cry to users of Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, who had put their support behind GameStop.

 

Senvest, which had slowly been trimming its position, decided to get out completely.

 

“Given what was going on, it was hard to imagine it getting crazier,” Mr. Mashaal said.

That implies that they got out mostly on Jan. 27, when GameStop closed at its all-time high.[1] They got into this stock based on fundamental research conducted over months; they called the top perfectly based on an Elon Musk tweet.

 

Honestly I am tearing up a little? These guys get it. What a great investment process. I hope someone is working on a revised edition of Graham & Dodd that incorporates the Did Elon Musk Tweet Yet metric. The best time to buy a stock is a few months before Elon Musk tweets about it; the best time to sell it is the day after he tweets. If Elon Musk just sold advance notice of his tweets to hedge funds, he could be the richest person in the world.

 

To be clear, though, this is not quite what I had in mind yesterday, since these guys got into their GameStop position long before it went nuts. I still want to read about fast-money hedge funds who had no position in GameStop until last week, and who were then like “huh, GameStop at $147.98, I think it has one more day to run” and bought the stock for no fundamental reason at all. “‘Lol GME to 1000 [rocket emoji] [rocket emoji] [rocket emoji]’ is a perfectly good hedge fund thesis right now,” I wrote last week, and I want to read about a hedge fund that actually tried it.

[thepossum]

It seems that over my lifetime so many trusted institutions, industries, whatever, have been taken over by a load of immature, irresponsible and often rather incompetent people. And so many powerful people everywhere are playing into the trivialisation and game-playing nature. I guess they all got a bit too big for their boots. Everything is being played with and hard working people and business people are the ones who always suffer

 

All I'm saying is can we trust any of these characters with anything any more. Our savings. Our freedoms. Our rights. Our privacy. Our lives etc

 

Seems sadly that a bunch of greedy and totally irresponsible anarcho-capitalist types who abuse the use of the anarcho- tag in claiming to care about people's well being and social justice. All they care about is their own greed. I actually despise the use of the anarcho tag with them at all. If anarchy ever stood for anything it was about justice and progress and freedom from oppression. Not f**king around and playing with people's lives for amusement and profit

 

Did I mention we also need to trust those characters with the well-being of the whole planet. Yet they seem to be educating a whole generation that all you ever need do to be successful in life is play around with an app. The sad thing is many of them think they are hard up struggling generations yet many of them have much more as children than their grandparents did after a lifetime's productive hard work

 

Final sentences. Sadly the ignorant attitude that by attacking worker's pensions you are attacking the wealthy is part of all the other political claptrap sold to an ignorant younger generation with their divisive generational warfare for close to 25+ years now. Dangerous times indeed when a wealthy privileged younger class thinks they are badly off and goes after ordinary hard working older generations. Who is behind that politics? And dressing all this rubbish up as some kind of progressive social justice struggle when people are dying from poverty all over the world is truly disgusting. None of them would know what social justice really is. So while these new generation of global freedom fighters sit in their swanky apartments playing their consoles some old workers modest savings are flushed away and possibly some poor countries whole GDP/reserves is flushed away too. So much for your freedom fighting and justice

 

You start to get nervous posting stuff like this in case some ****** decides to target your super fund on Reddit

[y66]

https://www.theringer.com/nfl-playoffs/2021/1/25/22248604/tom-brady-patrick-mahomes-bucs-chiefs-super-bowl-matchup?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210204&instance_id=26794&nl=the-morning&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=51053&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

The greatest quarterback of all time is set to face off with the greatest quarterback on the planet. The result could echo throughout NFL history.

It’s a rare thing in sports (or any realm): An all-time great, who’s fading but still elite, is facing a potential successor. We asked some of our Times colleagues for previous matchups that this Super Bowl brings to mind.

 

1962 European Cup final. The Portuguese club Benfica beat Real Madrid, which had won five of the first six European Cups. The entertaining 5-3 win was “the passing of a torch,” The Times’s Rory Smith said, and confirmed the ascendence of Eusébio, a Portuguese striker.

 

1966 World Series, Game Two. Jim Palmer of the Baltimore Orioles, then 20, outpitched the great Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers. “Koufax was at the height of his powers, but his arm was killing him and this would turn out to be the last game he ever pitched,” Tyler Kepner said.

 

2007 N.B.A. Finals. The master triumphed this time: Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs won his fourth title by beating the Cleveland Cavaliers in LeBron James’s first finals. Afterward, as Marc Stein notes, Duncan told James: “This is going to be your league in a little while.”

 

2009 W.N.B.A. Western Conference finals. Lisa Leslie, one of the league’s first stars, had come back from an injury for the Los Angeles Sparks. But Diana Taurasi and the Phoenix Mercury beat the Sparks — and Taurasi has gone on to become the league’s top scorer.

[y66]

David Marchese: As far as your legacy, there’s your big Minnesota contract, there’s proving that players could successfully go pro at 18 and there’s the way you played. But what do you believe is your contribution to the story of basketball?

 

Kevin Garnett: It’s a sense of pride, a work ethic. I would be out there and be so energetic that I didn’t even know what to do. So I would Rahhh! I would roar or scream after something tremendous because that’s how I felt. When it comes to expression, I gave the league that monster face, you know what I’m saying? I used to play with so much tenacity that you felt it from your seat — every night. I brought excitement to the game. You don’t get a nickname like the Ticket — you don’t sell tickets — unless you’re doing something to make ’em all remember you. They didn’t call me the Freebie. They called me the Ticket.

 

From Kevin Garnett Isn’t Sure His Generation Could Play in Today’s N.B.A. at NYT

[shyams]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56106824

 

The BBC and other mainstream media has been covering the potential troubles of one of the WallStreetBets protagonists (YouTube name "Roaring Kitty"). I post this here for two reasons:

 

1. I guess the mainstream media was reluctant to ever reference his Reddit nickname anywhere ("DeepF&%#ingValue") because they'd rather not! :). Interestingly, Brandon Kochkodin whose Bloomberg article I had linked a few weeks ago specifically uses the Reddit nickname in the Bloomberg article without ever identifying the real person behind the Reddit ID (It's quite easy to find out who DeepF&%#ingValue really is).

 

2. Call me unkind but I sense an element of relish (or schadenfreude) in the tone of most media articles on the lawsuit against this Redditor. DeepF&%#ingValue is one person who converted a $60k gamble into something in excess of $11 million from this one stock alone. My sense is that the media resents such success!

[kenberg]

https://www.bbc.co.u...siness-56106824

 

The BBC and other mainstream media has been covering the potential troubles of one of the WallStreetBets protagonists (YouTube name "Roaring Kitty"). I post this here for two reasons:

 

1. I guess the mainstream media was reluctant to ever reference his Reddit nickname anywhere ("DeepF&%#ingValue") because they'd rather not! :). Interestingly, Brandon Kochkodin whose Bloomberg article I had linked a few weeks ago specifically uses the Reddit nickname in the Bloomberg article without ever identifying the real person behind the Reddit ID (It's quite easy to find out who DeepF&%#ingValue really is).

 

2. Call me unkind but I sense an element of relish (or schadenfreude) in the tone of most media articles on the lawsuit against this Redditor. DeepF&%#ingValue is one person who converted a $60k gamble into something in excess of $11 million from this one stock alone. My sense is that the media resents such success!

 

The link above has within it the link

 

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-55841719

 

This inner link gives a quick explanation for those of us who have no idea of what this is all about. I read it, now I understand a little. Very little. I did not know what reddit was before reading this. I had never heard of GameStop.

 

Quite a few years back I got myself into a high stakes (by my standards) poker game. It did not take me long to realize I was in way over my head. I stayed for a while but then announced the obvious that I needed to go. Everyone understood.

It was an interesting group of guys. One of them, although he wasn't there that night, was also way over his head playing with them and they told him he was no longer to play with them since they did not want to take all of his money. He demanded to keep playing, threatening to call the IRS to report the game if they did not let him play, So I guess they let him play. I never learned how that all ended.

 

The idea of basing my investments on social media posts from Roaring Pussy seems absurd. Thanks to population growth, I think we can update an old expression and say that there is a sucker born every second.

[y66]

From Texas and California Blackouts: A Song of Ice and Fire by Liam Denning at Bloomberg

 

Both emergencies have a lot in common, including a lack of cheap or easy solutions.

The last thing Texas wants to hear even at the best of times — and these are not those — is that it shares something in common with California.

 

The causes of the enormous failure of the Texas power system during the long weekend’s arctic blast are, like the grid itself, bound to be complex and wide-ranging. We can expect a volley of jeremiads against wind power, as perhaps half that fleet stopped spinning. But with perhaps more than 30 gigawatts of thermal generating capacity tripping offline, and wind power producing about five gigawatts less than planned, this disaster clearly stretches, as Texas’ grid operator said, “across fuel types.”

 

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Texas has been here before. Almost a fifth of the capacity in the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas’ area failed in February 2011, during another unexpectedly ferocious winter snap. Apart from nuclear plants, all types of units went offline. Wind barely figured in the mix then. That was the state’s coldest winter weather since the freeze of Christmas 1989 — which was also the first time in history ERCOT implemented shutoffs to cope. Wind turbines were conspicuous by their utter absence back then.

 

Yet there is a common theme linking these blackouts over the past 30 years or so: harsh weather in a state unprepared for it.

 

Ice certainly can play havoc with the blades on wind turbines. It can also play havoc with thermal power plants, freeze coal piles and interrupt gas supplies in all sorts of ways, ranging from freezing gas wells to power shutoffs to compressors and, most of all, diverting fuel away from generating plants to home heating.

 

It is possible to mitigate these impacts. Winterization packages keep wind turbines running, and heat tracers keep fluid lines and gauges functioning in thermal plants, for example. Gas plants can also pay extra for committed, or “firm,” supply that prioritizes them in a pinch.

 

Such forms of insurance are found across power systems. Indeed, a well-functioning grid is one large exercise in redundancy. Apart from heating equipment and fuel-supply contracts, we build generating capacity that sits idle for large parts of the year to cushion spikes in demand. We often also have incentives in place to encourage large power users such as factories and office blocks to dim or switch off the lights when supply is tight. And insurance, as always, comes at a premium.

 

This is why the desire to blame a disaster like the current one on this or that type of power plant is simplistic and distracts from the real issue.

 

Texas is experiencing what will be called “unprecedented” conditions, as is a large swath of the Midwest, which is also suffering blackouts. Moving further afield, and across time, the same nomenclature was used to describe the polar vortex conditions that hit the PJM grid across the mid-Atlantic states in January 2014. Similarly, California suffered blackouts during a heatwave last August and multiple wildfires in recent years linked to its power grids, especially PG&E Corp.’s in the northern part of the state. These are all, it should be emphasized, very different power systems employing different technologies and market structures.

 

The disruptions or outright disasters of these events are often characterized as “perfect storms” overwhelming our infrastructure. In Texas’ case, ERCOT had planned for winter peak demand of about 58 gigawatts versus available capacity of almost 83 gigawatts. In an extreme scenario, it expected demand to peak at 67 gigawatts and maybe 14 gigawatts of its spare capacity to be offline. Even then, the grid would in theory just scrape through with a margin of just over a gigawatt.

 

Clearly, demand spiked higher and outages were much more widespread, leading to a wholesale collapse in power supply. But the inescapable conclusion is that a grid built and operated primarily to meet spiking summer demand to run air conditioning failed in the face of a winter storm.

 

This isn’t just a question of making sure components on turbines — whether they run on wind or gas — are adequately heated or have the proper antifreeze lubricants or whatever. It extends far beyond that.

 

After the 2011 freeze, Texas raised its cap on wholesale power prices to entice more generation to be built. Does that figure need to be raised now? Or does Texas need an outright capacity market to be instituted? Should the state rethink its island status and build more interconnections with neighboring grids? Similarly, many Texan homes are built with the idea of shedding heat rather than conserving it. Does that need to change now?

 

There are no easy answers because each one comes with trade-offs. When I wrote about the implications of the wildfires in northern California for the state’s grid, the question that kept coming up was “who pays for what?” Energy grids, especially the power network, are exercises in socialized costs; the billpayer in that city apartment subsidizes the otherwise uneconomic line running to that farm 200 miles away, for example. That’s the compact that electrified America.

 

We now face a situation in the form of extreme weather events and natural disasters that will increase in frequency and ferocity due to climate change. This will test our 20th century infrastructure built primarily with the goal — backed by price incentives — of expansion rather than conservation.

 

California’s wildfires naturally raised questions about undergrounding cables and replacing wooden poles for power lines with steel ones. Those are already complex questions with costly answers. But the ramifications of a changed climate raise even thornier ones. Should we break up or agglomerate grids? Who will insure homes in fire zones? Where should people live in a state with high housing costs and restrictive planning in less fire-prone areas? Should people living in safer areas subsidize the risk of those housed in relative tinderboxes hundreds of miles away?

 

These are the sorts of questions Texas now faces. Even as the costs of renewable power fall, they require energy storage systems that remain expensive for now and, as this disaster demonstrates, require extra investment in winterization. Thermal generation may be more reliable, but clearly not reliable enough in its current configuration — and, lest we forget, much of it also contributes to the climate change making these unprecedented events all too precedented.

 

Nuclear power offers an alternative solution, but one that is very costly and high-risk from a capital-markets perspective. Looking further out, having a million electric vehicles with a 70 kilowatt-hour battery in each parked off Texas’ snowy roads could offer a big resource to draw on in an emergency — but only with the right price incentives and technology in place.

 

When a system fails, whether it be a state-wide power grid or just a bathroom tap that worked yesterday but suddenly doesn’t today, we yearn for the simple fix. That loose screw or one component that, if tightened or replaced, will set everything right again. It’s harder to admit that what we built worked fine for generations but just isn’t made for these times. Increasingly, though, that’s where we are.

It's hard to build reliable, interdependent systems when people in positions of responsibility can't agree on what the greatest threats to reliability are or on the benefits of a more efficient and resilient grid. Managing by train wreck feels like it isn't cutting it.

[y66]

From Alexandra Alter's review of "The Committed" by Viet Than Nguyen

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/books/viet-thanh-nguyen-the-committed.html?action=click&module=At%20Home&pgtype=Homepage

 

In one of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s earliest memories, he is on a boat leaving Saigon.

 

It was 1975, and he and his family had been turned away from the airport and the American embassy but eventually got on a barge, then a ship. He can’t remember anything about the escape, other than soldiers on their ship firing at refugees who were approaching in a smaller boat.

 

It is Nguyen’s only childhood memory from Vietnam, and he isn’t sure if it really happened or if it came from something he read in a history book. To him, whether he personally witnessed the shooting doesn’t matter.

 

“I have a memory that I can’t rely on, but all the historical information points to the fact that all this stuff happened, if not to us, then to other people,” he said in a video interview earlier this month.

 

Real or imagined, the image and feeling stayed with him and shaped his new novel, “The Committed,” a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, “The Sympathizer.”

 

Like “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed,” which Grove Press will publish on March 2, hinges on questions about individual and collective identity and memory, how wars are memorialized, whose war stories get told and what happens when abstract political ideologies are clumsily deployed in the real world. It is packed with gunfights, kidnappings, sex and drugs but delivered in dense prose that refers to obscure scholarly texts and name-checks philosophers like Sartre, Voltaire, de Beauvoir, Fanon and Rousseau.

 

“The Committed” opens with a scene that feels Homeric, as a group of refugees make a treacherous journey in the belly of a fishing boat. As a refugee — and as someone who often points out that he is a refugee, not an immigrant — Nguyen wanted to use epic imagery to describe the voyage, to counter the stereotype of refugees as pitiful and weak.

 

“From the perspective of the West and people who are not refugees, boat people — people who flee by the sea — are pathetic. They’re desperate, they’re frightened, and they’re just objects of pity. I wanted to refute that,” he said. “You’ve got to think of them as heroic.”

In “The Committed,” the narrator — who calls himself Vo Danh, or “Nameless” — has escaped his Communist interrogators. He heads to Paris and joins a gang of drug dealers, the ultimate act of capitalist rebellion. He’s no longer sure who he is or what he believes in. His identity, mission and even his consciousness — he sometimes refers to himself in the second person — have been fractured by displacement, disillusionment and torture.

 

To the French natives he meets, he is among “les boat-people,” a label he rejects. “I was not a boat person unless the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on the Mayflower were also boat people,” the narrator thinks.

[y66]

Over the summer of 2020, as coronavirus cases fell and life in Britain felt briefly normal, something very abnormal was happening to the country’s electricity supply. No coal was burned to generate any portion of it for a period of more than two months, something that had not happened since 1882. Britain’s four remaining coal-burning power plants are zombies, all but dead. Within a couple of years they will be closed and Britain will probably never burn coal for electricity again.

 

The elimination of power stations that burn coal has helped Britain cut its carbon emissions faster than any other rich country since 1990 (see charts). They are down by 44%, according to data collected by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) during a period when the economy grew by two-thirds. Germany’s emissions, in contrast, are down by 29%; coal is still burned to generate some 24% of its electricity. Britain has made cuts to its emissions 1.8 times larger than the EU average since 1990. In America, emissions over the same period are up slightly.

Here is the full article from The Economist. I’ll say it again, whether it is AI, the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, the speed of the current vaccination program, this switch to greener energy, the reemergence of Oxbridge, the new Dominic Cummings-inspired DARPA-like science funding plan, or London being the world’s best city — current Great Britain remains grossly underrated.

[thepossum]

 

This inner link gives a quick explanation for those of us who have no idea of what this is all about. I read it, now I understand a little. Very little. I did not know what reddit was before reading this. I had never heard of GameStop.

 

 

I was getting a little anxious about this thing for a while. I actually vaguely knew what Reddit was but had hardly ever used it. So I joined the group. My anxiety subsided very quickly

 

The dominant style of post seemed to be along the lines of "tell the whole world what you plan to be buying tomorrow" etc

[y66]

I think I may know why white people are so upset about this Dr. Seuss/cancel culture thing. I was reminded of this story today.

 

It goes back to the second-most devastating day of my life:

 

The day I found out the Hardy Boys were white.

 

A thread