I love these. They have pics like this in the Zermatt museum.

I definitely appreciate modern technology.

Modern fashion is a big part of the improvement in this instance, and much more responsive to human desires.

The exclusion of GME from market access is flatly sinister.

In the 1800s, british scientists would go out to do fieldwork (like geology) in formal wear, because they were gentlemen.

I still dress for airplanes, even coach. Sport coats outdoors, 65℉ - 18℉. Wool pants M-F, natural fabrics almost always. Logos (colleges, blood banks) only for sleepwear.

Adjustments would be made for mountain climbing, but I wouldn't hop crevasses with a woman in a hoop skirt... I'd stay in the bar at Base Camp with her less-insane sister.

Feelin' all girly 'n sentimental… Remembering the good times…

This was probably the finest moment of 2020.

"flatly sinister"
What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world#t-141835

You can get the gist of her plan by the 2:15 mark when she uses the words "epic win."

Wall Street better be careful who's attention they draw. These gamers are a spirited bunch. And current regulation is poorly designed to work in this environment.

• Consider this righteous sentiment, retweeted by the mighty Mel Chen.

• Pissarro was great.

> gamers are a spirited bunch.

Even when listless, they have as much right to throw away money in markets, disrupting the positions of others, as anyone.

I'm not so impressed with that Tedster. You don't need to read a Phd thesis to know why we're better at challenges in games than in real life, or why people often enjoy the uncomplicated emotional relationships in films more than those of real life: Those contexts are built to profitably engender feelings of satisfaction to paying customers. To say 'Life should be as pleasant as a video game!' doesn't kick the ball forward.

Ya wanna Ted? Here's one of the remarkable scientific achievers of my lifetime. I don't know what the look on her face was when she made her discovery. Mighta been a shit-eating grin, or maybe a blank rictus of unrelenting concentration. But I'll never care.

Agreeable smiling faces and the latest bro-language from high school probably don't have much to teach us about scientific discipline… Not as compared to aggressive instruction, study and testing.

If the textbook publishers don't memoryhole this event, the GME would be a great study case.

Who am I kidding, of course this will be buried with prejudice.

https://twitter.com/businessbarista/status/1354789569221300226

Let's be clear: A lot of these GME investors are going to get creamed.

That doesn't mean there's any excuse for protecting them from themselves, and the lesson they need to learn.

Happens to the big boys, too.

Agree with Six, but we don't know if RH was being threatened behind-the-scenes by regulators or partners and vendors (AWS, et al.).

The GME plot thickens:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ArkhonDH/status/1354834763245359111

Dear God Six, they can't be doing this on their own.

They're BEGGING for suits.

This article is one of the best things I've ever read from Tyler Cowen. (The good parts are cites.)

IowaHawk metaphor...

https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1354899636704718850

Okay, here we go.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1354911653582630915

Webull, from a post in the twitter thread linked by Sixclaws, was going to be the next company for me to investigate (out of curiosity, NOT a desire to buy GME).

This interview with their CEO explains much.

He makes me think of Hollywood nook restaurants in the twenty-naughts: If Paris Hilton throws her drink into the face of some handsy sitcom star in your dining room one night, you've got about twelve or thirteen hours to convince everyone that yours is a place where the stylish come to see and be seen, and not just a hole-in-the-wall with good Ginseng Chicken Soup.

The GME saga continues:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AstralTrading/status/1354893276801859593

That tweet linked by Six from @businessbarista regarding the fragility of brands now seems especially poignant: All the Reddit smartphone/social media investors who'd presumed they'd been given new superpowers by an investment app on the phones now believe that RobinHood bowed down to pressure from THE MAN on Wall Street.

But it was merely marketplace realities in motion! So they're wrong.

Ahem. Ot took until market close on Thursday night, but it now looks like everything is working okay… And not, as I said this morning, "flatly sinister."

Look, I grew up in a lefty household… Enamored of the speed of electronic communication since I got my first AM transistor radio (it was red, and chicks dug it)… These errors are going to crop up occasionally.

Mea Culpa.

Outsider Trading Enrages Inside Traders

"Filthy plebes don't even know what real money looks like" one sniffed after snorting his hourly allotment of fine Bolivian flake. "Can you imagine, believing you have the right to access the market when you're not even Ivy League? I'll have our pet Senators get right on it".

So far the Biden Administration seems to be handling things like this:

https://mobile.twitter.com/LivingScribe/status/1354881981792845824

Oops. It's "whose," not "who is." That's probably a Flagrant 1 on this blog. CtG can take the free throws.

Don't mis-underestimate what our children is learning. All this gaming is having real-life consequences.

" By 2015, in Instruction 5410.16, the Pentagon included "electronic games" in the list of media that "may benefit Military Service recruiting and retention programs." By 2018, the Esports team was born, cashing in on the rising star of competitive video games and, crucially, unmoderated voice chat rooms.

Top military recruiters have been pleased with the gamer-to-soldier pipeline. Major General Frank Muth credits the foray into video games as a major success for recruitment endeavors, "

> So far the Biden Administration

The Biden administration are the last ones we want involved here.

> Don't mis-underestimate what our
> children is learning.

I'll complain about military recruitment separately…

But the thing is, tonight, right now, the front page of Reddit is a fucking nightmare. Every illiterate little teenager who can't get a job washing dishes during the pandemic (or wouldn't try anyway) is whining about all the dark and sinister forces at work in our economy…

…Much as I was this morning.

Thing is, they're a voting bloc, and I'm not! Biden, or some damn person, is going to promise them that things can be made better through regulation. That idiot AOC has already proposed investigation.

The only possible result will be HIGHER FEES AND SLOWER TRANSACTIONS.

This is why I was suspicious about the discussions Lenona was linking a few months ago.

Americans have moved all their gossipy, silly and impulsive responses from sitcoms and morning talk shows and are applying them on Reddit.

It's weird how these different social media are shaking out. This particular lunacy couldn't have blossomed on Facebook or Twitter. Or Prodigy. Or Amy's blog.

TBH, I haven't yet decided how I feel about the GME shenanigans.

On the one hand, a group of individual investors were able to flex their muscle, which is good. On the other hand, a group of people with no clue how the market really works took out their juvenile anger on a hedge fund engaged in legitimate investment tactics. On yet another hand, hedge funds, by their sheer size, often create self-fulfilling prophecies with their shorts.

That Robinhood limited the ability of individual investors to follow their chosen investment strategy using its app raises the same concerns that Twitter censoring Trump raises. Are apps merely access ramps or are they responsible for the actions taken by the users? If rioters use Twitter to coordinate a riot, is Twitter responsible for the damage done? Likewise with Robinhood and the takedown of hedge funds that are shorting stocks.

As for the high price of GME today, that will settle out and those holding high-priced shares or options to buy at a high price will lose their money. The market does one thing really well, it determines the price at which something will sell. And pumped-up GME is overpriced right now.

That's how life teaches you - exam first, lesson after.

In the 1800s, british scientists would go out to do fieldwork (like geology) in formal wear, because they were gentlemen.

cc at January 28, 2021 9:10 AM
__________________________________

And even much later than that.

http://reader.epubee.com/books/mobile/a1/a142665d0f5dce69c8fbe310efecefb2/text00000.html#filepos0000008257

From the first chapter of Going Solo, by Roald Dahl:

"The ship that was carrying me away from England to Africa in the autumn of 1938 was called the SS Mantola . She was an old paint-peeling tub of 9,000 tons with a single tall funnel and a vibrating engine that rattled the tea-cups in their saucers on the dining-room table.

"The voyage from the Port of London to Mombasa would take two weeks and on the way we were going to call in at Marseilles, Malta, Port Said, Suez, Port Sudan and Aden. Nowadays you can fly to Mombasa in a few hours and you stop nowhere and nothing is fabulous any more, but in 1938 a journey like that was full of stepping-stones and East Africa was a long way from home, especially if your contract with the Shell Company said that you were to stay out there for three years at a stretch. I was twenty-two when I left. I would be twenty-five before I saw my family again.

"...our ship was running between Malta and Port Said. It had been a stifling hot afternoon and I was having a brief rest on my upper berth before dressing for dinner.

"Dressing? Oh yes, indeed. We all dressed for dinner every single evening on board that ship. The male species of the Empire-builder, whether he is camping in the jungle or is at sea in a rowing-boat, always dresses for dinner, and by that I mean white shirt, black tie, dinner-jacket, black trousers and black patent-leather shoes, the full regalia, and to hell with the climate."

I have to wonder - since wearing pants was unacceptably unladylike back then, why would even climbing a mountain be acceptable, for a woman?

I was also wondering how she could get away with wearing proper footwear for the occasion - standard ladies' winter boots wouldn't be good enough, I suppose - and then I remembered that back then, women were supposed to keep their feet hidden anyway, for modesty's sake. (Or at least that was the case in 1880s America.)

I have a lot of sympathy for RobinHood. Their unsophisticated customers expected to pay the rock-bottom fees for an investment that's indisputably going to blow up, and the back-end agencies who could execute RH's enormous traffic would need to charge a lot more money for their enormous volume of rush transactions.

None of the professionals want to be left holding the bag.

The teenagers in Reddit are all sitting at home pretending to be part of something very righteous and grown-up, buffeted by the illusion that Big Casinos don't need to see the cash before you step up to the wheel.

These new retail investors will learn their lesson, and that's okay by me. They're using their smartphones for buying (dicey) stocks, not for looking up weather forecasts from the NWS. It's gonna cost 'em, as it should.

It's gonna cost 'em, as it should. ~ Crid at January 29, 2021 10:20 AM

My dad made a lot of money in the stock market. The reason he was able to make money in the market, he once told me, is because he lost so much of it in the beginning.

I really don't see these GME gamers learning the right lessons and turning it around.

Exam first, lesson after.

Yeah, and it's a loooooong exam.