I was inspired to write this by Steve Yegge’s idea from his piece on how China is basically better than us:

We view cheating, and IP theft, as a form of “cheating at life”, and being grossly unfair to others, and we have sayings like “cheaters never prosper”, which we all know is bullshit but we say it anyway because we want to discourage cheating. Western society looks down on cheaters, and we think of them (at least a little bit) as bad people because they are cheating.

There’s truth in that. Though if you google pro CS: GO players…

Reading up on the history of insurance on Wikipedia is not what party people do Friday evenings. I know I had a confirmation-bias-orgasm, though:

Babylonians developed a system which was recorded in the famous Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, and practiced by early Mediterranean sailing merchants. If a merchant received a loan to fund his shipment, he would pay the lender an additional sum in exchange for the lender’s guarantee to cancel the loan should the shipment be stolen, or lost at sea.

In the United States, economists and consumer advocates generally consider insurance to be worthwhile for low-probability…

I’m so tired of this fake economy with all its money printing. WSB’s $GME shenanigans have made it abundantly clear ‘retail’ is not supposed to earn. Casinos don’t need customers that win.

Front-running users with HFT is okay. Don’t like how the game is playing out? Throw a tantrum. Call in favours at the media. Close down options. Try and get subreddits shut down. Ask the SEC for help. Maybe not mention the ILLEGAL 130% naked short, though.

What is the reason we have ‘rich people clubs’ like ‘accredited investors’ or ‘institutions’ that get to buy at…

Is this site right here: https://www.highshortinterest.com/

They sold more $GME short than there is $GME… They can’t all return what they owe by definition. Without driving the price sky-high, obviously. Crowded trade, short squeeze, makes a dinosaur like Volkswagen 5x in a day.

Here’s a ‘shortfolio’ I made out of the top 11 stocks (because I wanted Tootsie Roll in) on January 22nd:

America didn’t deserve an overweight monolingual heavily indebted “fake it ’til you make it” reality TV star as their leader. That’s not what America stands for.

Innocent hard working well meaning Russians aren’t to blame evil Putin has his heel on their necks.

Was talking how Google Assistant copied Shazam, plus also guesses songs from humming now. Somewhere along the way, I uttered the phrase ‘hey, Google’ to have my pocket chime ‘I didn’t quite catch that’ in response to the rest of my Estonian-language tirade. My phone has been listening in 24/7 for months now. Not secretly or abusing some fine print buried in the EULA. I asked Google to analyze my eating, fapping, shitting, and sex sounds. …

You’ve maybe noticed Medium has scrambled to make changes lately. I’m quite satisfied with how the new front page focuses much more on what I care about now than the latest scandalous hashtag.

The newsletters need tweaking yet. These are from the first ones I got after re-subscribing in September (did so because I wanted to read Scott Galloway), after Evan’s post about a more personal Medium:

‘Here’s some #MeToo with your #BLM’, I’m fairly certain the one with the not-so-obvious title also won’t be able to avoid the topic du jour somehow.

Ethan Siegel puts it very well in his COVID-themed article:

Exponential growth is so powerful not because it’s necessarily fast, but because it’s relentless.

We humans are so bad at understanding exponential growth there are children’s fables dedicated to bringing this closer to home.

There’s the wheat and chessboard problem:

The sage modestly asked just for a few grains of rice in the following manner: the king was to put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and double it on every consequent one. The king accepted the sage’s request.

Or the expanding lily pad:

There is…