danhak

You are being tracked, and your network is identifying you (tagging, mentioning you, posting photos that include you etc) whether or not you use Facebook.

This is like telling people who have privacy concerns about 23andMe / Ancestry DNA "just don't use them." Meanwhile their parents or siblings happily open up the floodgates.

I don't understand the implicit assumption that a new search engine that reaches Google's scale will be more adept at curtailing abuse.

> Housing is a function of city council zoning policy...

This is the laughably reductionist take that predictably appears on HN when folks think the dynamics of San Francisco apply everywhere.

Housing costs have nothing to do with the Fed? Really? You don’t believe record low mortgage rates are driving demand at all?

Nah, it must be city council zoning policy that is sending home prices soaring all over the country—-even in rural and unincorporated areas.

Housing, healthcare, education and childcare costs matter. I don’t believe CPI is accurately capturing the skyrocketing costs of these things, which are the most significant expenses for most households.

They rolled out a catastrophically bad redesign of the site, resulting in a mass exodus of users directly to Reddit

It is nonetheless the prevailing thesis behind BTC, and many highly-regarded fund managers are starting to allocate serious portions of their reserves to cryptocurrency.

There is close to $1 Trillion worth of bitcoin out there, largely held by futurist / technology enthusiast types. If that's not his target market then who is?

All large enterprises keep cash reserves. Whether you agree or not, the prevailing thesis behind keeping cash reserves in BTC is not that it will turn a profit, but that it will avoid devaluation like USD.

Here's my wild speculation on why Musk did this (and why it's brilliant)

He knows there is a large and growing community of Bitcoin speculators and enthusiasts out there. By "endorsing" Bitcoin in this way, he not only moved the market--further enriching these folks--but also signaled that he is an ally to them, significantly boosting positive sentiment toward him and increasing the likelihood that they will purchase a Tesla as their next vehicle.

In one fell swoop, he not only drove demand for his product, but also made it more affordable to his target market without lowering its cost.

In your hypothetical example, a stock is going up and up, and I suspect it might be fraudulent, and you believe I have no incentive to pull my money out before the house of cards collapses?

Getting my money out is all the incentive I need! I bet plenty of Theranos investors would've loved to do exactly that. And there was no shorting involved in that company.

The incentive already exists in the form of long investors doing their due diligence.

Theranos collapsed without any shorting involved. Isn't this a counterpoint to the argument that shorting is required for "price discovery" and the unmasking of fraud?

If investors believe shares of these companies are a ripoff, they can sell any holdings and / or abstain from buying. Just like they can do in nearly every other type of market.

If a used car salesman is trying to rip me off, I walk away from the deal. I don't need to be able to short his inventory! And the supply / demand dynamics of the used car market will trend toward equilibrium without any such shorting.

The law of supply and demand doesn't require shorting in order to "correct" prices downward. The counterpoint to your Theranos example is the fact that Enron existed too. Both of them were fraudulent. Both collapsed after some number of years. One privately held, one publicly-traded and shortable. Same outcome, no?

I can't (directly) short the price of strawberries at my farmer's market, or the cost of rent in my small town, or the prices of artwork at an auction house. Price discovery seems to work reasonably well in all these venues. What is with this canard that shorting is necessary for price discovery to occur? There is no such requirement in the law of supply and demand.

Not symbolic at all. Stock confers legal ownership of a company. Why is ownership of a company's assets any less valuable than ownership of cash dispersed to your personal account?

No, it's not. Not even close.

The current market cap of GME is $25 billion. Meanwhile, the size of the subprime mortgage market in 2008 was in the neighborhood of $50 trillion.

This is nothing like the size of the bubble (US housing market) that precipitated those crashes.

This is nothing like the relatively common trading halts imposed by the exchanges under various circumstances—-which halt all trading, not just buying.

This is a specific broker—-one with direct financial ties to this trade, by the way—-totally shutting down the ability to enter an opening order for a specific ticker. Pretty unprecedented artificial suppression of demand.

Blackouts knock out gas pumps, too.

Healthcare is tough. There are few markets with more inertia and misaligned incentives than this.

With respect to pitching the product directly to clinicians, OP may have misunderstood his target market or overestimated the value proposition.

It seems like a very big request to ask a doctor to deviate from a treatment with which they already have a high level of experience.

> Congress is about to impeach Trump (successfully this time, since the Democrats now control the Senate).

That’s not how that works. Conviction in the Senate requires a 2/3 majority vote, which is vanishingly unlikely even with Democratic control.

Why are you comparing individual stocks to a currency?

“Let’s have trial by combat!”

-Rudy Giuliani, 1/6/2021

“First they came for the violent insurrectionists, and I did not speak out”

The issue is that these platforms have grown to monopolistic or duopolistic size, NOT that a private company has the right to sever a business relationship.

It’s an antitrust issue, not a free speech issue.

There’s something very ironic about Parler—-which kicks users off its platform for espousing liberal ideology—-whining about being kicked off other platforms.

From their own TOS:

> "Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason or no reason“

> For example, I’d like to understand the defining characteristics of social media platforms that contrasts them from traditional public forums that have existed through history.

They are privately held.

I’m not sure this argument holds in general.

For example, you could change your religion and it would still be illegal to discriminate on that basis.

Yes, thank you. I edited my post.

Ah, but gender (and by extension, sexual orientation according to SCOTUS) is a protected class under the Civil Rights Act. Political affiliation is not a protected class.