But that’s the thing, it’s not fraudulent to run a business that loses money. And these folks are committing no fraud, they are entirely honest in their filings that show they are burning through money with no hope of actual profit.
Yet, people keep buying. It’s like they care less about the underlying business, and more about catching a profit before it all falls apart.
They don’t need to be fraudulent, if they can get just as much investment by being honest.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the IPOs. If an unprofitable company wants to go public with nothing to offer but empty promises, why shouldn’t they?
The real problem is how these companies have grown as large as they have with no profits, and are dominating the US economy. In a sane world, ordinary investors wouldn’t be lining up to buy shares of these companies that may never show a profit. What makes it even worse is how indexes are bending their own rules to get these companies in. Many ordinary people might not even realize how much their retirement is tied into these companies at this point.
Now, educated investors might see these as a lotto ticket. Put a small amount into each one, and maybe one or two hits big and generate outsized returns. But those folks are not gambling with their pensions. I have a bad feeling that when it all falls apart, the country as a whole will be left holding the bag, either because the stock market craters to the point that no one can retire, or the Feds step in and bail it all out
It’s only a matter of time before AI bots learn to wriye intentional tyops and shifty autocorrect just to appear more human
King Steven the Turd, Greediest of Pigboys, cares not for the privacy of his subjects. All the data are belong to Him!
The cloud is a great metaphor. It represents all that software that we expect to just “be there”, without any thought to where it might be. Of course software needs a platform to run on, but it is designed so it doesn’t matter where it is run. Your phone just finds it. It couldn’t care less where the server is, it just connects, and you get your cat pictures, as long as you are connected to the Internet.
The physical manifestation of the cloud is all those servers in datacenters, with redundant connectivity and power, designed to run and be connected 24/7/365.26 . They are designed with failures and redundancy in mind. It can take a literal act of war to get a datacenter off the network permanently. And even then, when local data and connectivity are lost, people running Web services for real should be backing their data up offsite and designing their services to easily spin up elsewhere. Some services hosted in those datacenters simply had a brief outage while other resources were provisioned.
“The Cloud” is really just a series of Best Practices for software design and operations so that these services can run anywhere. Of course, they have to run somewhere, but they can run anywhere…
I will vote for her no matter which ballot she is on. But I am selfish, and want to keep her in NY as Chuck’s Senate replacement for a term or two (or even three!). Maybe in another 12 or 18 years, the country’s a whole will be ready to elect a woman as President. We’re clearly not now.
(It has been my theory for years that America is too sexist to elect a woman as President, but is self-aware enough to know they can’t say that, so we get excuses like “I don’t like her laugh” or “She did this one thing I dont like in the past, so I’m never voting for her”, instead of the real excuse “She has the wrong parts”…).
Plus, from a political perspective she is better off waiting. President is a top-tier job. Let’s say she runs in 2028, and wins two terms. Now her political career has peaked, everything else she does is less important, and she’s not even 50 yet. Worse yet, she runs in 2028, and loses. Now she has the baggage of a failed campaign to deal with, and she’s not even 40 yet. Liberals seem to be less tolerant of Presidential losers than Conservatives.
She’s smart, and understands all this. Her thought process might be: are the Democrats putting up another clown this time around? She might risk the run sooner if she thinks there’s no one compelling in the pipeline.
r/cryptocurrency did manage to figure out how to put your balance as a flair, and all the data regarding which posters received a distribution was public, so if you wanted to you could figure out which posters were selling as they went along. But it started out life as an ERC-20 token on an Ethereum testnet, but are now on Arbitrum.
Selling them involved bridging some ETH to WETH on Arbitrum, using that to pay gas and transaction fees to swap the MOONS for WETH on Arbitrum, and then converting it all back to ETH (and then $$$s). Since I had already imported my Reddit wallet into Metamask, I could do all this even though I swore Reddit off after the APIocalypse.
It was all a huge hassle and convinced me that if crypto might have been the future of money at one point, the nerds ensured that it would never be as easy as a $20 bill.
Reddit did make all their accounts into crypto wallets, and experimented with handing out tokens for community engagement on r/cryptocurrency and some Fortnite forum. I was posting on /r/cryptocurrency and managed to obtain no small amount of token for free… Which, inexplicably, a market developed around and they were worth actual money.
One thing they did correctly, though, was allow you access to the private key passphrase attached to the wallet they generated for you. So you were not tied to their platform to transact.
Selling those was a chore, but I managed to do it a year ago and score some free money. I think I sold when they were worth around $.10 each, which was a good move, as the bottom fell out and they are now worth $.002 (if you can even find someone willing to buy them). The final joke may be on me, though: I just checked the history and at one point in 2024 they were up over $.50 …
We can call that AI “Dread Pirate Robot”
Maybe Bibi is next
Even though physical cartridges are tiny, retail stores still have to manage them as part of inventory. I think the retail margins are relatively tiny on those (25% or less), but there is still room for a retailer to reduce price and still make a profit, particularly to clear out inventory. But, if some games are distributed to retailers by allotment, I can see a retailer reducing their price to increase volume and qualify to get more games in the next allotment.
OTOH, digital titles are sold directly by the console manufacturer in their online store. Yes, you can buy a code at the retailer, but I bet those pieces of cardboard have an entirely different distribution agreement. With less effective competition (since there isn’t really any functional distribution to speak of), digital stores don’t need to discount.
It depends on how close you are to retiring. If you are more than 10 years away, you are probably better off doing nothing differently. Look at the inevitable dip as a buying opportunity.
Even if you are close, you still need to be careful. Yes, the market is probably due for a 40% haircut at some point. But if it takes another 3 years to get there, then the market might increase more than that before then.
There are funds that track the entire S&P 500, but omit those 7 large Tech companies, and their performance has consistently lagged behind the whole index. If you thought years ago that the Tech sector would be do for a correction and backed out of those 7 companies while keeping the rest, you would be objectively worse off.
The whole idea of a 401k is that it’s not taxable until you pull stuff out on retirement. You an trade in and out of stuff with no tax implications.
The Internet thinks you’ve got your own trolls
https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/Peikko
https://finland.fi/life-society/finnish-mythical-creatures-still-lurk/
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also snipers, though. I’ve known a few Finns, you are all badass…
Shit, you think Internet trolls are bad, Finland has some of the OG trolls in those woods and you don’t want to piss them off
They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.
That sounds like when a company I used to work for first found out about Agile…
I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I’ve asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It’s certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more…
Product managers tend to be useless in large groups, but a good product manager is worth their weight in Iridium.
It’s basically the upper end of the Peter Principle.
This admin is more “Three Stooges” than anything Groucho did…
A teensy tiny fig leaf is all he needs