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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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In January 2021, and a few times after, meme stocks experienced profound price increases based on little related to fundamentals. The reasons are varied - in some instances, there were many large players who were short the stock (GME, AMC) and waves of buying pressure from retail investors, as well as other hedge funds, caused the prices to cascade upwards in a truly hilarious manner (GME going from $18 in December to $480 at the peak). In other instances (TSLA in summer 2020 for example), it was the case that too many call options (a derivative that allows one the right, but not the obligation, to purchase a specificed security at a specified price, on or before a specific date) were sold, and those who sold options were forced to buy more stock to hedge, in a cascade upwards.

Due to various acts of incompetence by Robin Hood and other brokers, having insufficient liquidity to deposit with the clearing houses which settle stock trades (as exposed in the SEC Report, Robin Hood's head of compliance was unaware of the existence of margin requirements with the clearing houses), various things which appear sketchy occurred in January 2021, and at other times. For example, in January 2021, Robin Hood moved the stocks to "Position Close Only", meaning that one could hold or sell, but not buy any more of the specified securities.

For those who were new to markets, this became a crusade. It has long since ceased to involve any fundamental cause, or even revolve around any sort of evidence, but instead is a venue for a mish-mash of totally wild conspiracies that are reminiscent of QAnon.

Let's look at AMC. AMC is the movie theatre company of which you have likely visited in past. It has a market capitalization today of 4.20B (lol), In September 2019, AMC had a market capitalization of $1.1B. This is a 4x.

When one compares the company's books [1], the discrepancy becomes even more stark. At the end of 2019, AMC had a tangible book value of -3.7 billion. Today, it has a tangible book value of -4.8 billion. In Fiscal Year 2019, it lost 149 million dollars. This quarter, it lost 121 million dollars.

So uh, how is it alive? How does it stick around?

Well, there's a cult backing it, and they have essentially agreed to use the stock market as a Go Fund Me, with the belief that when the End Times/"Mother of All Short Squeezes" comes, AMC's share price will rise as high as $100,000 per share[2]. With 516 million outstanding shares, this would value the company at approximately 51.6 trillion dollars. They believe in earnest that they will be able to cash out from this level, and earn trillions of dollars that their counterparties obviously would not have available to pay them. They believe this is the case because they believe that short sellers have sold billions of "synthetic" or "fake" shares of the stock [3], despite no obvious mechanism for such a thing occurring, and positing a conspiracy that would require likely >10,000 people, all of whom could instantly betray that conspiracy in exchange for vast riches beyond belief, to all keep quiet for over a year and a half at this point. The CEO, Adam Aron, has somewhat played into the meme stock aspects in a way that makes me feel sorry for the cult believers. However, he has also attempted to dispel some of the mythos [4], to little effect. In link 4, the tweet thread, he states this, but says that part of the reason they have done their recent corporate action (issuance of a preferred share to all shareholders - effectively a stock split), is to show that there are no synthetic, or naked shorts.

And so, the preferred share was issued to each shareholder who owned AMC. The AMC "Apes" beforehand stated that this [5] would be [6] the nail [7] in the coffin [8] and The MOASS WOULD HAPPEN as SYNTHETIC SHARES WERE REVEALED.

Predictably, no such MOASS occurred, and the price of AMC and the split-off preferred equity ($APE) have bled since. Predictably, cults do not take kindly to evidence that The Date Was Wrong, and instead, Outside Forces Have Conspired To Ruin Us. [9] [10] [11]. 11 is a good example of the totally false information that runs rampant in these stock cults - the stock $HKD was halted 94 times during its run up and run down. The halts, by the way, are automated and processed by computers on the basis of price swings in short periods - there is no centralized authority who chooses what to halt and when, other than if the company has imminent news and requests the exchange halt the stock.

The reason that I make this post is somewhat of a follow up to [12], and to indicate that the reasons I believe social media is a pretty awful technology, and the reason I support greater censorship isn't solely a matter of politics. It's a matter of homeless people [13] [14] investing in a bankrupt movie theatre stock, because influencers who run Onlyfans accounts and monetize their Youtbe channels make money by being "leaders" of a "movement". Because people are convinced that this bankrupt movie theatre stock is their ticket [15] out of the middle class. Because [16] this is how to get back at the man - how to get revenge for 2008.

This Friday, there are approximately [17] 36,000 call options on AMC that will expire worthless. Given the option prices on AMC, it is safe to assume that these were all purchased for around $100 each. Every week, "The Man" makes $360,000 by selling options to retail traders who are convinced that The MOASS is coming. Prior to the pandemic, The company has sold to date, 200m or so shares after the retail crowd started buying the stock, at an average price of $20. The executives of the company sell all of their shares, as soon as they vest, and have no ownership interest. The CFO unloaded everything he had at $30. When the CEO unloaded at $50, the cult said that it was OK because he was doing "Retirement Planning". His retirement plan is likely "Be Rich".

People are going to lose all their money. People will develop crippling drug addictions. People will kill themselves. People will spend the rest of their lives convinced that the entire world conspired against them to prevent them from becoming millionaires, bitter and poor. Some of them will go postal and harm innocent theatre employees or random bankers, eventually.

And what great benefit do we derive from this? The nature of social media platforms is not a neutral venue in which all speech can be heard - you do not have an email box of "Thought Of The Day from Everyone In Your Town" - you have an intentionally cultivated set of messages sent to you, because they're maximally addicting. Any perceived increase in the "freedom" of your speech is a side effect and an afterthought to maximizing the stock price of BigTech.

It's possible that this is simply the same set of suckers that would have been taken in by any other scam at any other time in history, but the group feels larger and more committed with the passing of time, rather than losing faith, continuing to dump more good money after bad. I doubt the scale of the problem has ever been this large - I've not even mentioned the Gamestop, Bed Bath, BBIG, etc. cults.

I think when people conceive of social media censorship, they react viscerally because they do not want themselves to be silenced. This is the great error - it is never small communities that cause the problem, it is the influencers.. Analogizing to the past, I think that if little people generally want to argue for the virtues of Cannabilism, then free speech should allow them to do so in 1980 or in 2022. However in 1980, Ted Koppel would not appear on Television every evening extolling the virtues of Cannabalism, followed by a 60 Minutes piece on how THEY are keeping you from finding out how good flesh tastes.

Any society that renders it easy for its constituents to be quickly and easily brainwashed, in a fashion so pleasurable they do it to themselves to get the next dopamine hit when they refresh their feed, into anti-social and self-destructive behaviors is doomed.

BigTech does not facilitate this because it acts for Free Speech. It facilitates this because maximizing the quantity of speech makes more money.

Those who confuse the quantity of speech with freedom of speech make the same error as one who would see owning 50 guns as more free than 10, or 10 abortions as more free than 2. A freedom's true import is clear when it is utilized to effect, not when it is worshipped in effigy.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMC/balance-sheet?p=AMC

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/amcstock/comments/mv9tnf/amc_100k_dont_be_fooled/

[3] https://twitter.com/stephmase22/status/1566969527128162304?s=20&t=3K1ye3x0XGHSEKh-Hqyh8Q

[4] https://twitter.com/CEOAdam/status/1555303048989364227

[5] https://twitter.com/userofintellect/status/1556792984821063683?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA

[6] https://twitter.com/AntonioTheMexi/status/1555395134182785024?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA

[7] https://twitter.com/AMCcheerleader/status/1559655570776330241?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA

[8] https://twitter.com/StacksMoney247/status/1557103509866258432?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA

[9] https://twitter.com/CeccottiFrank/status/1566927882668355584?s=20&t=dviPpKxJTItHcSsFiSgaPw

[10] https://twitter.com/beachbumscali/status/1565014681160257536?s=20&t=dviPpKxJTItHcSsFiSgaPw

[11] https://i.redd.it/9axs30kdvaj91.jpg

[12] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ubedpi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_25_2022/i6qlleg/?context=3

[13] https://twitter.com/Michelle801Ape/status/1502217924462927872?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg

[14] https://twitter.com/DrJoRoJo/status/1396529297565921280?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg

[15] https://twitter.com/trini_amc_ape/status/1567350662026903553?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg

[16] https://twitter.com/LTwittington/status/1566509811444875266?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg

[17] htt

an email box of "Thought Of The Day from Everyone In Your Town"

Can I just say, I want that as an app? The "thoughts" would be anonymous and have the capability for anyone in the town to reply to them like a comment chain. Also anonymous. Maybe pseudonymous. With randomly assigned Colors and hash based names to give a sort of continuity.

No updoots. Just text.

Wasn't Yik Yak like that? Anonymous local messages left publicly?

EDIT: Yik Yak originally folded, after some criticisms had been made over the content people posted (because of course), but it's back, apparently. And as to the context of that quote, I say the response is "get rid of algorithms in feeds, then."

I'm imagining something like a combination of Yik Yak and 4chan.

I’ve been thinking about an inverse failure mode in medicine, where snake oil is ruthlessly exterminated but good medicine is expensive, hard to get, and slow to get to market. A fool and his money are easily parted, so we still have plenty of hookum sold to the gullible, but they aren’t taking real drugs with serious side effects, or so the argument goes.

Medicine would be better for some substantial % of the populous if they could just take whatever drugs they wanted. Others would very rapidly harm themselves. A two-tiered system where people can take whatever they want after jumping through hoops seems superior to either extreme, but we already kind of have that, where patients bug their PCP until they get the drugs they want. But we still have exploitation through med advertisements, Medicare fraud, etc., and we lack the freedom to import specialized baby formula or try even mildly novel compounds.

I like free speech maximalism in social media on the grounds that there isn’t a 1:1 tradeoff between freedom and truth. Less freedom often means less truth, as lying is a powerful tool if you can get away with it. Can you shut down the scammers at all without breaking some other load-bearing norm? It might be the case that social media is net negative, but the milk is spilt in that regard. Why not other regulatory angles tho? Finance is tightly regulated so changing the rules about investment products seems safer than throwing out an key amendment.

I feel like there's another issue here, which is large institutions (typically mutual funds) holding vast shares in these companies, yet not selling when the price skyrockets. The supply side of the stock market is broken if most of the public float is locked up. If Vanguard or Blackrock were selling their holdings (which are held on behalf of their clients, which they have a fiduciary duty to) when the price doubled or quadrupled, then that would help not only meet demand, but quell a bunch of it.

If the execs are all selling, everyone who go in early are selling, demand is insatiable, and yet the people managing most of America's 401Ks are just sitting on their hands, something is wrong.

The fact so many shares are essentially 'locked up' makes short selling more profitable, but more volatile. It makes buybacks much more attractive (especially for executives). All the incentives are wrong. You don't actually need many people to create a meme stock, you just need Blackrock, Vanguard, and other institutions, to own most of the shares.

And when the share price of a company spikes far past what its fundamentals suggest it should be worth, maybe companies should be forced to issue new shares and dilute everyone else, in order to get the price down. Almost feels irresponsible for a company to not raise funds off things like this, since it'd benefit the majority of their shareholders.

People worried for years "what happens when everyone owns index funds?" and it was considered a "lol if we should be so lucky for that to ever happen for us to worry about" scenario.

How much of the float is in index funds?

Almost feels irresponsible for a company to not raise funds off things like this, since it'd benefit the majority of their shareholders.

AMC has raised money off of the current stock price. I suspect they are nervous to try it too hard.

It's frankly a weird place for CEOs to be. I would just resign and fuck off to an island rather than be the test case for a million new shareholder lawsuits.

I would be more inclined to care about this if the victims weren't so overwhelming unsympathetic. If someone bankrupts themselves through their own ignorance after being told how they're wrong 100 times how can you really feel bad for them. Just on a gut instinct level nothing is more unappealing to me than the combination of ignorance and confidence and the folks over at /r/superstonk have both in spades.

You've just restated, elegantly and with a somewhat novel examples, the same case that has always existed for restricting freedom of speech. This is not fundamentally different to calls to ban criticism of transgender ideology on the grounds that it can cause transgendered people to harm themselves or calls to ban criticism of the church because it might damn people's immortal souls even if I have more sympathy for the cause of silencing hucksters like the GME cultists that actively disgusted me as they reigned.

The response is as it's always been. Who, exactly, gets to decide what is true? I've seen what passes for experts and I'm not impressed. I'll take my cults over my tyrants, thank you.

The reason that I make this post is somewhat of a follow up to [12], and to indicate that the reasons I believe social media is a pretty awful technology, and the reason I support greater censorship isn't solely a matter of politics. It's a matter of homeless people [13] [14] investing in a bankrupt movie theatre stock, because influencers who run Onlyfans accounts and monetize their Youtbe channels make money by being "leaders" of a "movement". Because people are convinced that this bankrupt movie theatre stock is their ticket [15] out of the middle class. Because [16] this is how to get back at the man - how to get revenge for 2008.

It has to do with so-called lottery system of success. Most of these people are not that smart IQ-wise, so a comfy white collar job is out of the question. Speculation and other hustles such as crypto, youtube, or meme stocks is the only ticket to getting rich. Unfortunately for them and not surprisingly, the expected value is negative, so most lose. Crypto crashed 70% this year..AMC crashed..NFTs crashed..see a pattern. The boring old college + white collar job + index funds +home ownership route has a much higher expected value and much smoother returns, but you need to be smart to succeed at this...you need the credentials and skills to land a good job and then a good income to buy a home, which these crypto and AMC people often lack.

Pre-pandemic, the crypto market cap was 300 billion. Today it is over 900 billion. Housing did not go up 3x in the last few years, nor did the NASDAQ or stock indices generally. Index funds did not achieve this level of performance.

Over these last few years, crypto is not just a positive value proposition but considerably superior to traditional investments. The expected value is greater if you don't buy stuff like CuteFeet.finance or Goblintown NFTs as a long term investment. If you simply bought boring, well-established coins like BTC and ETH, you'd have gains considerably greater than index funds. Only if you buy at the top are you looking at losses.

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=CRYPTOCAP%3ATOTAL

about $130 billion of that is stable coins or new additions. Also, one must take into account the huge decline from 2018-2020, which is why BTC is unchanged since late 2017, and why BTC lags index funds (SPY, DIA, QQQ) on many timeframes as far back as 2017. BTC is only at 19k, a 90% gains from oct 2020, which is nowhere close to 3x.

Housing did not go up 3x in the last few years

Housing is bought using leverage using a mortgage, usually 10-30 years. Its not like most homeowners are buying a home 100% cash down. The returns for housing is much more smooth, making it ideal for leverage.

Finally, if you look at price weighted volume, much of the buying was after and during price surged in early 2021, so most of these people are looking at a loss. Anyone who bought BTC after late 2020 and didn't sell is looking at a loss, which is probably a lot of people.

So the fair metric is comparing the previous all time high to the present day? Or comparing from October 2020, midway through the bull run? Or late 2017? We both know what happens when you track BTC's performance from pre-2016, it leaves absolutely everything else in the dust.

If I wanted to produce really spectacular returns, I'd do the same thing as you but in early 2017 when Ethereum was trading at $10-40 and BTC was just breaching $1000 again. Or I could put my start point at the end of 2018!

90% from October 2020 is nothing to sneeze at. Apple didn't do that. What hedge fund is up 90% since October 2020?

Nobody is saying that it is easy or risk-free to make massive profits but it is possible and has been done.

Different solution would be to just throw people in jail for market manipulation. Melvin Capital is clear victim here. It’s illegal for people to act as a group to corner a market. That’s market manipulation. Instead of a few rich people in a smoke filled room organizing their play it was done on social media. People involved in the manipulation should go to jail.

Don’t censor speech. Arrest people for their actions.

Telling someone to buy a stock because you will sell is market manipulation.

Telling someone to buy a stock because it would be funny is a different beast.

shorting carries unlimited loss. this is a risk that is on every prospectus. Melvin's mistake was poor risk management, they were victims of not protecting their possible downside..

Sure but that’s because the company discovered cancer or something big and it’s worth more.

Not because trade manipulated the market and organized collective action to force trading.

People are on trial over -60 oil because the broke securities law. That Asian dude who had a bunch of hidden swaps has criminal issues because he broke securities law.

It's unclear to me that Melvin is a victim - I am biased because I made lots of money on Gamestop in January 2021, but I did so having expected it to double in three years off a long term turnaround, having bought at 18.30 in December 2020.

On WSB, before GME, there wasn't really an attempt at a corner - it was "this is a cigar butt, and the squeeze would be funny but probably won't happen". The 10m subs who joined during GME were arguably attempting a corner - but they all lost money.

GME was being led/controlled by hedge funds the entire way up and down. I think people vastly overestimate reddit's influence. The average speculator on Reddit probably has just thousands of dollars, maybe $2-10k, but we're talking many billions of dollars of daily option volume and tens of billions of dollars of trading volume. Only hedge funds can move those kind of numbers. On that Friday I recall GME momentarily still went up despite the robinhood trading freeze , which proves hedge funds were doing the buying (it was not reddit folks with the robinhood accounts).

$3-4 a share was a cigar butt. $19 was after the manipulation started.

Melvin actually wasn’t that big of position for any reasonable valuation. But positions that were .5% of your fund become 50% of your fund when they go up 100%.

My valuations from memory might be off but my guess is you were already paying full or 50% above the cigar people numbers.

Also they exited at like $300 a share. At that point it was a manipulation of market structure and nothing fundamental .

  • But positions that were .5% of your fund become 50% of your fund when they go up 100%.

You're going to want to check your math on this. I think you mean 100x not 100%

They could have bought puts , that way the max losses are capped. their risk management was shit to allow this to happen. Naked shorts are risky even if the allocations are small, precisely for this reason. See 2008 Volkswagen squeeze.

Puts have their own issue of negative carry and needing to be right on timing.

If you have a diversified short book and can theoretically hold forever then you have no negative carry and Can assuming valuations stay reasonable your max loss isn’t that much. I mean worse case for a cigar butt stock was a 3X loss for Melvin on a very small part of book. Market manipulation (which is ILLEGAL) is why the position didn’t work. Melvin wasn’t a market timing firm where puts would make more sense.

And acting as a group to acquire over X amount of a firm is ILLEGAL which theirs no lack of evidence that the market manipulators were NOT encouraging acting as a group behavior . Elon Musks broke security law by acquiring more than X% of a stock. And if he split up the order with a buddy it would be ILLEGAL.

Melvins risks management was simple. Assume the SEC enforces security law.

This is all in Dodd Frank. You can’t even put a short term bid offer in the market anymore to bluff your intentions or you go to jail.

Market manipulation (which is ILLEGAL) is why the position didn’t work.

It's not unprecedented at all for illegal manipulation of affect stock prices. It happened during the 90s and early 2000s. Maybe a heuristic as simple as closing out a short position when it doubles in relative size would have saved them . But nope. They stayed in way too long and paid for it.

That adds negative carry and that heuristic which just get owned by the 2sigma and rentech types calculating their stops and running them

I agree that social media has enabled mind control on a scale we haven't seen before and it's incredibly dangerous, but I'm not sure it's a problem we can fix with censorship exactly. I don't know that censors can be nimble enough to stop the mind virus before it takes off. I'm pessimistic about it.

Within a community I ran, though, I'd definitely ban meme stock promotion.

I'm also not sure banning meme stocks is even a good idea. If someone lost their shirt on meme stocks, weren't they destined for financial ruin one way or another? Should we mandate that retail investors can only do index funds? Should we ban gambling and excessive charity donations, and should we ban liberal arts degrees?

Do we want to ban cults on general principle?

No, because gambling losses are not socialized. liberal arts degrees are more socialized. A case can be made that bad food should be banned because it imposes an externality in the form of higher healthcare costs

Defining bad food is surprisingly hard. Most people can agree that empty calories like soda shouldn't be consumed by anyone, but that's about where the agreement ends. Should we all eat like Vegans? You've got to admit, they tend to be skinny. Or are they emaciated? What about keto... do we abolish bread?

Do we ban dessert because some people will eat cake every day if we let them?

maybe disallow people who habitually engage in poor eating habits from using public healthcare services.. deny public healthcare to alcoholics and smokers is a starting point.

And you would enforce this... how? Maybe we'd need to log every food/drug purchase with the government? Social credits? I'll pass on that thanks.

Maybe we'd need to log every food/drug purchase with the government

for smokers and alcoholics, you can probably tell from their illnesses and physical condition. Same for obesity, except moreso. The insurance company already has your drug purchases, and they're already heavily regulated by the government.

I'd rather deny driving privileges to alcoholics if we're playing this game.

I'm also not sure banning meme stocks is even a good idea. If someone lost their shirt on meme stocks, weren't they destined for financial ruin one way or another? Should we mandate that retail investors can only do index funds? Should we ban gambling and excessive charity donations, and should we ban liberal arts degrees?

I don't think you even have to ban "meme stocks", I think that a targeted shutdown of a few dozen at most promoters who are milking the remainder of the community would be effective enough.

Part of the reason I am so upset about this is that I'm sure all of the money-losing sob stories will cause the SEC to restrict the freedoms of responsible retail investors later on, and I view the prioritization of speech rights of influencers over my long-term rights to investment as the inevitable trade off, and I'm salty.

Well, I think your right to invest in an index fund or whatever doesn't trump my right to shitpost about anime on the Internet. If anything, I value financial speculation way, way less than that.

Well there are many on the dissident right and weirdo left who believe that the world both before social media and orthogonal to it is the real mind virus. So they have a complicated relationship with acknowledging this kind of problem.

I'd rather protect people by preventing them from investing than preventing people by silencing them. dath ilan (yudkowsky's fictional alternate earth) has a licensing scheme where you need to pass a test before you can invest.

Thinking you can protect the investor from themselves through censorship is on the face of it ridiculous. Especially if you're also claiming no significant side effects from people holding this power.

Are investment communities cultish? Yes. Always have been, always will be. You won't fix this because so long as you allow people to buy and sell freely there will be Warren Buffets who make bank on speculation, the litanies of idiots who think they are Warren Buffet and get fleeced and the concert of charlatans that will sell you how to to become him.

Trying to stop suckers from being parted with their money is like trying to fill a bottomless cup. The universe will always design a better idiot, you cannot win. All that you can do is make the world worse for everyone with pointless regulation.

On another note, I don't care how competent you think you are to evaluate other people's motivations. That doesn't override our natural rights.

And finally, as it too often happens with well reasoned positions about what the market will or even has the possibility to do in the future, maybe you're completely fucking wrong.

Well, there's one thing you can do, and that is to kick the cultists out of your group when they start trying to sell you something.

Assuming you could actually make the distinction between organic collective enthusiasm and cult behavior in any meaningful way.

I can't think of a single time where real money was involved that this has been done successfully. Which one are you thinking of?

NFT folks got pretty much run out of town on a rail by every community I'm a member of.

What is legitimately wrong with NFTs?

In traditional art, you get a painter to make a painting, there's an element of scarcity and expense involved. With NFTs, somebody spends some Ethereum to mint a bunch of them, then they're done. There's an element of scarcity and expense involved.

Then people buy, sell and revalue them as they see fit. Now I don't want to buy a Bored Ape. But I also wouldn't pay a vaguely similar amount for this: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Nature-36/555517/8571133/view

I could surely find an example of some extraordinarily ugly piece of modern art purchased for some vast sum - how is that any more desirable than an NFT? Why is it more desirable to own a physical picture than a digital picture? If it's just the tax loophole for donating to art museums, how is that a valid justification for the fine art market over NFTs as opposed to some sneaky loophole manipulation?

The first problem is that the art is uniformly meritless and awful. The second is that the NFT has nothing to do with ownership or viewing, and is just a way to trick people into doing the much more useful activity of donating to the author's patreon (or even bitcoin wallet if you want). And third, the way the internet works makes just publishing art for free much better for the consumer, and there's art much better than almost any NFT project available on twitter, for free!

Have you checked all the art before saying its uniformly awful?

I rather liked this one: https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x2953399124f0cbb46d2cbacd8a89cf0599974963/48388610335180253795576366386312396261162674450341463428664179782889647374436

It captures the mocking grin of our effeminate, malign overlords. There's political commentary. There's a pun in the title. The creator gets 10% of each transaction. We consumers can view the image whenever we want. What's not to like?

No it doesn't, it's the awful bored ape style copied into jeffrey epstein. There's no characterization, no angles or lighting, no detail, etc. It's just a very bad pun.

Modern art fans somehow never need to barge in and ask this question. I can link The Line Goes Up for you, but I assume you've already seen it. My personal gripe with NFTs, besides the tiresome advocacy, the wasteful Blockchain, and the predatory crypto-anarcho-capitalism is the attitude that everything needs to be a digital asset, that we should commodify every damn thing.

I'm not going to watch a 2 hour movie. What about NFTs means that everything should be 'commodified'? The other half of the anti-NFT argument seems to be that they're rubbish at commodifying things, that you can just right-click save and this is a stunning blow to the whole concept. It can't be both ways.

NFTs are just a way for rich people to show that they're rich and have clout, like buying art or ridiculously expensive fashion. It's a bit obnoxious but not an actual, realized way of manipulating the tax system as with existing art.

I'm not going to watch a 2 hour movie

Video is a poor medium, someone made a transcript.

NFTs are just a way for rich people to show that they're rich and have clout

They are that thing, but they're also a way to fleece people with pump and dump schemes.

rubbish at commodifying things

NFT jpegs are rubbish at commodifying things, but you could actually tie the ownership to something interesting. It would be massively annoying if that was done. for example check out what Pearson wants to do.

The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life

I think part of the issue is that digital things are inherently anti-scarce. Information wants to be free, etc. We should support digital artists as much as traditional physical artists, but artificial scarcity just doesn't seem like the way to do it. Either it's available (with some paywall, if necessary) to all forever, or it's going to be yoinked out of the artist's hands whether they like it or not. We can barely put a lid on porn piracy, and every NFT that has ever been flaunted has been vulnerable to "right-click > Save as."

I'm sick of NFTs but if you think "ha ha right-click save-as" is a useful critique you have not engaged with the argument.

I can go into google images and 'save as' the Mona Lisa - yet this isn't a devastating blow to fine art. The Louvre isn't going to shut down because of me. Nobody can stop you right clicking anything, NFT or not. The whole point is that it's clear who owns the product, not that it's somehow kept obscured from mortal eyes so only the owner can see it.

For some reason people like first editions of important books and will pay more for them. Nobody considers this a grave injustice, nobody clowns on these people by saying "I bought the same book for cheaper". People just popularized this bizarre notion of 'right click save as = you're an idiot' when there's no logical connection to how this is good or bad. For several months the right-click NFT meme was plaguing twitter and the internet and nobody seemed to justify how this is a coherent concept.

At the same time, I think there's still a qualitative difference. You're comparing physical things to digital: sure, I can download an image of the Mona Lisa, but there's no confusion as to who owns what. With books (and especially comic books!), there's also a meaningful difference with special editions or rare versions. NFT art doesn't entirely have this; at best, people are really buying the receipt/deed of ownership, which could count for something, but the technology remains speculative even now, and it's hard to see what difference owning an NFT actually makes beyond being useful for entry into clubs and the like.

I think NFTs could potentially make a comeback, but they need to have a serious use case, and shed the baggage on top of that.

I can go into google images and 'save as' the Mona Lisa - yet this isn't a devastating blow to fine art

It was, actually? A hundred thousand hours are spent looking at cute anime girl faces for every hour spent staring at something in the Louvre. Traditional physical art is much less important than it was pre-industrial revolution.

NFTs continue to be a great technology used wrong by most projects where neither the average supporter nor detractor is very informed on their actual use. I'm an NFT fan if that includes ENS and not if it is limited to poorly generated image packs.

And yet, they are still around. So I remain convinced your method doesn't work.

Trash still exists somewhere but I prefer keeping it off my lawn.

OP's entire point is about the elimination of this behavior because he thinks it's antisocial. Which I object to in my post because it's tyrannical and pointless as the behavior can not be eliminated within a market.

If you just want to not participate that's very much fine by me, but it is also off topic no?

Not only elect not participate but also actively discourage the discharge from polluting my life.

I have a buddy who was/is(?) still into the GME and AMC stuff. He tried to convince me that the mother of all short squeezes you mentioned would happen in about June of last year. I just told him to not invest what he couldn’t lose, etc. but it was troubling to see him constantly latching on to that and other cope excuses for why his meme stocks were not working out.

He isn’t well off and has a lot of issues in his life, most of them genuinely not his fault. It’s easy to scoff at what he’s doing, but I think the degenerate betting you see in the crypto/meme stock space is more rational than I first gave it credit for. If you’re a young man with little assets, no education, no girl, and no status, what do you have to lose if you make a terrible options play and go bankrupt, really? And what do you gain? Possibly a life free of working a shit job until your body gives out.

You might run the numbers and find that the odds are so low that it is not worth the risk. I’d tend to agree, but If you’re the type to run those numbers I’d bet you’re more likely to have something resembling a degree, stable job, and financial assets.

There are issues with those online communities you described but at their core they’re a place for young men who aren’t doing as well as they’d like to shoot the shit and find some camaraderie. We used to have wars, robust priesthoods, and high risk high reward jobs like whaling (we still have some jobs like this, not as many though) to deal with excess men. What pressure valve is there for excess men today?

I don’t think we should bring those things back, because most of those things are terrible. But men are disposable and for many the risk/reward of hustling crypto/NFTs/stocks does seem to make sense.

You're right about vulnerable young men. I remember reading that the average Robinhood user balance is $200.

Update: it's $240.

The issue is that meme stocks are worse than lottery tickets - when people win (ie, AMC runs from $5 to $72 last June) people refuse to even take their winnings! It's a lottery with worse chance to pay off, and the cultish behavior causes people to lose even when they win, so whilst I see gambling as rational when evaluated as LAMBOS OR RAMEN, it seems to reduce to "ramen".

I'm convinced that the HODL meme is a sociopathic way for current bagholders to get others to raise the price of their investment to the ideal cash out point. Many of the people who bought at the bottom made out with lifechanging money.

A lot of them though, yeah. They're just idiots. I begged my friend to sell his Gamestop stocks at his buy-in price when the stock rallied back up to it, but he held on for the MOASS and is now in the red. I don't know what can be done to protect those types, short of just not allowing them to spend their money on stupid things, which opens up a new host of (worse) issues. As the adage goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted."

EDIT: I may be undervaluing the clout you get in these communities for HODLing and hanging on well past when you should have sold. For some people, the money may not even matter and it’s more about the clout and fun of fucking around with like minded men with a normally serious topic like investing. Again, not my thing, but for some that may be worth it.

I may be undervaluing the clout you get in these communities for HODLing and hanging on well past when you should have sold.

Someone should suggest the concept of going on the internet and telling lies.

People are going to lose all their money. People will develop crippling drug addictions. People will kill themselves. People will spend the rest of their lives convinced that the entire world conspired against them to prevent them from becoming millionaires, bitter and poor. Some of them will go postal and harm innocent theatre employees or random bankers, eventually.

...

This Friday, there are approximately [17] 36,000 call options on AMC that will expire worthless. Given the option prices on AMC, it is safe to assume that these were all purchased for around $100 each. Every week, "The Man" makes $360,000 by selling options to retail traders who are convinced that The MOASS is coming.

It's actually $3.6 million, you missed a 0. As someone on the other side who makes money off retail traders I think this cleansing by fire is necessary for the public to realise that when they do these type of trades they are playing a game against people who are smarter than them, have better data than them, have better market understanding than them, have better execution than them etc. and that they will lose in the long run, no different to how it works in a casino.

These weekly losses should be publicly broadcast on TV and made fun of routinely by news anchors etc. until the general public has fully instilled the message that in the long run "you can not beat THE MAN".

These weekly losses should be publicly broadcast on TV and made fun of routinely by news anchors etc. until the general public has fully instilled the message that in the long run "you can not beat THE MAN".

I would strongly recommend a less face-stampy tone, at least.

I have vague accelerationist ambitions and thus encourage it.

There's no point to being coy about it. If you don't like THE MAN and want to resist him, it's very useful to know how he can most easily stamp on your face. This is easiest to learn by watching some poor fool get stamped in your place.

Of course THE MAN can anticipate this logic and expend unreasonable effort, to give the impression of easily stamping on some problematic hard face and save himself trouble in the future. And that's sort of what the Count is proposing with his ideas for mass media coverage. But that's hard to pull off convincingly against a distributed target.

It's actually $3.6 million, you missed a 0. As someone on the other side who makes money off retail traders I think this cleansing by fire is necessary for the public to realise that when they do these type of trades they are playing a game against people who are smarter than them,

I don't think that's the lesson "the public" will learn. It will be another cultural grievance, another reason to hate contiguous and identifiable segments of the overall population.

These weekly losses should be publicly broadcast on TV and made fun of routinely by news anchors etc. until the general public has fully instilled the message that in the long run "you can not beat THE MAN".

...I'm not sure this is a lesson that can actually be comprehended. It runs directly counter to our entire worldview as Americans. Even conceding that in this case it very well may be the lesson that needs to be learned, my mind immediately starts searching for escalation strategies.

Yeah, I don't know how anyone can advocate for broadcasting "society is unfair, get over it" and expect the American people to accept it in this modern climate. Sure, it might be honest and accurate, but it's not likely to turn down the temperature of the culture war. As the OP mentioned, people still do want some payback for 2008, and 2020-onwards has been shaping up to be a repeat of 2008.

I think there is an easy line to see between "stop entering unfair contests of your own volition" and "society is unfair" but maybe that is me.

The $3.6M number could be broadcast the same way that cigarette deaths are.

It's the truth. It's always been the truth. It will always be the truth.

That's enough for me. Ultimately there are no good lies. I'd rather people kill each other over reality than make peace over falsehood.

Because reality always comes back for it's due.

I don't think that you can really call GME/AMC rubes getting fleeced a symptom of an unfair society.

I was thinking more of OWS and the revival of unironic socialism/communism in the 2010's. What do you think would happen if The Man decided to out and say, "yes, we admit it, we are on top, we will continue to be on top, you'll own nothing, and you're gonna have to enjoy it"?

I guess your definition of The Man decides if you believe they already have or not.

The NFT hype bubble has seemed like its followed a similar trajectory, just that it's the crypto VCs and devs doing the fleecing rather than the hedge funds. It seems like both prey on a similar kind of conspiratorial young male too (the GME/IMX crossover into the NFT space was pretty much inevitable in this light).

My wife and I watched that LulaRoe MLM documentary a little while back, and, as a part of it was observing that MLMs were overwhelmingly joined by lower-to-middle class women looking for a ticket out of drudgery, she noted that the flip side of that coin was probably all the dodgy investments men go in for. I have to agree, and it's not hard to see parallels there either, especially with the kind of forced, paranoid positivity of the HODLers.

I can't say I'm all that sympathetic. Everyone is a cynical investor making trades on the way up, hyping it up to service their portfolio/downline. Then when it collapses and they're in the red, suddenly everyone is just someone who had a dream whose pure innocence was abused by the real cynical actors somewhere else.

I mean NFTs are more in the 'new speculative good that might experience some adoption but probably not but you never know' category compared to the short squeeze cargo cult where it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market works. Equivalently dumb things have bubbled as NFTs.

One thing the NFT folks and the GME/AMC folks have in common is the sheer amount of annoying shilling they did in other communities.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMC/options?p=AMC

Link 17, as it broke.

So this forum actually allows linking directly use [text](link) to create a link

I wish there was a tutorial on how to use the features of this site somewhere ;/

Thank you - I thought my only options were the formatting options below the text box.

It's just markdown. That syntax isn't some arbitrary thing borrowed from reddit. It's a fairly ubiquitous standard for expressing HTML as readable text.

standard

Don't give it too much credit. It doesn't seem to be particularly standardized—though at least one effort has been made in that direction.

It has many features that markdown doesn't: like this

I almost assume that "I wish there was a tutorial on how to use the features of this site somewhere ;/" is sarcasm, because there's a link below every post box labelled "formatting help" which provides a description of the rules.

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