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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Even with civilisation or society, there’s always been a subset of people looking to exploit whatever facet of existence they can, whether it be religion, politics, crimes of opportunity, weaknesses in social systems, or even the justice systems that are supposedly meant to deal with those flaws.

    And to add even more complexity, other people who aren’t pieces of shit looking to exploit others form emotional attachments to those who are and are fooled by their lies and will defend them. Others don’t have attachments but see parallels to themselves and worry that attempts to deal with the problematic ones will result in the same treatment being applied to them (and aren’t necessarily wrong because even justice trying to act in good faith can get it wrong).

    It’s all a complex web of power struggles and religion is just one set of stands.









  • Yeah, this should probably be approached from the angle of “someone might do this, so we should do research to be prepared”.

    Research ways to improve containment to reduce the chance of an accidental containment breach.

    And research ways to quickly determine the weaknesses of such synthetic lifeforms if a breach happens anyways. Also to be prepared in case someone deliberately weaponizes it.

    By the way, this kind of thing is why IMO if we ever do find extra terrestrial life, attempting to make any kind of physical contact or even land on the planet might end up dooming both our own species (and maybe all current complex life on Earth) as well as any complex life on that other planet. They could have basic forms of life that are entirely different from our own and completely invisible to our immune systems.

    Though it would probably also have cool results in a few hundred million years, after microbial life has evolved defenses and perhaps some hybridizations.



  • I believe it was just one of them, a free trading platform (Robin Hood?) that made its money by selling its trade stream before it could be executed (which means they can make free money by exploiting inefficient trades, at the expense of clients of the platform). It was pressured by the company that buys that trade data to halt buys.

    Since a large portion of the people buying shares were on that platform, the whole thing lost momentum (when it was on the way to paying off). Though, if it had been allowed to continue, it might have broken the entire economy because the short squeeze didn’t have a maximum on the amount those betting against GME could lose and such scenarios end up in a vicious cycle where price just keeps going up because there’s an obligation to buy shares (to cover in the case of calls or back in the case of short selling).

    Previous successful short squeezes (eg: Porsche) only ended when the entity doing the squeeze negotiated a way out for the shorters. But in GME’s case, it was a crowd sourced squeeze where everyone wanted their lambos as a result and weren’t going to negotiate but each choose at what price they were willing to be bought out.

    What it should have done was cause some investigations about how funds operate and lead to some big changes in how funds and trading platforms handle short selling (in this case, they had oversold the number of outstanding shares, meaning there weren’t enough shares to ever cover if the short was squeezed, and calls that market makers just kept selling multiplied that).

    Instead there were a few senate hearings and then it fizzled out. I don’t recall any actual changes resulting from it. Many tried to blame the public doing the squeeze because they weren’t rich enough to exploit the system or something.