Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@Goku Black  
You know exactly what I meant.
 
We buy the same crappy products from one big company, and none of us are gonna be a rich business owner.

@Goku Black
 
Well duh. Guns and drugs are the same.
 
@Background Pony #581E
 
No.
 

 
Also, Kiwifarms is based because it stood up to my government and told it to get fucked. It’s also a good source of info on lolcows.

@Background Pony #5A29  
And this isn’t gonna be the death of hedge funds or short selling. They’re like professional poker players. Sometimes the rando from Sheboygan does knock out the guy with a dozen bracelets, but the guy with the bracelets can absorb that loss because he is very good at what he does, and because he has a much bigger bankroll than Sheboygan. Sure, you can celebrate this win for the little guy, but if Sheboygan gets cocky he’ll come right back to the table and end up losing his shirt to the same pros he thought he had licked.
 
And that’s exactly what the pros are counting on.

So what exactly is the context of Reddit messing around with Gamestop’s stocks?
 
Is this some sort of money scheme, a statement on the state of the stock market, or just one giant “Reddit Moment”?

@Background Pony #1F81  
all of the above, they are making money, fucking with the rich guys on wall street and laughing their asses off

@Background Pony #1F81
 
2LDR:
 

 
Short story long, GameStop’s stock was tanking and it looked like they were going to pull a BlockBuster. Their stock bottomed out at about $4 a share and a bunch of investors “sold” stock they haven’t bought yet at that price, waiting for the price to drop lower (like, maybe as far as twenty five cents a share if it went like BlockBuster did).
 
Yes, you can sell stock you haven’t bought yet.
 
Then three of the top executives who created Chewy - the online pet food store - bought heavily into GameStop and joined its board, making it look likely that they were going to turn the Brick And Mortar company into an online seller.
 
In response to the apparent ‘second life’ that GameStop was showing, the investors sold … not making this up … possibly as much as 300% of the available stock “short” - in one day the short sellers ‘sold’ 71 million shares of GameStop, which only has 63 million shares of stock in total, and only about 30 million or so of that stock can legally be traded due to it being held by executives who are locked in or similar circumstances.
 
Effectively, even though GameStop was doing better, had a 300+% increase in e-sales and was looking better, the investors who were selling the company short sold it short HARDER expecting the stock to tank so they could ‘buy’ the shares they had already ‘sold’ at a lower price.
 
But the reddit group did a ‘short squeeze’ - they bought the stocks that the ‘short sellers’ needed to buy and drove the price of the stock through the roof.
 
Now all the companies that ‘sold short’ have to buy shares from the folks who are holding them. And instead of buying them at twenty five cents a share, or even $4 a share where most of them were ‘sold’, they have to pay $30 a share or more.
 
So now a bunch of investment firms on WallStreet are crying fowl, because their attempt to tank GameStop has been unprofitable for them.
 
They gambled and they lost. So of course they’re going to agitate for a bailout now because it’s somehow ‘unfair’ that GameStop didn’t crash.

@Background Pony #1F81  
Gamestop hasn’t been doing to great for awhile (though they had some good news late 2020). As a result a lot of short sales were made by big investors. This means they borrowed the stock and sold it and will need to buy it back later at a hopefully lower price. Reddit flexxed on them by buying Gamestop and driving the price up. The higher the price goes the higher those short sellers have to pay to close their position. It’s Reddit fucking with big money hedgefunds.
 
watching
 
@Ciaran  
helps because that is a good movie and it will make you smile

@Background Pony #5A29  
It’s a movie that keeps on giving, truly in the Christmas spirit.

@Ereiam  
Biowaste is not a lifeform, you’re missing a key part of my definition. Or to be even more specific, a fetus is a lifeform with unique, human DNA.
 
Someone without ‘autonomous neural activity’ is still human. They still have rights. If they don’t, you should have no problem with destroying comatose patients even if they may survive come out of that state, since from that moment they are not human and not a person. Similarly, plenty of humans have been born with severe defects limiting their mental capacity to the point they cannot function without being cared for.
 
Brain function is not an argument for a life’s value nor one for justifying murder.
 
@Violet Rose in The Rain  
I don’t know why I was replied to with that quote, I don’t care about compromise. But you know what? In this case I will.
 
But sure, I’d be willing to do that. If it takes increasing taxes to apparently justify not killing babies, then sure. What about you? Would you be willing to stop abortions if all these evil Christians agreed to increase taxes?
 
@Latecomer  
There are problems inherent to states. One of those problems is that they often have a monopoly on violence, that isn’t something you can solve unless citizens can also defend themselves. Let’s be honest, Britain is not getting better and its controls to stop tyranny are very weak. Citizens there will be able to defend themselves one way or another, using plastic arms if need be.
 
The state has the security forces, including the police, the army, and even private corporations like the UK’s case G4S. You have literally nothing, you’re putting all your trust and power in the British state. Could not be me. The citizens in the UK have been disarmed (remember all the ‘gun’ problems back then?) and the police are more armed than ever, their ability to spy is greater than ever. You have bills going through that allow the police to commit crime and hire underage prostitutes.  
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-parliament-law-undercover-agents-commit-crime
 
The state has been getting more and more power, putting the squeeze on more and more people, and the British citizen can’t even legally carry pepper spray.
 
And life begins at conception clearly.

@Ciaran
 
It’s great, and although people are making money from putting the screws to the hedgefunds (good for them, IMHO), a lot of people are also doing it out of spite. I honestly can’t blame them, because it’s infuriating seeing rich investors making money hand-over-fist while the rest of us suffer.

I want to ask again. Why is the US government paying its people only $1400 instead of the full $2000 it promised?

I wonder if I can collect the money I never got.

@HorsesandMuchMOAR  
Because all of it - the $600 plus whatever else gets added - is a ‘prepayment’ of the 2020 tax incentive that people don’t really ‘earn’ until they file their taxes this spring.
 
Because of how the Fed accounts for it, by the time it is ‘technically paid’ it is one lump sum, ‘paid’ as a part of people’s tax returns.
 
The fun part comes if people get the ‘tax incentive’ but don’t file 2020 taxes. Then things get … ‘interesting’.

@HorsesandMuchMOAR  
I already got $600…on which I ordered an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (plus motherboard and RAM) to replace my aging Intel Core i7-3770.
 
I should be able to make some of that back, though…

And the hedge fund story gets another page, as the Robinhood app used for trading stocks are now forcibly selling Gamestop etc stocks from users.
 
And Elizabeth Warren will be CNBC talking about this fiasco.

@Dustcan  
In that particular case it could be a margin call, which would be perfectly legal. But if not, then holy cow is that lawsuit time.

@Dustcan  
Democrats and Republicans want to hang Robinhood for this  
Here is a sneak peak into their board room currently

@Ciaran
 
Relatedly there’s already a class action lawsuit filed against Robinhood for closing the trading. This came after.

@Dustcan  
I think that lawsuit is a very good thing.

@Background Pony #0DE7  

Actually, I was replying to the other Background Pony and just happened to compiled replies, so that wasn’t targeted at you nor did I expect you to compromise.
 
I still wouldn’t ban abortions even if it was financially possible for every single baby was cared for (Besides the fact that it’s the mother’s choice, Black was right in that banning abortions would only make them resort to more dangerous options), but it’s nice to see you’re not one of those hypocrites who talk big about saving lives but then scream at poor people to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’.

@Background Pony #0DE7  
I’ll take our problems over America’s any day.

Oh man is it going south for the Wall street leeches. I mean you have both AOC and Trump Jr agreeing that what they’re doing to stop regular people from investing is unacceptable. I think we’re going to see a shakedown of Wall street.  
And Discord has shut down the wallstreetbets server, claiming it has nothing to do with the recent events but because they’ve been watching it for hate speech. Yeah right. It just now crossed the line enough for them to ban them?

@Violet Rose in The Rain  
Instead of just allowing abortions then, we should target the reasons why some are having dangerous abortions. We should not resort to having the state provide murder.