• 12 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2025

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  • I’m not making any mistake.

    Intelligent people can choose to be willfully ignorant, no matter their political affiliation. For example I personally know a person who is extremely brilliant yet parrot Jordan Peterson. This person is amongst the world’s most capable in his highly competitive and lucrative field — so while I find this person’s politics deeply abhorrent I cannot find him stupid.

    The problem with over-attributing stupidity to things we simply don’t like is that it masks the other factors which produce the outcomes we as a society are trying to avoid, such as fascism.


  • I’ll be the Debbie downer and respond to your silly joke with a serious reply.

    Quite often political affiliation is related to cultural or geographical factors and not intelligence. I’ve lived in a variety of places both leaning conservative and liberal, including a couple US states. I’ve both met intelligent and idiotic people everywhere I’ve been.

    I’ve also seen people be willfully ignorant on both sides of the political spectrum. This isn’t to say “enlightened centrism, all sides equal” because fascism is quite uniquely bad. But the tendencies to get into these bubbles are a human behaviour and not geographic.

    Apologies for the pedantic response to what was clearly a harmless joke.





  • My issue is with the expressed idea of Trump realizing his mistake and rolling back.

    It’s not a mistake. And they don’t want to go back. This is intentional and directed behaviour, we think it’s crazy or weird just because it’s so stupid.

    I do realize I’m being an annoying pedant about it. But because I feel it’s so important to underscore this as it informs what our response needs to be.

    The system of bonds and the USDs unique place in the world economy that you (accurately) described needs to be replaced. We shouldn’t try to save it or implement workarounds except as a temporary measure to disentangle ourselves in an orderly fashion.











  • I mean especially in hindsight it absolutely was dumb, I can’t argue against that. And it was certainly a mistake to bet so much without having cover.

    At the time I agreed with this person that their analysis of RIM as a dead company walking was correct. In fact I was likely partly responsible for their outlook (though not their reckless position).

    As you say —the national interests and hope in RIM’s success kept the price at irrational levels. Much like I argued here that Tesla is staggeringly overvalued today… which is why I made the comparison in the context of someone wanting to short Tesla today. It doesn’t matter if you’re right, for shorts it also matters when you’re right.


  • TL;DR: shorting can be an extremely dangerous proposition, tread carefully and warily.

    An anecdote about shorting stocks: A close friend of mine heavily shorted RIM in early 2009 when the writing was on the wall about the success of Android and iPhone.

    However the stock proceeded to double in the months following, eventually squeezing my friend substantially and generating a very significant loss.

    So this person was right about the future value of RIM as a company, and was even right about the reasons — but still lost out big time.

    Even in case where the stock prices don’t squeeze you out, the carrying costs can be significant and easily eat all of the profits if you get the timing wrong. Most people should never short a stock.