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Ansem

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I know. They should wait.

Worth keeping in mind that I’m wholly expecting he won’t be convicted. I’d rather spell out what the Republicans are willing to accept in it’s entirety.

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You could do it now, fail, and have even more incriminating evidence come out after and pretty much have it be for nothing.

You could do it later, get the incriminating evidence, and if it fails it will at least make the Republicans look even worse because they'd be knowingly voting to let all of it slide.

We're not really spearheading it, so our anger doesn't really matter. And that's why they'll probably just go ahead with it, fail, and we'll be left getting more angry.

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Yeah, but just how much "proof" will it take for the Republicans to vote to impeach?  Unless they're being pressured somewhere, Jesus could come down and tell them to impeach, and they'd refuse to do it.

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On 1/22/2021 at 3:39 AM, whase said:

Did Bush ever undermine democracy like Trump did?

I am bit late with this, but I am surprised no one here commented on all of the drama surrounding the Florida recounts in the 2000 election. Of particular note was the Brooks Brothers Riot, where paid "protestors" funded by the Bush campaign shutdown a court mandated recount with violent demonstration in one of the Florida counties, although the final Supreme Court decision would end up rendering the act rather moot. Bush's brother Jed being the Governor of Florida, and the Florida Secretary of State being a member of the Bush presidential campaign also left open a lot of questions of how deliberate the numerous failings in the Florida voter system were in trying to undermine democracy. Although the part of this with the worst long term impact were what were viewed as partisan Court decisions, as they would encouraged the number of election lawsuit post 2000 to double from the previous years. Now after this questionable election Bush would do the whole reaching across the aisle to fix the divide song and dance, and objections to the election result by Members of the House were not endorsed by any Senator, leading to a much more peaceful transition of power, with laws introduced to address some issues with this election (like HAVA), and massive changes to Florida's voting system to be less of an embarrassment to the nation. Its an interesting comparison to look at between the two presidents, and with how Democrats responded to a similar situation without hysterical violence against our democracy.

It all started with all of the major News networks having to retract declarations of who "won" Florida multiple times, ending with most saying it was too close to call in the end, with the swing of that single state's electoral votes being the deciding factor in the entire election. It was close enough to trigger a state mandated machine recount, which had Bush leading by ~300 votes (although the last of the overseas absentee ballots would push it to ~900, when they were added into the count), and the two campaigns started lawsuits to have manual recounts on the Democrat side, and to stop the recounts on the Republican side. Numerous major issues with the Florida voting system became readily apparent as it became the focus of the nation, first there were a noticeable number of votes not counted by the machine due to the punch ballot not being fully punctured (~4% of all votes in the state), misleading instructions on sample ballots in 4 counties claiming you could vote for one candidate on each page led to numerous presidential votes being rejected due to the list of presidential third party candidates requiring two pages on the actual ballot (up to 20% of presidential votes in some precincts), issues with voter suppression (including a list of "felons" of which over 15% of those people on said list were denied their vote in error), the infamous butterfly ballots of Palm county where numerous voters mistakenly voted for third party candidate Buchanan instead of Gore due to its misleading design (especially when viewed at a slight angle...). The court decisions on whether or not the manual recounts would occur would flip-flop up through the ranks of the courts, although the decision by the Florida Supreme court to uphold the recounts and US Supreme Court decision to end them were both seen as extremely partisan decisions. The US Supreme Court even made a statement about how that case should not be precedential, and was particular to the situation, which has reinforced how questionable the decision was.

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I know the main reason it's been brought up was in reference to the fact that the win should be by a margin greater than around 537 votes or whatever the margin was in Florida. Because Republicans have actively been trying to undermine democracy for 50 years. This is really par for the course imo.

Good summary of 2000. I was about to turn 8 when all that was happening, so I just remember sitting in bed with my family watching the 2000 election results, and the news showing Bush/Gore anytime we visited somewhere else.

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What's going on right now with GameStop stocks and WSB is incredible. It's unfortunate that it's being halted by the people on top, but I think this display of power just to say fuck you to the people on wall street by the common person is amazing. I do expect a bill to be passed in the coming weeks to prevent retail investors from doing this ever again, because that's how our legal system works, but it will have been fun while it lasted.

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4 hours ago, indigoasis said:

That whole GameStop thing kinda confuses me. I heard it was more or less because of redditors that the stock went up as much as it did. 

Stocks are weird.

It is. Basically, your typical Wall Street investor was banking on Gamestop's stock to keep dropping so there's been a lot of short selling on it and then some people on Reddit caught wind of it and decided to coordinate the boom currently seen in order to fuck those investors as well as get a profit for themselves.

Now said investors are crying foul about the market being manipulated while everyone else is just sitting back in delight and laughing at them given Wall Street's history and the tax-payer funded bail-outs.

Spoiler

 

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Short selling in simple terms would be something like this...

1. You borrow 10 shares of Gamestop

2. You sell the 10 borrowed shares for $1,000 and wait for the stock value to drop

3. You buy 10 shares for $800

4. You return the 10 shares you borrowed but since you bought them for $800 after having sold them for $1,000, you've made a $200 profit.

Any short seller in this case is going to be pretty pissed because the exact opposite of what they speculated has happened and they're legality obligated to return the stock they borrowed which effectively amounts to them having to pay a large sum of money cause of some Reddit trolls when they had hoped to make easy money off of Gamestop's decline.

Edited by Dr. Tarrasque
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Just wanted to point out this kind of microcosm that's going to be a trend for a while I suspect, such as the griping of the GOP and fellow travellers against actions they would have been all to willing to take and which laws they have dictated allow, (I hope) the clearing out of bad actors that made things worse and at least a show of putting things in the right direction.

GME looks to be disappointing from a free market perspective, but then again the actions that the GME surge were working against were bad to begin with (and in and of themselves subverting a free market in spirit), so I'd wish attention were being placed on shorting and this kind of market gambling and influencing to begin with.

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5 hours ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

It is. Basically, your typical Wall Street investor was banking on Gamestop's stock to keep dropping so there's been a lot of short selling on it and then some people on Reddit caught wind of it and decided to coordinate the boom currently seen in order to fuck those investors as well as get a profit for themselves.

Now said investors are crying foul about the market being manipulated while everyone else is just sitting back in delight and laughing at them given Wall Street's history and the tax-payer funded bail-outs.

  Hide contents

 

EswVUD0VkAEzyiy.png

2gl5qza4yrd61.png

5tcc1yym4xd61.png

 

Short selling in simple terms would be something like this...

1. You borrow 10 shares of Gamestop

2. You sell the 10 borrowed shares for $1,000 and wait for the stock value to drop

3. You buy 10 shares for $800

4. You return the 10 shares you borrowed but since you bought them for $800 after having sold them for $1,000, you've made a $200 profit.

Any short seller in this case is going to be pretty pissed because the exact opposite of what they speculated has happened and they're legality obligated to return the stock they borrowed which effectively amounts to them having to pay a large sum of money cause of some Reddit trolls when they had hoped to make easy money off of Gamestop's decline.

Shorting is basically gambling for sociopaths. This probably won't hit them as hard as it should, since a lot of them were likely buying stocks with Reddit during this to help pad the hit they're gonna have to take when they have to return their shares, but they're already losing billions and nobody should have sympathy for them. Short-selling is the same exact thing that caused a global recession a decade ago. They thought they could just do it again to destroy more businesses and industries in order to make a quick buck.

Even if GME doesn't lead to much, WSB knows what to look for now and will probably watch stocks like hawks for more opportunities to do this again, and that's what is freaking out the hedgefund managers the most. Normal people learning how to use the stock market is going to make it less of a surefire thing for the rich to gather more wealth, since at any moment an internet mob could just fuck them over.

Edited by Slumber
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So would the GME situation be a good thing? Common folk are profiting from it (as well as drawing in people unfamiliar to stocks and the situation, in turn letting them learn more about stocks and how it works if they do the research), and it's prevented short-selling from happening (at least for GME). I don't know how exactly it would affect Wall Street and the stock market in the long run, though.

Hurray for capitalism...?

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I should mention that the idea WSB is moving GME isn't actually true. A billion is a thousand millions, WSB has a few millionaires but all of them added together might not make an entire billion.

 

It's mostly just hedge funds with 10s of Billions fighting other hedge funds with 10s of Billions. The media likes to portray WSB as being behind it because it makes for a better story.

 

Regarding the politics of the GME thing. My view is that in capitalism you only matter as much as the money you have, so if the hedge funds which are short GME lose this bet then they should get punished, but if they manipulate the market enough and get out without getting forced into bankruptcy or whatever then they shouldn't be. They served themselves on a platter, though, GME rocketed up because other hedge funds went long, so it'll be interesting to see how they try to get out.

I have a feeling the big drop this morning with the combined efforts of disabling buys & a short ladder* is because they would have been forced to liquidate (locking in their billions of dollars of losses) if GME stayed above 400 for long.

* The stock dropped 50% with around 2 million shares of volume, which is an obvious joke to anyone with volume data.

Edited by DehNutCase
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5 hours ago, DehNutCase said:

* The stock dropped 50% with around 2 million shares of volume, which is an obvious joke to anyone with volume data.

Someone is getting fired. Or maybe not. If you have billions in assets, losing a million here or there is not going to make much of a dent, plus, you will eventually average out the losses anyways overtime.

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48 minutes ago, XRay said:

Someone is getting fired. Or maybe not. If you have billions in assets, losing a million here or there is not going to make much of a dent, plus, you will eventually average out the losses anyways overtime.

Oh their losses are in the billions at this point (and if they actually try to unwind the proper way where they're forced to liquidate and buy at any price it might even be in the 10s or 100s of Billions). They would've needed to get out around $4 if they wanted to get out for only millions. This might seem weird since $400 is only 100x $4, not 1000x, but the thing is once things get this high the more stock you by the more the price goes up. Trying to unwind stupid amounts of shorted shares (We're talking 10s of millions of shares sold short here) is expensive as hell unless you mange to short a company into bankruptcy, in which case you're off the hook for those shares.

Which is why they got into this position. And it's basically risk free because once you're this deep in the hole you'll bring down other people with you when you go under, hence why even the brokerages are helping shorts out. Because if a hedge fund goes insolvent and can't pay for shares then the clearing house is on the hook, and if the clearing house also goes insolvent then it's the brokerage on the hook.

 

Shorting companies like this has extremely good risk/reward since the upside is you get literally free money for the shares you sold short but never have to buy back (since the company went bankrupt), and the downside is what we see right now---you threaten to bring down other people with you so you won't even be punished financially, at least not to the true infinite risk extent shorting is supposed to be. ...Unless you mess up badly enough that you run out of money, in which case you'll get prosecuted since you don't have money anymore.

 

If Capitalism works the way it's supposed to, nobody in the hedge funds should be punished yet. (I mean in a serious way, not the wrist slap level million dollar fines way.) They managed to get other players on board before they went bankrupt. In my view, they should repeat this play (disable buys, short ladder so the stock dumps) tomorrow since they haven't unwound enough of their shorts yet.

Edited by DehNutCase
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1 hour ago, DehNutCase said:

Oh their losses are in the billions at this point (and if they actually try to unwind the proper way where they're forced to liquidate and buy at any price it might even be in the 10s or 100s of Billions). They would've needed to get out around $4 if they wanted to get out for only millions. This might seem weird since $400 is only 100x $4, not 1000x, but the thing is once things get this high the more stock you by the more the price goes up. Trying to unwind stupid amounts of shorted shares (We're talking 10s of millions of shares sold short here) is expensive as hell unless you mange to short a company into bankruptcy, in which case you're off the hook for those shares.

Which is why they got into this position. And it's basically risk free because once you're this deep in the hole you'll bring down other people with you when you go under, hence why even the brokerages are helping shorts out. Because if a hedge fund goes insolvent and can't pay for shares then the clearing house is on the hook, and if the clearing house also goes insolvent then it's the brokerage on the hook.

 

Shorting companies like this has extremely good risk/reward since the upside is you get literally free money for the shares you sold short but never have to buy back (since the company went bankrupt), and the downside is what we see right now---you threaten to bring down other people with you so you won't even be punished financially, at least not to the true infinite risk extent shorting is supposed to be. ...Unless you mess up badly enough that you run out of money, in which case you'll get prosecuted since you don't have money anymore.

 

If Capitalism works the way it's supposed to, nobody in the hedge funds should be punished yet. (I mean in a serious way, not the wrist slap level million dollar fines way.) They managed to get other players on board before they went bankrupt. In my view, they should repeat this play (disable buys, short ladder so the stock dumps) tomorrow since they haven't unwound enough of their shorts yet.

But could not the hedge fund(s) that bet against Melvin Capital, Citadel, and other bears just bail the bears out? I highly doubt WSB got that amount of financial power to drive GME up like that. WSB got the influence to start things for sure, but I am not sure they got money to just buy all those GME shares, especially now that GME cost hundreds of dollars.

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2 hours ago, XRay said:

But could not the hedge fund(s) that bet against Melvin Capital, Citadel, and other bears just bail the bears out? I highly doubt WSB got that amount of financial power to drive GME up like that. WSB got the influence to start things for sure, but I am not sure they got money to just buy all those GME shares, especially now that GME cost hundreds of dollars.

WSB doesn't, but the thing is the long side knows the short side's screwed. Like, the other side is staring down bankruptcy, so let's try and sell our shares for 90% stake is probably the thought process.

 

The reason the long side institutions didn't buy today is because they benefit from retail driving the price up while they also slowly pick up stock.

WSB likes to buy options, which is a little similar to taking out huge %interest loans to buy stock in terms of the effect they have. I have, for example, ~1,500 delta in my account, which moves like holding 1.5 thousand shares, but in exchange for not needing to cough up, say, 200 * 1500 = $300,000 for the shares---which is a lot even for a guy playing around with hundreds of thousands of dollars (not a millionaire, sorry)---I just pay something like $30,000 in effective interest every day, except it's called Theta. Retail buying call options (taking out loans to simulate buying stock) and long institutions preventing stuff like short ladders from other institutions while doing their own manipulation (a lot of after hours gains and losses are just institutions messing with the share price, after hours have jack all for volume) combined is what's driving the stock.

 

I assumed that the longs and shorts would cut a deal during one of the weekends where the longs settle for a gigantic stake in the shorts, but it's looking like the shorts went all in rather than just accepting their gigantic loss.

 

Edit: If you want more info please PM me or start a new thread, this isn't really politics at this point.

 

Double Edit: This Reddit post has some possible details of how the brokers went into sell only mode:

 https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l7fw0x/i_used_to_work_merrill_heres_what_likely_happened/

 

But my perspective is that there's no difference from stupidity and malice, both stupid and malicious people can hurt you either now and in the future, but pretending to be stupid would, for some reason, let you off on lawsuits occasionally. To put it another way, by deliberately not communicating the brokers picked a side, even if by inaction, but this way they'll have an excuse for court. Exactly how I would play it if I had picked a side but didn't want to be legally liable. Either the brokerages were stupid enough to lose all customer trust or they had very good incentives not to communicate, but this way they both achieve the desired result and get an ready excuse to cover their ass is my view.

Edited by DehNutCase
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The $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit Smartmatic just filed today against Fox is great.

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These machines were used in only Los Angeles county lmao

Here it is in it's entirety.

Edited by Crysta
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>285 pages

Why do I have the feeling the defendants will get off lightly?

Also, how far do you think the Dems in Congress will go to make it clear that no, the game's not the same now? I feel like there won't be enough of a push, but I could easily be wrong.

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I love how they start that off with "The Earth is round" and "Two plus two equals four."

While I don't quite know the extent of the situation, I can understand their position. It does kind of read like a twitter allegation thread in the introduction to me, though.

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2 hours ago, Dayni said:

>285 pages

Why do I have the feeling the defendants will get off lightly?

Also, how far do you think the Dems in Congress will go to make it clear that no, the game's not the same now? I feel like there won't be enough of a push, but I could easily be wrong.

Credit where it's due: they're doing a lot better than I thought they would.

The House is voting on whether or not to bar MTG from her committee assignments right now. 

Also not sure if the defendants really will get off lightly: the mountain of evidence in the plaintiff's favor is pretty damning. And that's probably why they didn't bother cloaking it in verbose legalese lol.

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