themeatbridge

Current, but he’s a retired Marine chiropractor and guru.

I know, it just sounds like a movie starring Treat Williams and Steven Segal.

Are we really sticking withThe Adjuster?

Sealed bids encourage last and best offers, and prevent the deepest pockets from submitting a “highest plus one” bid that minimizes the proceeds from the sale.

This judge is either a dipshit or corrupt.

And there’s a trustee for a reason. The debtors decided that the value of keeping Alex Jones away from InfoWars had its own value and were willing to accept a lower bid. There’s no fiduciary duty to maximize the proceeds from the sale, and Alex buying back his own assets during a bankruptcy auction is actual fraud.

Is that too much to ask?

Somebody who needed $60k for medical expenses.

I don’t think it’s OK, but I think it was entirely expected. I agree that his prosecution was political, and that most other defendants would have gotten much less focus. I also agree that he broke the law and should serve his time.

Ultimately, our entire system is corrupt and we should do something to fix it. Sadly, we’ll have to wait at least two years for the next election to hopefully at least take back the House and/or Senate. But even if Dems take both, nobody seems to be interested in actually addressing the injustice baked into our government.

I agree. If the aim was to avoid a primary, he should have stepped down two years ago and given Kamala a chance to establish a track record as the incumbent president. I don’t like either of them, but anything is better than a rapist, insurrectionist, kleptocratic felon.

I assumed that this meme was just a reference to his latest bullshit. I’m well aware of Biden’s record, and have been a consistent critic of his for my entire adult life. The earliest memory I have becoming aware of him was when he presided over the Anita Hill testimony.

Democrats keep losing because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the game they are playing. Democracy is not a game of having the best ideas or plans or even character. You can win hearts and minds with passionate leadership and rational persuasion, but we’ll never win another election if that’s the only lever they want to press. It’s a progressive truism that people, given the same information and the same priorities, will reach the same conclusion. So therefore if a conservative has a difference of opinion, they must either not have the same information, or they must have different priorities. That’s why progressives are so frequently astounded at the hypocrisy and mental gymnastics required to support Trump while claiming any moral highground on any position.

How can they claim they want traditional family values when Trump is a thrice-divorced rapist with an obvious attraction to his own daughter? How can they oppose immigration when Trump has had two foreign national brides and Musk was an illegal immigrant? How can they oppose a woman’s right to choose when Trump has paid women to abort fetuses he sired? How can they claim to be patriotic while Trump gargles Putin’s sweaty raisin bag? How can they claim to want fiscal responsibility when Trump has driven his businesses into the ground, routinely declaring bankruptcy and using his political influence to line his own pockets? How can they claim to want lower costs of living when Trump plans to raise tariffs on imported goods, making literally everything more expensive?

The answer is that they don’t care. They don’t care about having all the information, or having true information. The conservative mind is not a rational actor. It’s not built on priorities or fundamental beliefs. There is only one core idea at the nexus of every conservative ideology:

Me good.

That’s it. That’s all there is. Dig down far enough, under all the bullshit and psychological spaghetti of beliefs, and you’ll find one nugget of truth. I am a good person, therefore whatever I want is good, and anyone that wants something else is bad. If it helps me to lie or cheat or murder, then I’ll do those things and they will be good because I did them to help me.

This has always been the comforting lie of conservative thought. Conservatives claim to want stoic preservation of national values, but the reality is that those values inexorably align with their own personal gain. It is not, as most conservatives prefer to believe, a resistance to change for change’s sake, but a narcissistic demand that all policies and decisions benefit themselves.

It’s more transparent now because Trump has worn thin the veneer of reasonable discretion, but the closer to the surface it gets, the more effective the messaging. It’s OK to be selfish, and ignorant, and cruel, and criminal, because deep down we deserve to do whatever we want. We deserve to get whatever we want. Anyone trying to keep it from us deserves to be destroyed. Anything we do to destroy those who would stop us is righteous. Cuz me good.

You’re never going to convince a conservative to vote for the lesser of two evils, because the greater of the two will simply lie to them. The greater evil will tell them they can have it all, that the dangers of climate change or viral pandemics aren’t real, that they don’t have to change their behavior or learn something new. They don’t have to get out of bed in the morning, they can stay warm under the covers and skip school or work or adulting, and everything will be just fine.

To win an election, you have to convince the conservatives that it is in their best interest to vote for the progressive candidate. That might sound like a tall order, but we already know how to do it. We already see the gameplan that works on all conservatives. We have seen how centrists and moderates and neoliberals win in conservative strongholds.

Progressives just need to start lying.

Depends on the critique. “Joe is a hypocrite for pardoning his son” is reasonable. “Joe proves that it’s normal for politicians to act unethically, therefore criticisms of all unethical behavior are invalidated by the rule of whataboutism” is a transparent defense of Republican corruption.

It is, but forex markets allow traders to trade on significant margin. Meaning, if I have $100, I might be able to buy $1,000 worth of foreign currency (a 1:10 margin) and if the value of the currency increases 1% ($100) you get 10% of the profit, which is 10% of your investment. If the position increases by 10%, you double your money. However, this also means that if the value drops by 10%, your money is gone.

Now consider that forex traders often leverage at 1:500 margins. You get to buy massive positions with currency pairs, and even the tiniest fluctuations can provide massive profits or instantaneous ruin.

The algorithm I used monitored recurring micro-patterns, watching for predictable movements. You’re also watching relative value pairs, rather than just an absolute market value. Both sides of a currency pair have nations vying to improve the value of their own currency, so you can make money (or lose money) on either side of the pair. Dollar is low against the yen, buy dollars with yen. Yen drops against the dollar, sell your positions. Euro drops against the yen, go pick up Euros agains the yen, and feel confident that Japan is already trying to strengthen the yen (simplified example, because it’s way more complex than that).

So if you track currencies across all currency pairs, you can find inconsistencies. I called it “torque” 15 years ago, but I’m sure a proper forex trader can give you an actual name for it. These are areas where three or more currencies are out of alignment, like if the dollar is up against the yen but down against the euro, and the yen is up against the euro. These are situations where you would expect the market to equalize in one direction or the other, and the trick was being able to predict which way it would go.

And I thought I had figured that out. I had not figured that out. I had gotten lucky several times in a row. In fact, the market can tolerate that sort of incongruity, and the market forces on various positions are far more complicated. And because you’re leveraged, if you bet big, even small swings in the wrong direction can wipe you out.

And because your leveraged, if the position dips, you can’t just hold it hoping it will bounce back. Once the loss in value reaches your investment, the position automatically closes and you’ve lost everything you put in. It doesn’t matter if it bounces all the way back up, because you no longer own it.

It hurt with fake money, because I thought I had discovered some big secret key. Like that movie Pi. And then it was gone. All the sucess, all the dreams of a 9-screen batcave-style computer station with financial tickers and shit. I realized that I had nothing, and I was foolish for thinking otherwise. Stung like a bitch.

But you’re right, safe investments are the smarter long-term play. I did make an extra paycheck on dogecoin once on a moonshot. But otherwise, my boring retirement funds are all steadily beating inflation by a few percentage points. Why fight the tide?

Reminds me of the time I started learning about forex. I used a practice account to test an algorithm for recognizing short-term trends and trading on the activity. I ran a simulation for a few days to make sure it was working, and my fake $10,000 bankroll turned into $50,000 in less than a week. I was excited about the results, and went to explain it to someone with deeper pockets who might actually have $10k to invest, and in the time it took me to walk from my desk to his and back, it went to less than $600. Five minutes, $50k wiped out.

Needless to say, he didn’t invest and I stopped daydreaming about owning a yacht. Forex is gambling.

Narayama Murthy sounds like an enormous piece of shit.

Agreed, those people are the best. But also, that’s a bit of a nightmare scenario, because now you have to decide if you’re going to risk saying something from five minutes ago, or decline the kindness and feel bad for rejecting the gesture.

Awkwardly attempt to join the conversation, only to be talked over mid-sentence by someone else, and so you wait for another lull. Attempt to start again, only to be interrupted again by someone else. Watch helplessly as the subject of the conversation drifts far from the point you were going to make. Minutes pass, and everyone is glad to be talking about something else. You let go of the moment, and resign yourself to remain quiet. Then someone says to you, “Oh, what were you going to say?”

It also forced users onto their app, which creates a captive market for force-serving ads disguised as content.

What they’re saying is that trying to reverse climate change won’t be enough. It doesn’t mean it isn’t the right path, just that it won’t go far enough.