Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[bubblesort]

I don't think that theory works because again, Gill bought his Gamestop stock and was already at least trying to hype it on his YouTube channel before he got fired; in fact I think I read that he first bought the stock back in 2019. I do believe that he dramatically ramped up his efforts after he got fired because you're right, what he did basically meant that he would have a very hard time finding another actual job in the industry. Gill's manipulations basically created his own golden parachute.

The narrative that what people did was "sticking it to Wall Street" only works if Melvin Capital was doing something immoral or unethical. But that in turn would only be true of Melvin was literally engaging in some kind of market manipulation to MAKE Gamestop's stock fall - and there's legitimately no evidence of that. Gamestop's stock had been falling very steadily for several years - in fact it's been steadily falling ever since a short-lived high in 2013. You could slice cheese with that line it's so straight. That's the whole reason the stock was being shorted so heavily - the stock was reliably losing value, there was no need for Melvin Capital or anyone else to have to manipulate a drop. There's no sudden dips or anything in the line that hints at any funny business going on.

I think Gill and his cohorts knew that much, and that's why they did their best to try to portray short selling, as in, the concept all by itself, as inherently unethical - like Melvin Capital short-selling Gamestop stock was the thing that was killing the company. But it's not. Short-selling is just a bet, and the only thing that's at stake is the bettor's own money. Gamestop was losing value for like some extremely logical social, tech, and market reasons - the same basic kinds of reasons that Radio Shack and Sam Goody aren't around anymore.

There's an anti-capitalist argument that Wall Street as a group - as in, all of the actors - are bad because capitalism is bad; but that argument doesn't exempt individual traders; capitalists preying on other capitalists is just another road on the same social inequality map.

I think you're just doing everything you can do ignore that Gamestop is a solvent company, with a solid business model. Objectively speaking, they're still around, still doing business, regardless of what Melvin and their buddies said, and regardless of the hedge fund industry's sleazy machinations. You can play with the analysis of what happened with their stock and reddit and this character or that character all day long, but at the end of the day... the people who believed that gamestop is not going bankrupt were objectively correct, and the people thinking they were going under were objectively wrong, and that's why Melvin Capital is bankrupt right now, and I can still go to Gamestop to buy pokemon plushies any time I want.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Melvin Capital's short-selling of Gamestop wasn't a bet that Gamestop would fold and go bankrupt. Just that the stock's value would continue to fall and be lower in the future. In fact, Melvin - and not just them; a whole lot of people where shorting Gamestop stock - positively needed Gamestop to NOT go bankrupt in order for the short-sell to profit at all because at the end of a short whether it's a profitable outcome or a losing outcome for you, you still have to buy the all of the shares you owe, and you can't do that if the shorted company has gone under and been delisted from the stock market.

 

[bubblesort]

Melvin Capital's short-selling of Gamestop wasn't a bet that Gamestop would fold and go bankrupt. Just that the stock's value would continue to fall and be lower in the future. In fact, Melvin - and not just them; a whole lot of people where shorting Gamestop stock - positively needed Gamestop to NOT go bankrupt in order for the short-sell to profit at all because at the end of a short whether it's a profitable outcome or a losing outcome for you, you still have to buy the all of the shares you owe, and you can't do that if the shorted company has gone under and been delisted from the stock market.

That's not how short selling works.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

That's not how short selling works.

No that IS how short-selling works, it looks like I was just wrong that the shorter still owes the stocks after a company goes bankrupt. According to that article they don't have to pay back the stocks; but they still don't profit either, meaning I'm right that as a short-seller you don't necessarily want the company you're shorting to go bankrupt.

Either way, the point is, short-selling is still just gambling with one's own money, it's not an action that forces a company into bankruptcy.

 

[bubblesort]

No that IS how short-selling works, it looks like I was just wrong that the shorter still owes the stocks after a company goes bankrupt. According to that article they don't have to pay back the stocks; but they still don't profit either, meaning I'm right that as a short-seller you don't necessarily want the company you're shorting to go bankrupt.

Either way, the point is, short-selling is still just gambling with one's own money, it's not an action that forces a company into bankruptcy.

No, you are still not getting it. Let me explain...

Short selling is almost as old as stock markets. The idea is that you borrow shares and promise to pay them back at a later date. So you borrow, say, 100 VVO shares from Jeff Bezos, and today, they're worth $10, each. So you borrow them and sell them immediately, today, for $1,000, total. If one VVO share is only worth $7.50 next week, then you can buy the 100 VVO shares for $750 and give them back to Jeff Bezos, and pocket the $250 difference as profit. Good job!

This can also leave you open to theoretically infinite losses. If VVO is worth $20 per share next week, you might want to buy VVO shares to close out your position. If you think that VVO is going to be worth increasingly more and more, and never go back down to $10 a share or less, then you are open to infinite losses. So you cut your losses at $20 and pay $2,000 for 100 shares of VVO, return the shares to Jeff Bezos, and he laughs at you. You had a bad day.

I'm leaving out more complicated things like margin calls and leverage, to keep things simple. The two most common outcomes when a short sale is initiated is the price rises or the price falls and you take your gains or losses and walk away.

The ultimate win for a short seller is a bankruptcy, though. It doesn't happen often, because big companies don't de-list every day, but if you can predict a company de-listing, you can make 100% profit of a short sale. Here's how:

Start with the same set up: Borrow 100 shares from Jeff Bezos at $10 a share, and sell them for $1,000. Next week, instead of just increasing or decreasing in value, VVO goes bankrupt and de-lists from the VR-DAQ (which isn't a thing, but I bet the NFT idiots will try to invent it next week, LOL). In that case, the shares of VVO can not be bought or sold. If you can not buy or sell a thing, it has no value, which means you owe nothing to Jeff Bezos. You laugh in Jeff's face and he cries like a baby. Today was a good day.

Now, most companies have a certain percentage of their shares shorted. 5-10% of a company's stock being shorted is normal. Investors refer to the percentage of shares that are shorted as the short interest of a company. If VVO has 5-10% short interest that's normal. If the short interest is over 20%, that's very pessimistic. The market expects VVO to do poorly if short interest is over 20%. If short interest climbs over 50% or 75%, that means the market is confident in it's expectation that VVO will shut down, very soon.

GME was shorted over 100%. This is possible, because think about it... when you short a stock, you are selling it, right? How many times can a single share be sold? As many times as you want. You borrow a share, sell it to somebody else who lends it out to somebody who sells it to somebody else who lends it out for another short sale. That one share just got shorted 3 times. This situation still doesn't usually create short massive interest, partly because shorting is not common, but also because there are regulations regarding using leverage on short positions where the short interest is that high. This is how you can have over 100% short interest, though. It's extremely rare to see short interest that high, but it's not impossible. It happens, sometimes.

Anyway... GME's short interest may have been exceeding 200% at various points, depending on who you believe. The GME short interest reporting is another tangent all it's own, because the firms reporting the short interest were delaying data releases, to cook the books, or just flat out not releasing the data at all, and basically it's a huge rabbit hole, that ends with the SEC refusing to do it's job, for the millionth time with regard to this situation. In the end, I'm pretty sure everybody agrees that the short interest was over 100%. The precise number doesn't really matter. The point is, the short interest was a clear indication that the markets expected GME to go bankrupt, very fast. Why did they all make the same mistake at once? Maybe it's because all the trading houses use the same algorithm, maybe it's because they all think Melvin is a swell dude, but for whatever reason, they all thought GME was going under.

It turns out, the market was just simply wrong about that. Objectively wrong. There is no world where there is an argument that GME is less solvent than Melvin. Objectively speaking, the market should have listened to Reddit. If Melvin listened to Reddit, maybe they would still be solvent. Instead, the Melvin people are all looking for new jobs, and my local Gamestop has had a hiring sign up for months now, so they're doing just fine.

To be clear, I don't actually like the people on the Wall Street Bets subreddit, but I also think it's important to keep the facts straight. If you think Citadel and Melvin are wonderful little angels, and reddit is full of horrible big bullies, taking advantage of the poor little guys in Manhattan, then cool. You can come to any conclusion you like, I'm not trying to control your brain. All I"m saying is that you should at least know how short selling works before you come to that conclusion.

Extra Credit: Naked short ladders

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

No, you are still not getting it. Let me explain...

Short selling is almost as old as stock markets. The idea is that you borrow shares and promise to pay them back at a later date.

Yeah - I typed out a whole explanation, even funnily enough using VVO as a pretend example, for that post at the top of the page, but I decided to delete it because I figured it wasn't important. But yeah, I knew literally all of that, except the single detail that delisted debt doesn't have to be paid back. That tidbit was never mentioned in any of the stuff I read, probably because it almost never actually happens, since it turns out brokers will almost inevitably margin-call and force short-sellers to return the borrowed stock before a bankruptcy happens.

The point is, the short interest was a clear indication that the markets expected GME to go bankrupt, very fast. Why did they all make the same mistake at once?

No, again. You're right that Investopedia says a bankruptcy is theoretically the best outcome for a short-seller. But in practice, like I said, there's almost always a margin-call before that happens. So no, the fact that a lot of people were short-selling Gamestop stock is NOT an indication that the markets expected GME to go bankrupt, it's an indication merely that they expected the stock to keep going down, and they were so convinced of that they were willing to bet a lot of money on the fact.

You realize that if Gamestop stock had just fallen say another two dollars but not gone bankrupt, those short-sellers would've made out like bandits right? It still would have been immensely profitable for them.

Maybe it's because all the trading houses use the same algorithm, maybe it's because they all think Melvin is a swell dude, but for whatever reason, they all thought GME was going under.

They thought it was going down, and it's more likely because its stock had been declining in an arrow-straight line for 8 years, without even so much as a single uptick, and then a pandemic happened, so it wasn't naturally recovering any time soon.

It turns out, the market was just simply wrong about that. Objectively wrong. There is no world where there is an argument that GME is less solvent than Melvin. Objectively speaking, the market should have listened to Reddit. If Melvin listened to Reddit, maybe they would still be solvent. Instead, the Melvin people are all looking for new jobs, and my local Gamestop has had a hiring sign up for months now, so they're doing just fine.

Firstly, all of the shorters had their short positions before "Reddit" started even talking about the stock. So you're wrong that they "should've listened to Reddit".

Secondly, saying a brokerage firm "should have listened to Reddit" is kind of like saying that they should've listened to you or me here on VVO, it kind of doesn't make sense; posts in an obscure subreddit are in practice only available to members of that subreddit. If you're not one, you generally don't see them, and can't know they exist really.

Lastly, the Gamestop spike was caused by Reddit buyers who wanted to squeeze the shorters. That was the expressed sole and only reason they bought the stock. Literally, they are the people who started all the buying. Gill had been going on and on for months about the stock being undervalued; it's only after he invented and appealed to that "underdog against Wall Street" narrative that people on Reddit started memeing about it. Since it's not a thing that's happened before, it's not something that anyone had a reasonable chance of predicting.

In the end, people shorted Gamestop for the exact same reason they shorted Radio Shack. And true, Radio Shack did eventually decline so far that it did go bankrupt; but that wasn't because it was being short-sold, it's because Radio Shack's business model was no longer relevant in 2020, and Reddit didn't care enough to try and rescue Radio Shack for a laugh.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of my objection here. It's not about someone in this situation being a good guy, and someone being a bad guy, and me thinking that people have which one is which wrong. This is Late Capitalism - they're all bad guys - the "leaders" of the subreddit, the people shorting Gamestop, people longing Gamestop, and even GAMESTOP, the actual company itself - are bad guys. My pushback is against the myth-making. It's about a guy, a 10-year finance industry professional, making himself out to be a scrappy outsider nobody who took down the bigger fish; it is, in essence, the exact same phony narrative that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have built around themselves and is believed and pushed by their respective cults of sychophants. There are victims; they're not Melvin Capital, they're the actual normal everyday people who weren't members of WallStreetBets but were lured by the subreddit into downloading an app and buying Gamestop shares at the peak of the squeeze - the Gamestop stock those people bought has lost two-thirds of its value, and nobody talks about those people, who were completely wiped out. They weren't investment firms, they weren't Wall Street. Gamestop got to take their money and announce an NFT project; and Gill, a guy who was lost his job over his unethical opportunism, got to print himself a winning lottery ticket off their backs.

 

[bubblesort]

Yeah - I typed out a whole explanation, even funnily enough using VVO as a pretend example, for that post at the top of the page, but I decided to delete it because I figured it wasn't important. But yeah, I knew literally all of that, except the single detail that delisted debt doesn't have to be paid back. That tidbit was never mentioned in any of the stuff I read, probably because it almost never actually happens, since it turns out brokers will almost inevitably margin-call and force short-sellers to return the borrowed stock before a bankruptcy happens.

I"m not trying to insult you. I just thought it might help to get some fundamental facts straight.

No, again. You're right that Investopedia says a bankruptcy is theoretically the best outcome for a short-seller. But in practice, like I said, there's almost always a margin-call before that happens. So no, the fact that a lot of people were short-selling Gamestop stock is NOT an indication that the markets expected GME to go bankrupt, it's an indication merely that they expected the stock to keep going down, and they were so convinced of that they were willing to bet a lot of money on the fact.

It does happen. A lot of crazy stuff happens, because big firms can afford to write their own short contracts, which is a different conversation, but basically, it does happen, and that's what the hedge funds wanted to happen.

You realize that if Gamestop stock had just fallen say another two dollars but not gone bankrupt, those short-sellers would've made out like bandits right? It still would have been immensely profitable for them.

Yeah, and if I had wheels I'd be a bicycle. Big deal. For the money they make, they absolutely should be able to see 'phenomina' and 'moments in time' before they happen. That's literally what they're paid to do.

They thought it was going down, and it's more likely because its stock had been declining in an arrow-straight line for 8 years, without even so much as a single uptick, and then a pandemic happened, so it wasn't naturally recovering any time soon.

LOL, OK, fine... this is absurd, but lets say they were betting that the price was going to decline another two dollars... or why not, since we're here... lets assume they wanted the price to drop two more pennies, or even two more pieces of eight before they covered... but they didn't. Hypothetically.

They still fucked up! Reddit and retail investors still ate their lunch and drove Melvin to bankruptcy! They were shown for the unprofessional, undeserving, corrupt morons, that they actually are. These are the kinds of idiots who lose money in crypto. Laymen should not trust them with our retirement funds.

Firstly, all of the shorters had their short positions before "Reddit" started even talking about the stock. So you're wrong that they "should've listened to Reddit".

There was ample evidence that they doubled down on their investment in GME shorts after Reddit started buying.

Secondly, saying a brokerage firm "should have listened to Reddit" is kind of like saying that they should've listened to you or me here on VVO, it kind of doesn't make sense; posts in an obscure subreddit are in practice only available to members of that subreddit. If you're not one, you generally don't see them, and can't know they exist really.

Actually, they do watch reddit, and similar boards, now. What's the difference between watching these boards in 2020 vs watching them in 2021? We have made some incremental progress with AI and data mining, but we haven't had some massive leap in technological capability that made it possible in that period. What we had in that time period was a massive leap in the will to make it happen. The will did not exist before the GME situation, because the hedge funds and the plutocrats were too stupid to understand how things work, until they were made to suffer for their stupidity. This is just an example of how beating on rich people makes markets more efficient.

Here's a short 3 minute clip, where the CEO of Melvin Capital tells a senate inquiry panel that big funds are watching reddit now.

Melvin Capital's Plotkin at GameStop hearing: Reddit traders exploited opportunity around short interest

Gabe Plotkin, founder and chief investment officer of Melvin Capital, appears before the House Committee on Financial Services to discuss the hedge fund's role in the trading mania surrounding GameStop.

www.cnbc.com

Lastly, the Gamestop spike was caused by Reddit buyers who wanted to squeeze the shorters. That was the expressed sole and only reason they bought the stock. Literally, they are the people who started all the buying. Gill had been going on and on for months about the stock being undervalued; it's only after he invented and appealed to that "underdog against Wall Street" narrative that people on Reddit started memeing about it. Since it's not a thing that's happened before, it's not something that anyone had a reasonable chance of predicting.

Nothing ever happened before. Or maybe everything happened before. This could spiral into Heraclitus's argument over whether or not we can step in the same river twice. The point is, the professionals, who we trust with our pension funds, because they claim they can beat the market by predicting things like this... they can't do it.

In the end, people shorted Gamestop for the exact same reason they shorted Radio Shack. And true, Radio Shack did eventually decline so far that it did go bankrupt; but that wasn't because it was being short-sold, it's because Radio Shack's business model was no longer relevant in 2020, and Reddit didn't care enough to try and rescue Radio Shack for a laugh.

Radio Shack is the worst company I ever worked for, back in the 90s. I mean, I loved the products, but my god, was that company mismanaged. If they had the advantage of naked short attacks against them, their shut down would have been more graceful, and better for their investors.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of my objection here. It's not about someone in this situation being a good guy, and someone being a bad guy, and me thinking that people have which one is which wrong. This is Late Capitalism - they're all bad guys - the "leaders" of the subreddit, the people shorting Gamestop, people longing Gamestop, and even GAMESTOP, the actual company itself - are bad guys. My pushback is against the myth-making. It's about a guy, a 10-year finance industry professional, making himself out to be a scrappy outsider nobody who took down the bigger fish; it is, in essence, the exact same phony narrative that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have built around themselves and is believed and pushed by their respective cults of sychophants. There are victims; they're not Melvin Capital, they're the actual normal everyday people who weren't members of WallStreetBets but were lured by the subreddit into downloading an app and buying Gamestop shares at the peak of the squeeze - the Gamestop stock those people bought has lost two-thirds of its value, and nobody talks about those people, who were completely wiped out. They weren't investment firms, they weren't Wall Street. Gamestop got to take their money and announce an NFT project; and Gill, a guy who was lost his job over his unethical opportunism, got to print himself a winning lottery ticket off their backs.

The subreddit does talk about the losers quite a bit, actually. The losers usually seem to get more press than the winners. They will tell stories about people losing their life savings on decorative gourd futures for years, but forget a big winner in a week. One of the things that outside financial 'professionals' do to attack WSB in the press, is to say that WSB focuses on the wins, and ignores the loses, which is the exact opposite of how things work on WSB. When people see that, the 'professional' loses credibility.

As far as mythologizing DFV and reddit... eh... you might be right, IDK. To be honest, I am deeply apathetic about mythologizing things. People will mythologize as far as they need to. Myths serve deep needs, and I'm not a psychologist. If people want to sing the praises of of the worst monsters in history, it's pointless to attempt to dissuade them. I do like to keep the record straight on what factually happened, but I'll leave the mythologizing to better myth makers than me. I think most good myth makers would tell us that it's best not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, though, LOL

I also don't care about amorphous concepts like 'capitalism' or 'socialism', or eschatological speculation regarding what is late stage and early stage. That's a longer rant for another time, though.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Yeah, and if I had wheels I'd be a bicycle. Big deal. For the money they make, they absolutely should be able to see 'phenomina' and 'moments in time' before they happen. That's literally what they're paid to do.

...

Nothing ever happened before. Or maybe everything happened before. This could spiral into Heraclitus's argument over whether or not we can step in the same river twice. The point is, the professionals, who we trust with our pension funds, because they claim they can beat the market by predicting things like this... they can't do it.

This pair of statements illustrates the self-contradiction that runs through your entire post. They should be able to predict things like meme stock hype being invented, so it's nobody's fault but theirs that they didn't. But also, predicting such things is impossible, so its their fault for even trying. Both of these things can't be true at the same time, but each is A criticism I guess, so you will freely use both concurrently.

Yes obviously predictions can be wrong; if that weren't the case, nobody would ever lose money betting on stocks. But they can be right most of the time, which is why people have gotten reliably wealthy betting on stocks too.

Actually, they do watch reddit, and similar boards, now.

Uh...yeah, that's exactly my point. They do watch NOW, as a result of what happened. They didn't watch those kinds of boards before the Gamestop thing though.

Here's a short 3 minute clip, where the CEO of Melvin Capital tells a senate inquiry panel that big funds are watching reddit now.

Yeah that happened after the Gamestop thing.

Radio Shack is the worst company I ever worked for, back in the 90s. I mean, I loved the products, but my god, was that company mismanaged. If they had the advantage of naked short attacks against them, their shut down would have been more graceful, and better for their investors.

This is irrelevant really; I've never read about anyone having a good customer experience at Gamestop, and I've never read about anyone ever having a good work experience there either; indeed, Gamestop was one of the companies whose pandemic response made press as particularly malicious, first trying to get declared "essential" during the short-lived shutdowns and, when that wasn't granted, trying to order its employees to work anyway in defiance of government shutdown orders. It's a garbage company that frankly didn't deserve to be saved. At best, everything you can get there can be gotten somewhere else for less money.

The subreddit does talk about the losers quite a bit, actually.

We're not on the subreddit, and my statement wasn't limited to it.

As far as mythologizing DFV and reddit... eh... you might be right, IDK. ... I do like to keep the record straight on what factually happened, but I'll leave the mythologizing to better myth makers than me. I think most good myth makers would tell us that it's best not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, though, LOL

Indeed; you don't join in the myth-making, you let the "better myth makers" do that job - and then just uncritically accept whatever they come up with.

I also don't care about amorphous concepts like 'capitalism' or 'socialism', or eschatological speculation regarding what is late stage and early stage. That's a longer rant for another time, though.

LOL of course; right you're not here for that whole "is capitalism bad" conversation, it's not something you care about...but also, "Big Wall St" and "big firms" and "plutocrats" play "shady games" and kill innocent corporations with their short-selling and "we" - as in, the rest of us who are not-"them" - should definitely not trust them and you don't seem to be reticent to characterize their failures as positive things despite not caring about the "amorphous concept" that makes them that.

 

[bubblesort]

This pair of statements illustrates the self-contradiction that runs through your entire post. They should be able to predict things like meme stock hype being invented, so it's nobody's fault but theirs that they didn't. But also, predicting such things is impossible, so its their fault for even trying. Both of these things can't be true at the same time, but each is A criticism I guess, so you will freely use both concurrently.

Yes obviously predictions can be wrong; if that weren't the case, nobody would ever lose money betting on stocks. But they can be right most of the time, which is why people have gotten reliably wealthy betting on stocks too.



Uh...yeah, that's exactly my point. They do watch NOW, as a result of what happened. They didn't watch those kinds of boards before the Gamestop thing though.



Yeah that happened after the Gamestop thing.



This is irrelevant really; I've never read about anyone having a good customer experience at Gamestop, and I've never read about anyone ever having a good work experience there either; indeed, Gamestop was one of the companies whose pandemic response made press as particularly malicious, first trying to get declared "essential" during the short-lived shutdowns and, when that wasn't granted, trying to order its employees to work anyway in defiance of government shutdown orders. It's a garbage company that frankly didn't deserve to be saved. At best, everything you can get there can be gotten somewhere else for less money.



We're not on the subreddit, and my statement wasn't limited to it.



Indeed; you don't join in the myth-making, you let the "better myth makers" do that job - and then just uncritically accept whatever they come up with.



LOL of course; right you're not here for that whole "is capitalism bad" conversation, it's not something you care about...but also, "Big Wall St" and "big firms" and "plutocrats" play "shady games" and kill innocent corporations with their short-selling and "we" - as in, the rest of us who are not-"them" - should definitely not trust them and you don't seem to be reticent to characterize their failures as positive things despite not caring about the "amorphous concept" that makes them that.

Nothing you say is making sense any more. I did not contradict myself at all. You are just confused, and I think you're too emotional to have a friendly conversation about this. Honestly, I didn't mean to get under your skin by explaining short selling. Sorry if that made you feel dumb. Real talk, though: You actually did need that explanation. Also, you actually need a bit more information than I gave (you don't grasp how leverage or margin calls work, with regard to shorts). You probably won't learn much from me at this point, because I can tell you're just mad at me, so I'm not even going to bother.

If you want to rant and rave about how this or that -ism is at fault, or how it's the apocalyptic late stage this or that, or how evil reddit is, or how horrible of a company Game Stop is, that's cool. I mean, you're nuts, but you know, you can think whatever whacky stuff you want to think. You didn't have to rope me into your bizarre rant by trying to act like you care about what actually happened, though.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If you want to rant and rave about how this or that -ism is at fault, or how it's the apocalyptic late stage this or that, or how evil reddit is, or how horrible of a company Game Stop is, that's cool. I mean, you're nuts, but you know, you can think whatever whacky stuff you want to think. You didn't have to rope me into your bizarre rant by trying to act like you care about what actually happened, though.

You didn't have to answer any of my posts, you know. Looking back at my first post about this, you can't really say my attitude about this whole situation isn't clear from the beginning. The main ideas are all there; every post since then has just been elaboration.

And the same is true of yours; you will continue to engage in your defensive and uncritical hagiography over the subreddit and Gill whenever the matter happens to come up, pretending the whole time that's not what it is and maintaining that you're above all the bigger-picture stuff, despite not being able to keep yourself from adding your two cents. And the next time someone calls you out for it, you'll do the same thing, just ramble condescendingly about how they're just crazy or something and use that as an excuse to dip when you're not making headway.

 

[Free]

Hoocoodanode?

“Tough to forge” digital driver’s license is... easy to forge

A litany of security flaws allows forgeries that are easy, quick, and cheap.

arstechnica.com

In late 2019, the government of New South Wales in Australia rolled out digital driver's licenses. The new licenses allowed people to use their iPhone or Android device to show proof of identity and age during roadside police checks or at bars, stores, hotels, and other venues. ServiceNSW, as the government body is usually referred to, promised it would “provide additional levels of security and protection against identity fraud, compared to the plastic [driver's license]” citizens had used for decades.

Now, 30 months later, security researchers have shown that it’s trivial for just about anyone to forge fake identities using the digital driver's licenses, or DDLs. The technique allows people under drinking age to change their date of birth and for fraudsters to forge fake identities. The process takes well under an hour, doesn’t require any special hardware or expensive software, and will generate fake IDs that pass inspection using the electronic verification system used by police and participating venues. All of this, despite assurances that security was a key priority for the newly created DDL system.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

Anyone click Like for a review?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

It is astounding and hilarious how many crypto supporters make comments like this guy's, thinking it's a total mike-drop

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

It is astounding and hilarious how many crypto supporters make comments like this guy's, thinking it's a total mike-drop

Me to my father in law: It's a scam.
Him: It must be miserable to be so untrusting.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Me to my father in law: It's a scam.
Him: It must be miserable to be so untrusting.

It's good you are there to protect him as much as you can. We have a neighbor we have known for many years who posts things on Facebook about 5G and covid, and how he just spent $200 on some miracle cure ASEA something which is just salt and water. We have enough going on we can't help him from wasting his money. In usual times my best would talk him out of it but she isn't in good health. He's a nice guy but a bit schizophrenic and we have too much going on to help him.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Who in the heck would ever want a clock that you literally can't read without getting up, walking over, and sticking your finger in it?

Also, imagine trying to reset this POS after a power outage.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

You probably reset it by telnetting into an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Actually, it probably uses NTP.

 

[Free]

Who in the heck would ever want a clock that you literally can't read without getting up, walking over, and sticking your finger in it?

People with time on their hands?

/me runs!

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

You probably reset it by telnetting into an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Actually, it probably uses NTP.

Okay fine but that still doesn't help that you have to stick your finger in the darn thing to read it.

And also, you have to make sure you stick your finger exactly through the very center, because if you're off, the time's gonna be off.

And since the minute hand and hour hand are both shadows cast by the same finger, they're exactly the same width and length which is great for readability.