finally found a dress I like that fits well and is warm enough to wear in winter
And it's red plaid flannel. Good to know your own brand I guess?
Look I'm masc
When Amtrak is functional and not delayed it's so fast and efficient and cozy.
I know I just posted about the efficient markets hypothesis yesterday - but it's a bit wild that Trump said "I will have RFK Jr running HHS" during the campaign and then once he was elected he said "RFK is running HHS" and stocks didn't drop when he was elected but did when he confirmed his previous announcement was actually true. It feels like markets aren't pricing in Trump doing the things he promised to do when they're obviously batshit, like making RFK Jr a Cabinet member, and I can't help but feel like that's because the finance types who move stocks mostly voted for Trump telling themselves this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
Hegseth’s choice could bring sweeping changes to the military. He has made it clear on his show and in interviews that, like Trump, he is opposed to "woke" programs that promote equity and inclusion. He also has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes.
I think there was a type of conservative who really thought that Trump's second term would begin like his first, where he didn't have much of an apparatus around him of people who agreed with his worldview, and ended up appointing a bunch of conventional Republicans who care about continuity and establishment and getting invites to the really good cocktail parties and locking down that cushy Jones Day lobbying job afterwards. That's not where Trump's at anymore! He's nominating his favourite Fox News host as Defense Secretary and a sex predator politician as Attorney General because they've both said nice things about him and promised their devoted loyalty. We're not going to get another term of Trump fuming about how things aren't going the way he'd like them to. We're getting a term of Trump surrounded by people who want to do exactly the same things as him, with a legislature completely uninterested in checking him, and a court system packed with his loyal supporters. Everything's going to happen much faster this time around.
Someone creates an electronic token and asserts that the token is the token “of” the meme, that the token represents the meme. Sometimes there will be a real connection between the token and the meme: Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (generally referred to by its ticker, DJT) is a meme stock (the token) representing the meme of “Donald Trump,” and Trump in fact owns a majority of DJT’s stock and was involved in its creation. Other times the token will just appropriate the meme: Dogecoin is the meme coin (the token) representing the meme “Doge, the Shiba Inu dog with cutesy text,” but the creators of Dogecoin did not create Doge or have any real connection to it. They just created the token.
I know I've already told all of you to go subscribe to Money Stuff because it's a great exploration of the micro dynamics of modern financial capitalism. Today's discussion of meme finance seems like it's getting at the hard limit of modern financial trading being based on information. I really think the financial system is in a place where the ostensibly good kind of allocative efficiency is all maxed out and now we're left with nonsense like this.
So one of the big selling points of financial markets is that they provide an incentive to get accurate information so that you can trade on it. If you have information that a company is going to be more profitable in the future, you invest in it so that you can own a share of those profits, and everyone doing this on aggregate means that the share price for very profitable companies goes up, and everyone doing this on aggregate means that early information about companies' future profitability assigns more capital to the most productive places early on. This system obviously isn't perfect, which is why we have endless rules about insider trading and straight-up lying, but the argument is that it does work better than the previous system where, like, the king's most loyal advisors guess what'll be most lucrative and send money there.
(This system also only works for enterprises above a certain scale, because it requires a whole lot of market participants to accurately move the prices in the right direction. This means that if you already have a lot of capital it's easy to access more, whereas if you don't have capital to start with then you're entirely frozen out of the system. Better technology hasn't fixed this so far, because evaluating projects got easier but it also got easier to flood the space with scams and lies.)
Anyway, for a long time, this need for better information generated more and more elaborate research into companies' growth prospects, because everyone wanted to be able to beat the market. I met someone whose job was fully just driving around new suburban developments and counting how many houses were under construction and how many were completed, because big investment firms were paying six or seven figures a month to use that information for trading purposes. By the end of 2024, though, I think we've maxed out on information. Every possible channel is either fully incorporated into trading firms' modelling efforts or regulators have deemed it too close to insider trading to be usable. But there's still this urge to find information that will help investors beat the market, even if it's not necessarily correlated with future profitability.
And right now, I think that informational edge entirely comes from hvaing a deep familiarity with Internet meme culture in places like Reddit and Twitter where rich finance types congregate, because it gives them an in-group signal about which assets' prices will be moving upward that isn't in big companies' trading models yet, and that lets them beat the market. This won't last forever, of course, and Elon Musk tweets are almost definitely baked into everyone's models now. Eventually some new form of private information will arise, and people will get the trading advantage from that, but I think the era of informational edge coming from knowing more information about the company's actual business might be over forever.
jakke reblogged
As part of our attempt to go out into the community and interview people about their PCs we interviewed people at the Howloween furry convention Vancouver - because if there's anyone who's going to have over-the-top enthusiasm about character creation, it's going to be furries. We got the chance to hear about some wildly creative campaigns and we can't wait for you to hear about them. Really grateful to everyone who saw our sign and stopped and then gave us a few minutes of their time to tell us about the PCs they've played in long-running campaigns.
Also while we were there we commissioned a little doodle of us making the podcast! And Shesta (who isn't on Tumblr, but has a whole website here) ended up giving us two doodles of what they imagined it looked like when we were making the podcast. Bonus points if you can guess which one of us is the cow and which is the sloth.
We are taking some really big swings this next season and I'm so psyched about it.
I don't usually post a ton of furry stuff on here but I did need to show you all this commission I got at the con this weekend.
still looking for a couple intros for Season 3
Every interview on the podcast starts with someone introducing the show in character as their PC, giving a little bit of flavour, and telling the audience they're listening to Campaign Spotlight. This has been a really fun way to showcase players and their PCs, and we'd like to continue with it in the next season. It can be any PC you've played in any campaign, and it absolutely doesn't have to be a D&D campaign.
You can either DM us about it on here, email us at [email protected], or call it in to 724 320 2020 - but also give us a heads up if you're calling it in to the hotline so that we know it's coming.
jakke reblogged
Tim Walz raised eyebrows Monday for publicly venting rare frustration with some union leaders, following a pair of high-profile union non-endorsements that hit Kamala Harris’ campaign as she struggles to win over working-class male voters in the final campaign sprint.
Been thinking about this a lot lately. They really did see half of the electorate as a set of constituencies who owed fealty to the Democratic machine and thought they could ignore those groups and do a bunch of dumb symbolic stuff (corrupt LEO speaking at the DNC, endorsements from people like Cheney and Kelly, border wall visits) to try to win over some hypothetical centrist voter who doesn't show up in polls and didn't show up in the election. And their comments since the election make it clear that they're going to be doubling down on this direction in the short run, so expect things to get way worse before they get any better.
stressed too much about wearing a skirt to the podcast cohost's DJ night
But of course the other DJ he's back-to-back with is trans and most of his friends and half the audience at this night are trans and of course no one cared? Sometimes living in Seattle really does just make things easier.
looks like Washington is the only state that went bluer in 2024 than in 2020?
I know 2020 isn't a representative baseline for an election but that's such a dismal result. Also a testament to how Democrats have self sorted into a few specific cities like Seattle, I guess.
jakke reblogged
I know for some people it is a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other, we accept the choice the country made.
A week and a half ago, Trump was literally a fascist, according to Democratic leadership. Now it's like "well okay guess he's going to be in charge isn't democracy magical". I don't expect the party to actually say "if he starts doing fascism, we'll set up a government-in-waiting and overthrow him", but it would be cool if Biden used thse last few months to pass any kind of executive action for the party's priorities - including abortion, where he has a ton of options. The asymmetry between the two parties' willingness to fight for their priorities is wild and inexplicable at this point. And calling Trump a fascist then meekly acquiescing to his leadership honestly feels like the Democrats are working to normalize fascism as a political identity in the United States more than anything.
@fadingroots I'd believe that this was a strategic decision on their part if their strategy actually had been working. Like, if the Cheney endorsement had delivered them a sweeping win and they repaid her by giving a tax break to a pesticide factory she owns, that would be terrible to see but also it would make sense as a way for the party leadership to maintain their positions. As it is, their strategy was a failure at delivering them profit or power or prestige, and given the shifts in voting among young people they're facing generations out of power, so I don't understand what bargain they're striking by acquiescing.
@fadingroots So I think fundamentally they're more powerful and earning more money under a Democratic administration than a Republican one. They might be getting more attention under a Republican administration, and if you think they value media attention more than money and influence, then maybe it's not so hard for them? I'm inclined to think that the money and influence feels better than posing for photos crying outside a detention camp that you previously voted to fund, but maybe I'm wrong about this.
@fadingroots I get what you mean, unfortunately. I just don't think it's as personally rewarding for a powerful Democratic leader to be out of power rather than in power. Maybe this is unsophisticated but the power and influence that comes from governing (plus all-you-can-eat insider-trading stock tips) just seem like they're going to be more personally valuable than getting a bunch of speaking time on Pod Save America? And to me that should suggest that they should attempt to win elections? Maybe I'm really misunderstanding what motivates them, though.
jakke reblogged
I know for some people it is a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other, we accept the choice the country made.
A week and a half ago, Trump was literally a fascist, according to Democratic leadership. Now it's like "well okay guess he's going to be in charge isn't democracy magical". I don't expect the party to actually say "if he starts doing fascism, we'll set up a government-in-waiting and overthrow him", but it would be cool if Biden used thse last few months to pass any kind of executive action for the party's priorities - including abortion, where he has a ton of options. The asymmetry between the two parties' willingness to fight for their priorities is wild and inexplicable at this point. And calling Trump a fascist then meekly acquiescing to his leadership honestly feels like the Democrats are working to normalize fascism as a political identity in the United States more than anything.
@fadingroots I'd believe that this was a strategic decision on their part if their strategy actually had been working. Like, if the Cheney endorsement had delivered them a sweeping win and they repaid her by giving a tax break to a pesticide factory she owns, that would be terrible to see but also it would make sense as a way for the party leadership to maintain their positions. As it is, their strategy was a failure at delivering them profit or power or prestige, and given the shifts in voting among young people they're facing generations out of power, so I don't understand what bargain they're striking by acquiescing.
@fadingroots So I think fundamentally they're more powerful and earning more money under a Democratic administration than a Republican one. They might be getting more attention under a Republican administration, and if you think they value media attention more than money and influence, then maybe it's not so hard for them? I'm inclined to think that the money and influence feels better than posing for photos crying outside a detention camp that you previously voted to fund, but maybe I'm wrong about this.
jakke reblogged
I know for some people it is a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other, we accept the choice the country made.
A week and a half ago, Trump was literally a fascist, according to Democratic leadership. Now it's like "well okay guess he's going to be in charge isn't democracy magical". I don't expect the party to actually say "if he starts doing fascism, we'll set up a government-in-waiting and overthrow him", but it would be cool if Biden used thse last few months to pass any kind of executive action for the party's priorities - including abortion, where he has a ton of options. The asymmetry between the two parties' willingness to fight for their priorities is wild and inexplicable at this point. And calling Trump a fascist then meekly acquiescing to his leadership honestly feels like the Democrats are working to normalize fascism as a political identity in the United States more than anything.
@fadingroots I'd believe that this was a strategic decision on their part if their strategy actually had been working. Like, if the Cheney endorsement had delivered them a sweeping win and they repaid her by giving a tax break to a pesticide factory she owns, that would be terrible to see but also it would make sense as a way for the party leadership to maintain their positions. As it is, their strategy was a failure at delivering them profit or power or prestige, and given the shifts in voting among young people they're facing generations out of power, so I don't understand what bargain they're striking by acquiescing.
I know for some people it is a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other, we accept the choice the country made.
A week and a half ago, Trump was literally a fascist, according to Democratic leadership. Now it's like "well okay guess he's going to be in charge isn't democracy magical". I don't expect the party to actually say "if he starts doing fascism, we'll set up a government-in-waiting and overthrow him", but it would be cool if Biden used thse last few months to pass any kind of executive action for the party's priorities - including abortion, where he has a ton of options. The asymmetry between the two parties' willingness to fight for their priorities is wild and inexplicable at this point. And calling Trump a fascist then meekly acquiescing to his leadership honestly feels like the Democrats are working to normalize fascism as a political identity in the United States more than anything.
picked a ridiculous time to make some big changes
Like I'm not trying to make myself the victim here I know I'll be fine but also getting the prescription two weeks before the election when this outcome was already highly probable was a wild choice in retrospect.