This is true - but it's also not fraud because it's legal. The only way to make it illegal is regulation and some on the NeoCapitalist side of the ledger are convinced that the only solution is less government.

OTOH, the other side of the coin, and why at least one major hedge fund has closed down, returning the capital to investors, is because it's getting hard to impossible to short where you think values are ridiculously high.

The famous case is the GameStock short squeeze. Retail investors set out to deliberately manipulate the price with the goal of forcing a liquidation of the shorts. If institutional investors had tried the same thing they would be in trouble - and possibly even going to prison - because market manipulation is one of the things that is regulated.

However, like so many things, while it was obvious from the social media noise that the goal of many of the retail investors was to manipulate a short squeeze, it's going to be hard to impossible to prove that any individual investor was doing that, especially as individual retail investors do not have the clout to do it, or even start it, on their own so you'd presumably (IANAL) have to prove collusion as well.

I haven't been paying close attention, thus my first question: did they manage to factor an arbitrary number larger than 21?

No. Economy is movement of value, not of money. That's just speculation.

As little kids in a socialist country, we got fed the following tale:
Heating fuel in a mining town was very expensive. So the protagonist took a cart and a friend, went to the other side of a forest to buy wood cheaply, and with much effort, hauled it home. When asked why he won't haul another load and sell it at home, the guy answered: "I'm a worker not a speculant".
Abstracting from the nonsense of the price difference of wood being so high on two sides of a forest, the commies who produced this piece of propaganda inadvertently produced a nice example why trade is good despite not producing something by itself: the value it creates comes from moving goods to where they're appreciated (ie, needed).

Thus: economy is the movement of value (goods, services) between different owners who value those goods and services differently.
On the other hand, movement of money or similar tokens (eg. a wash trade) isn't valuable by itself.

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

Yes, similar to an etf.

Perhaps a non-crypto example would be an ETF property fund.

Except the fund was formed by the investors putting in property they held rather than money.

Then they offload the ETF shares to the unsuspecting investor who trusts the value the fund has put on its assets.

I don't think it's quite that.

Normally, if I'm going to create a fund what I do is raise money from investors, go out and buy the underlying assets for my fund and then give the investors shares.

The investors get two things, access to my skill at investing, and the ability to spread their risk across the market without having to have hundreds of separate holdings.

What's happening here is, instead, the fund is being funded by assets the fund manager already holds but aren't really liquid and so are hard to price.

But once they've sold the shares in the fund, they've sold their hard to value asset for cash without having to actually find a buyer for a multi-hundred million holding or even having to properly value it.

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

There's no need for a "backing", what matters is that it's impossible to "print money". Physical metal coins are only one way to do so, and not even the best (as they can be mined, and take up metals that could be put into useful work). Of course, current cryptocurriences are not that good, either -- waste of electricity, waste of disk space (Bitcoin currently needs 700GB to meaningfully participate), transaction costs, etc. Metal coins are merely the most traditional one.

Too bad, those in power (and money = power) have grown too attached to the ability to pull money out of thin air. Debasing of coins was popular for thousands of years, most countries defaulted in early 20th century (Germany 1914, UK 1925, US 1933) then successively removed remaining safety barriers (US went into freefall in 1971). And most of money from nothing is "produced" by banks rather than governments.

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

The UK also had a veto over most of the rules that the EU introduced. I don't think it ever used it. In fact, in almost every case, the UK voted for the proposed rules. It was something like under 2% that it didn't want, mostly because the EU tends to make sure everyone is happy before even having the vote - you know, how adults agree stuff.

Pretty much. Although for many things the UK didn't have a veto but did very well out of the fact that if there was a disagreement at the "big country level" then it was France vs Germany with Britain being the casting vote.

Your 2% rings a bell - although that doesn't mean that the UK voted for the other 98%. The UK did abstain in a substantial proportion. - something like 60% of the time its vote went with the winning side, 38% abstain, 2% lose due to enough numbers on the other side.

The UK government also specialized in gold plating EU legislation. It would get the law it wanted passed in the EU and would then go over and above what the EU required while simultaneously saying to the voters "It's not us, the EU made us do it".

Itâ(TM)s definitely about the law requiring pricing to show the final price. I get it that tax rates are variable based on locality in the US, even within a state or a city. Thereâ(TM)s much less variability here in the UK (VAT is the same rate everywhere and only varies if certain goods are deemed worthy of a discount). No reason why taxed and tax free prices canâ(TM)t both be shown in the US. This is also common in some places here, especially where businesses will be buying items with a VAT exemption.

The only time I come in contact with Edge is in my Windows VMs or remote servers and I want to download something directly in to the VM on to the server, or I accidentally click on some Microsoft crap that opens the default browser. My annoyances:

• * It eventually forgets what my open tabs were from the last session. It does this frequently. I have tabs in Safari I've had open for for years, and that's the way I like. You fail Microsoft.
• * Configuring Edge is a headache. Default choices are shit and changing that involves going through too many steps.
• * Whatever the browser core, for decades now, Microsoft defaults to a busy noisy page. Their product manager must have been introduced to browsers in the late '90s when everybody had to have a portal. Most of my Windows access is to remote servers, so the last thing I want is it opening an animated page that kills the performance of the remote connection. Sure, it's not as bad as it was 20 years ago when latency was higher and bandwidth was lower, but still annoys the shit of me. Just give me a minimal page by default.
• * It's not even an independent product anymore. Using it means supporting Google. No thanks.

They couldn't make their browser successful when they developed it in-house. They had to make and cuts opted to wrap somebody else's browser, and even now, that can't make that successful.

Good luck getting FFmpeg running on a console from 1996!

Actually, at Demuxed 2025 recently, somebody did make a presentation detailing how they got a Sega Genesis (Megadrive) to stream and playback video. What an awesome hack!! Itâ(TM)s here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fjoeyparrish...

FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language

Not even close. 90% C, 8% assembly, at least according to GitHub.

That you don't self-identify as a racist, doesn't mean that you're not one. You insist that members of a certain race should have benefits above others, for no reason relevant to the people concerned.