I'd rather just buy a healthy company that's likely to go up than spend the same money hoping a bad company goes down and also paying for the options. Often times a bad company continues going up for a long time until reality catches up while the short seller takes a loss, having to either cover or exercise the options. I'm a retail investor. I don't have the insider info needed to make real money on shorts.

I did all my risky investing pre-retirement. Now I'm just coasting and living the life, stress free.

Shorting the market does not cause recessions. Why do you think that?

There is absolutely nothing wrong or immoral with shorting a stock. I would never do it as the risk is essentially infinite while the potential gain is capped but shorting is a valid and effective method for pushing down the price of stocks that are not worth what they were pushed to through whatever means. It's an important counter balance to the often insane "buy! Buy! BUUUYYYY!!!" mentality.

Your level of concern that stock shorting can cause a recession should be flat zero.

Your level of concern that crypto bullshit will destroy the global economy should be about 0.25. The size of the global economy is gigantic compared to the amount of real money being gambled in crypto crap. Once you take out the gaIllions of early coins held by the whales which were not purchased with real money, the true size of the crypto crap casino is quite small. If all crypto crap went to zero tomorrow the real world loss of real money pissed away would be trivial.

Retail buyers (I would not use the term "investors") will get wiped out, as usual. Big money houses will take a small loss from their super high risk accounts which will barely scratch their total net worth balance sheets. The rest of the world will raise an eyebrow briefly, yawn, and forget the whole thing ever happened.

No.

I recently restarted playing Skyrim and got stuck on some side quest. I asked Google's AI for help figuring out the next step. This is an old game with numerous full walk throughs available.

I told it the game, the quest name, the step I was stuck on, and asked for a console hack if it's a bug or directions if not.

Google responded with an answer to an entirely different game, told me I needed to kill some boss that doesn't exist in a place that doesn't exist.

I did a normal search after that, opened the first link with a title that looked ok and the answer was in the first paragraph.

There were numerous other links on Google's first page of search results that answered my question clearly. But Google's AI could not.

Google had the answer at hand. This is a rather old and well understood game with a large community of players who have posted a lot about every aspect.

Yet, Google's AI couldn't figure out what game I was playing, much less provide an answer, even after I explicitly told it what game I was playing.

If that's a human input error somehow then AI sucks if it can't figure out what I needed.

FakeAI is good for simple things like solving math problems, summarizing the weather report, and other trivia no one actually needs AI for but regularly fails for things we'd need and uses insane levels of electricity, compute power, space, and engineering effort to provide slop results.

I look forward to the AI bubble pop even if it temporarily kills the tech market and I take a big loss on paper in some funds.

Blaming the user for failing to cater to a system that makes the explicit claim of how smart the system is is total cope.

What apartheid state has the minority population voting and membership in parliament?

Are you seriously saying Israel is no different than white South Africa? C'mon, that's just factually incorrect and trivially discovered with 5 seconds of google.

Israel is also not Pinochet's Chile. There is zero comparison.

By western standards Israel is doing as well as the typical European country. Do you think France's "no go" zones are healthy and proper for a functioning western democracy? They're ghettos where they stuck the Arab population they let over the border but didn't actually want as members of their society. How many of them are in France's parliament?

It's better to be an Arab living in Israel where they are citizens, can vote, hold power in parliament and have human rights than be a Jew in most any Arab country where most or all of those things are lacking depending on the country. And let's not forget what happened to the Jewish population in pretty much every Arab country across the Middle East.

"Ethnic cleansing" is the polite term for what happened.

Also, if you're lgbtq or anything else non conforming then you're again better off in Israel where you'd have rights and protections as opposed to having to hide and risk death if found out in most/all of the middle eastern Arab world.

> Intelligence alone won't get us anywhere, or China and Israel would be the best places to live

China: if you are Han, don't care about freedom, social safety net, live upwind from the factories and aren't in the bottom 90% financially, isn't all that bad.

Israel: a very liberal first world western high tech democracy. As long as you're ok dodging incoming rockets on occasion and don't care about religious crap, which most there don't, is pretty good.

China is no different than most developing authoritarian regimes, just bigger.
Israel is no different than most 1st world western countries, except it's run by Jews so obviously it's a bad place.

They made db change. They have effectively infinite amounts of real production flow data they can use to test changes.

In this case, the system failed because it was hard coded to 200 max tests but they added more. If they had tested against that it would've been found.

This is not an obscure rarely used feature. This is a key feature of what their entire service is built around. They are selling filtered/clean incoming traffic against very large production sites. Who thought it was a good idea to have a hard cap of how many rules could be applied in the first place?

This is very much "no one will ever need more than 640k" thinking.

The closest I've ever got to doing similar was using a numeric incremental dns naming scheme based on 3 or 4 digit names like web001-999 or service0001-9999 knowing that it wouldn't be a surprise if we ever ran out of names, especially considering we had a dozen servers at the time which could easily handle 50x the current traffic load. But a numeric naming scheme isn't a surprise when you run out. Long before that we changed to "datacenter-service-number" so web005 became dc3-web-005 giving us up to 1000 web servers per data center in data centers that didn't have space for another 1000 servers anyway.

But this secret hard coded db limit is simple incompetence and lack of real world experience.

Again, this is the very core of their business model. Yet no one knew anything about how their systems work. It wasn't a complex problem. It was a dumb hard coded cap.

I have also seen very complex systems collapse under their own weight. This was not one of those times.

Seriously?

Even most of the shitty under resourced startups I was at had basic dev -> qa -> staging -> production environment life cycles in place.

This sort of failure is a result of sheer incompetence, bad systems engineering, and clueless management at all levels.

Outages? Yes, shit happens.

Preventable outages by huge critical infrastructure company in their key systems? Clown show.

Idiots? Ai contraire!

If they had solved this years ago none of them would have jobs today.

They just need to keep bread crumbing it. In 30 years they'll tell us the whales also have sounds for consonant equivalents.

They probably did figure it all out generations ago, already have full blown conversations all day with whales, usually their take on the latest Taylor Swift album, but just aren't telling us that.

Are they watching Taylor Swift videos? Complete waste of time.

Are they watching history, science, and other documentary videos? Good use of time.

In general, though, we know from Covid as well as way back when I was in uni and took a few childhood development classes that human interaction is generally a plus and isolation of any sort is generally bad.

There are a small number of anecdotal cases of abused children "raised" in closets or otherwise 99% isolated from all human contact who needed years and years of therapy and training once rescued to advanced beyond basic animal functions.

Video in and of itself is neither inherently good or bad. It's just a tool which can be used intelligently or not which is why this study is so wishy washy about their own results.

Indeed, crime, corruption, FOMO, political distress and other abnormal life events do drive crypto. None of them things non-criminal normal people would "invest" in.

Sir, I salute your brilliantly delivered straight up hard sarcasm. Well done. Few can pull it off like that.

My adult nephew is super into all things fake coin.

Like all crypto bros he is incapable of describing what drives the daily ups and downs nor long term ups n downs of fake coin prices vs anything else.

The price of stock is closely linked long term to company revenue with news impacting short term changes.

The price of gold is impacted by how much gets dug up, the cost of digging it up, how much use for both industrial and jewelry purpose are needed. Supply and demand. The gold sitting in government vaults is not available to the open market and therefore irrelevant.

The price of real estate is based on location and the number of people who need or want to be in that location and the cost of a loan based on current interest rates, as well as local land use regulations.

The price of the dollar or other currency is based on the stability of the country that issued the currency and the likelihood the currency unit will remain at roughly current value so it can continue to be used in a predictable way as opposed to going to zero like some whack third world country currencies. More stable countries can offer bonds at lower rates than less stable countries. Same is true for municipal and state level bonds in the US.

Everything that has a market has a real world driver that can be used to explain long term price changes as most short term changes. Except fake coins like bitcoin, eth, etc.

There is no real world event or driver that impacts the price of bitcoin. It is driven by unregulated corruption in the market by big players and the FOMO of small players. I've tried several times to discuss and explain this difference to my nephew but like all crypto bros his brain shuts off and he starts spouting crypto bro nonsense when I go there.

Specifically what I ask him is this,
"The price of oranges is almost entirely based on how well the orange crop did in the previous growing season. What is the real world equivalent driver for the price of bitcoin?" He babbles.

Other than being a crypto bros he's quite intelligent, has an engineering degree, makes 6 figures as a well liked and promotes engineering manager at a real company, owns a rental property, has a great girlfriend. Got it all going on. Except he's also a mindless crypto bros who believes in crypto coin magic. It's super weird trying to talk to him about it.

Obviously the answer is there is no real world driver to bitcoin prices. I closely follow the market news daily for the stock market as well as crypto. When I look at news for the DOW or NASDAQ price changes are always based on some news item. When I look at bitcoin news they describe the ups and downs but never give an explanation. They don't even pretend there is a real world driver for cost changes.

All these companies that put money in have their crypto fund labeled as "high risk". They each put in a relatively small amount of money they can afford to lose, just riding the wave. They know there's no there there. If it was real they'd put in money on the same scale they put into stocks and commodities. When the day comes they pull the rest of their money out, the price is crash all the way back to near nothing while the crazy crypto bros scream about buying opportunities and HODL! gOInG to a miLLiOn!!! Poor dumb bastards. Crypto bros do not understand the most trivial basic concepts of the market and real world value.

>Until Elon listened, they made good cars. Once his ego pumped and he decided he knows best, he pulled the plug on radar/lidar and that basically stalled self driving for a decade, same with 4680 battery, gigantic aluminum stamping pressess etc

What car did Tesla make before Elon bought the company? The roadster which wasn't even a 100% Tesla design.

My new model 3 is better than my old model 3.

Cameras are a problem? Now I have a front camera I didn't have before when all I got was sensors screaming at me but having no real idea how close I was to exactly what.

My new model 3 has longer range.

My new model 3 is waaay quieter on the highway at every speed.

My new model 3 cost the same in absolute dollars but these were post Joeflation dollars so in real world spending power cost a lot less.

My new model 3 has FSD. And so what? What is the use case for FSD? Why does any normal adult need FSD? And a change to cameras delayed useless FSD for ten years? Really? That's why every one else has level 5 FSD. Oh wait, no, they don't. No one has anything better than level 3.

Starship is following the same "push to failure" test process Falcon did. But I'm sure you know better. You're a rocket scientist who was responsible for designing uh that other successful rocket, the one that was uh great, because you're really smart and have designed rockets. If only Elon had asked you we'd have FSD, free tourism to Mars, free roadsters for everyone that run on Mr. Fusion and dogs n cats would be friends globally!

The slashdot Dunning Kruger effect is real. Very easy to explain your post.

Uh... soooo....

You think deflation, over production, a zillion cars rotting in lots that will never be sold wasting the resources used to build those cars is good because somehow economic laws do not apply in China for uh reasons.

High inflation is bad for any economy. So is deflation. Deflation incentivizes people to -not- buy or engage in the economy because they know the longer they hold out to buy something, the cheaper it will be. This rates a death spiral. Companies not selling will go out of business. Their employees will stop spending. Which will reduce e ok mic activity, usually make deflation worse which leads to less economic engagement and so on down the toilet.

China's economy does not get to magically ignore these basic facts about how deflation, over production, etc works in an economy. Xi can not just declare China is immune from economic reality and basic math.

Crashes are not good. It took a lot of resources to build those companies. When they crash their resources are not 100% recovered for the mythical replacement companies. The best economic outcome is the result of good de idiot making where supply meets demand. No waste, everyone gets their needs/wants fulfilled at a fair price based on real world market forces, no one loses their job because of waste in the system. A win for everyone.

It's weird that someone would think having an endless serious of business cycles of crashes is a good thing. Replacing the former big companies with new big companies doesn't even satisfy the "I hate corporations" thing. Same corporations with new names fixes nothing.

Inflation/deflation, the results of overproduction, etc is first semester freshman Econ 1 stuff.

The only way overproduction covid possibly make sense is if you plan to flood the market of some target country to destroy their native businesses then raise prices later because their industry was destroyed. To prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening is why there are international agreements to "outlaw" dumping, individual companies may impose tariffs or just flat out bar foreign imports in a market to protect native industries from predatory dumping.

So, sure China can overproduce but they are not selling those cars to anyone anywhere. Their cars are either unwanted or blocked from illegal dumping. How is overproduction good for China?

The left looooved Musk when they thought he was one of them. And the nerds were suckered in by all the green EV and mission to mars showmanship crap.

The turning point was freeing people to speak their minds without extreme one sided censorship on Twitter. I recall many people on the net including right here on slashdot prior to that who told conservatives to go build their own internet if they wanted free speech. Ok. We both bought and built those sites. And the left lost their shit. "We didn't mean you should actually build your own net! We weren't serious! We were just taunting you because we owned everything and t got away with treating you like shit!"

The pendulum swings -really- hard when it comes back. The left has had a good run since the late 60s. They had 60 years to fuck shit up. And boy did they fuck shit up. It's all over but the crying now. Musk isn't the leader of that. Trump isn't either. Nor Kirk. They didn't lead anything. They followed. In order to get political power they had to say the things conservatives said and believed and then -act- on those words or get pushed aside. The couple of times they go off message they get slammed from the right and get back on track. The right is in full ascendancy as a majority of normal people have finally had enough. In 2024, the so called blue wall went 100% red for the first time in since Reagan swept the country in 84. Turns bullshit has been defeated in the UK and most of Europe. It is dying here. DEI is dying. HR departments are getting gutted. DEI requirements from banks and investment houses are dead. It's over. The story has already been written. The left had their chance and blew it big time and got swept into history's dustbin.

On a good day the entirely leftist lineup combined gets close to Fox's every numbers. All the lefty newspapers are struggling. Blue states are choking on their own bad policies. California is back to scheduled power outages. Chicago pays their teachers 130k but has a sub 20% reading and math rate for high school graduates. NYC just elected a man who has less real world experience than my teen. She's at least run a lemonade stand. Seattle, wow, well it's Seattle. Portland continues their decline. Detroit has been struggling to crawl back for decades. And on n on n on as normal people flee these places taking their high income tax dollars with them leaving behind the takers not the makers.

Demographics is destiny. The left aborts their children by the millions.

This is not a debate or an argument or a fight. It is just how the world is, like it or not. The left has lost, we're merely living through that transitional process now. After Trump we'll have 8 years of Vance. Pelosi and Schumer made sure there was no Dem bench to replace them when they aged out. Pelosi in particular undercut and killed the future of the Dem party for her own personal gain. She doesn't care as she'll be dead soon anyway and despite destroying the party she'll be lionized by most of the left. Weird. Instead of an experienced and believable next gen we get AOC and that Texas fraud and omg Bernie is still alive somehow.

I came here when slashdot was a new site because it was packed full of brilliant, educated, and self aware people who really understood shit. Those days have been gone for a long time. Now I come here to see people squeal about maga and Trump and bark at the moon. The bat shit crazy self reinforcing ultra leftist thought bubble here is super entertaining. Never change, guys. Never change.

The Elon 180 from beloved assumed-lefty nerdy guy to super Nazi based on pretty much nothing was hilarious. He was a rich tech guy. Of course he was libertarian. How do we know? Because prior to buying Twitter he didn't talk about politics. All leftists can't help but talk politics. Someone silent is either conservative, independent, libertarian or apathetic. Never a leftist, you guys are loud af.