Welcome to the world of anonymous short seller hit pieces. These people are scum and they’re not even good at what they do. 99% of the time just make up a bunch of sensationalist bullshit. They are the new bottom feeders of the securities world, today’s version of boiler room folks.
Former Chicagoan here. Grew up there, lived there most of my adult life, raised kids there, and finally, thankfully, moved to another state three years ago. It's easy to pile on, but one of the main things that did it for me was sorta this realization that Chicago is more or less hopeless. There's no willingness to even discuss Chicago's problems honestly, let alone do something about them. The culture there is just too far gone - it's depressing. Was I worried that violent crime was going to imminently find its way to my doorstep? No, not really. But with three kids in Chicago Public Schools (no more dysfunctional, shameful organization exists in this country than CPS) I turned to my wife one day and said, "You know, we don't have to live like this." So we left.
I see woke as mainly two things. First, it’s the elevation of feelings above reality, and if need be redescribing reality to contort to certain people’s feelings. (“Certain people” leading into the second point) Second, it’s seeing everything through the lens of historical power imbalances, but importantly it’s taking an “ends justify the means” approach that discards all principles to rectify those imbalances…that rectification is itself the only principle.
It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.
In what bizarro world should holding cash in a perfectly legitimate bank to earn a negligible interest rate be considered "taking a financial risk" on par with like buying crypto or something???
I literally can't dream up a worse policy choice than to highly incentivize the almost immediate withdrawal of every non-insured deposit in the country from the banking system just so the money can be parked in t-bills. Every bank intervention has some degree of being unpalatable for various reasons, but you know why we do it? Because it's better than the alternative. Sorry. Remember when that money market fund broke the buck in 08? You can't have these sorts of products not getting par, all hell will break loose.
Right now, the thing that worries me the most is idiot politicians (redundant) inserting themselves and focusing on tangential things like who got paid a bonus or whatever. These people will - R and D - manage to screw it up.
I've been screaming about the OpenDoor's and RedfinNow's of the world for several years. These are in effect payday lenders for homes, dangling low all-cash offers to entice desperate sellers to hit the bid quickly. Ironically, these companies manage to lose money anyway, perhaps yet another sign that SFH's weren't meant for this. Incredible that even after 2008, we have yet to really learn that the financialization of people's homes should be pretty darn close to a non-starter.
Almost all of MSM had a noticeable, albeit restrained liberal bias for decades. This is what caused the birth of Fox News (which is no better) In the first place, it was just a natural response. That bias existed but it was tolerable, generally. Then Trump came along a few years after the woke cult emerged and the MSM had a radical cultural shift that amounted to “the ends justify the means.” Journalists had gotten replaced with activists who fancied themselves heroes doing god’s work. The collapse of journalistic integrity was shockingly swift.
The echo chamber and perverse cultural incentives in this profession are truly unimaginable. Now all the safeties have been removed, and as the journo-activism became so widespread it got normalized, like how at Enron everyone just thought fraud was normal because it’s all they saw every day. There’s no going back, the culture rot has metastasized.
Related, it always astounded me that newspapers had opinion desks. There is no more certain way to let political bias overtake the newsroom than having an entire opinion team to define the ideals of the company.
Ahhh, legacy mainstream media, where tech companies doing desperately needed layoffs just like practically every company in the world over an economic cycle is a nothing more than a singular conspiracy to "crush worker power." Never change my liberal echo chamber journalist friends, never change...
Could you be any more hyperbolic and disconnected from reality? Laying people off from a mismanaged company the spends too much (even by their own admission, because look at the hundreds of companies laying people off who don't have shareholders begging them to do so) is a sociopathic medieval process? Get a grip.
Folks, if it wasn't shareholders accelerating this process, it was gonna be the inevitable economic realities of mismanagement and losses. Shareholders are doing not only other shareholders but also these companies a favor by telling them to fix their problems before they get really bad. The cold reality is that the people getting laid off never should've been hired in the first place, the amount of waste at these companies is unfathomable...all the result of the bubble of dysfunctional managerial cultures (ie "Not making money is super awesome, yay!") and way too much money floating around. A dose of reality is much deserved and was gonna happen eventually anyway.
It is a fact that a disproportionate amount of women prefer men to be six feet or taller but only like 15% of men are that height.
All of this is just people unhappy about biology because it creates winners and losers. Losers think they'll have an easier time changing biology than themselves or simply readjusting their expectations.
(Never mind the insanity of this article saying it will help save the planet...wild how the NYT now prints stuff 10x crazier than something like Breitbart ever did, and no one cares)
Noah Smith and Scott Galloway are national treasures for their ability to be wrong about seemingly everything they open their mouths about...lots of value as nearly perfect contras.
True but it still might be better than the alternative of working just enough (~40 hours/week) to still make it hard to spend a lot of time on outside interests while not living very comfortably, financially speaking.
Rant: I have lost so much faith in our institutions’ (especially every federal org) ability to be objective in fulfilling their mission, that they’ve become so brazenly and unconditionally partisan, that I’ve come to the conclusion that SBF’s cozying up to so many of the right people on the favorable political side means that he’ll never see a day in jail, as unfathomable as that is. He’s embarrassed so many people that the pressure to sweep this whole disgusting mess under the rug will be enormous, and the fact that it’s now three weeks later and he’s still just walking around out in the open is strong evidence of this. You can see it every day in the reporting from the media, who describe this giant con as if it was a legitimate enterprise that just sorta - oopsies!! - went awry through poor judgment and silly hijinx. The whole thing was a fraud and STILL no one with a real voice is saying so. I have no words. This has a high likelihood for marking the time when rules just officially stopped mattering, no sin too large, if you can game the system politically.
There is no right wing media ecosystem. There is Fox, which I’ve literally never once in my life watched and have made fun of for two decades. Then there are a bunch of rinky-dink outlets no one even knows. There is however, a giant, ubiquitous, controlling ecosystem of liberal media and news and information outlets who we all used to rely on for being at least pretty much objective which I’ve grown insanely f-ing sick of and find beyond disgraceful (they’re all now far worse and more shameful than Fox ever was) since around 2016
Not one thing is different since he bought it. Nothing. Literally nothing. Some articulation that carefully explains...nothing about why anyone would be inclined to leave other then "zomg Elon doesn't like woke people noooo!"
Just amazing all these pearl-clutching progressives having their minds break because of nothing other than Elon buying it. Every single tech company of note, every major media outlet not named Fox, every university, all controlled by liberals and just one gets bought by someone who's not even really conservative just more like outwardly anti-woke and these people can't handle it and throw temper tantrums without even being able to articulate why. Hysterical.
A very large chunk of GAAP losses are attributable to stock comp expense (a quick and easy way to check cumulative profits/losses is looking at the balance sheet’s equity section for “accumulated deficit”) which still gets counted as an expense but since it’s non-cash it’s not a drain on whatever the company has raised. If you look at Uber’s last three FY’s, they’ve cumulatively reported losses of about $16 billion, and stock comp has been about $6.5 billion of that. For the vast majority of public companies this isn’t as material but for all these VC-backed, Bay Area-type tech companies they have this systemically dysfunctional culture where they dole out stock and options to no end.