Or how about your opinions on yourself? Analysis of your own behavior, done by AI, seems like a a decade of therapy provided by a maybe-good-or-bad psychologist happening in minutes. The impact of that could change how you think about the world by reinforcing biases you hold or weakening strengths by making you self conscious.
Ultimately you run the risk of having a computer program redefine who you are as a human and that begs the question of whether you’re really you after that?
Exactly! That's another thing, and I don't wanna be way too self aware , I fear it'll redefine me (I know a lot for the good but then also where do you draw the line when a machine starts to redefine you?)
Damn strangely good times we are living in, (that's what every generation thought looking around themselves).
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
That’s still important. GenX is smaller than the boomers or millennials.
If millennials and young men continue supporting maga and Trump’s party as they did last election, it won’t help much if Boomers expire.
Boomers also surprisingly voted slightly less for Trump than previous elections, his coalition in 24 expanded a bit to Hispanics and young men etc. he won due to inflation and covid imo, and probably due to sexism and only 107 days for Kamala to campaign (thanks Biden).
In that case though Paramount offloaded 25% to foreign wealth funds and had Larry Ellison willing to provide guarantee on(according to google) almost $50b of debt.
Besides the Larry Ellison, Trump, and Middle East backing, Paramount and WB's businesses have synergy.
Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.
GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.
They have deep synergies in the collectibles market. There's a Venn diagram with eBay on one side and Gamestop on the other, and cultural characters like Logan Paul with his $16m Pokemon card right in the intersection.
This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.
I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.
Hell, if they promised to do literally anything differently I’d support they. Worst case it’d be entertaining. Best case, both companies will be utterly destroyed.
I could see a synergy. Remember when there was a small trend of strip-mall "We'll sell on eBay for you" shops?
That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.
Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."
If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.
Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.
You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.
I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.
To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?
it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data
you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.
the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information
This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution?
Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.
> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?
Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.
The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.
> If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny
If they never make money, you’re fine. If they make a lot of money, it will get flagged ex post facto. Regulators then check if you or your family have any affiliations with the issuer; if they do, it’s flagged further. All of this typically happens automatically after companies’ stock prices move significantly.
The robot vote is a critical and quickly growing minority group since Wall-E v Sanders determined that all sentient robots were to be treated as citizens. Immediately after, Citizens United was rendered useless and large corporations moved their investments from campaign finance to literal voting machines.
I am a bit confused with the consistency of this community in speaking about MBA’s running their orgs or PM’s making bad decisions… it feels like more resistance by engineers to learn business than the business side not learning code. What I mean is that what a company values seems to be widely understood and the reaction from HN is “they’re wrong.” If anything, this is the green light for engineers to step into the business side and fix all the complaints they’ve had for decades.
> I didn't get into programming for the money, it's just been a nice bonus.
Exactly the same for me! If kind of feel like an artist whose paintings are worth more more easily than a paint or music artist… But boy would I be poor if this art were worthless!
It's also such a weird claim, how the fuck are we going to be left behind when the skill level is just entering text in a box... a skill we literally do for our jobs..
Ultimately you run the risk of having a computer program redefine who you are as a human and that begs the question of whether you’re really you after that?
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