Tag Archives: WWW

Stonks Game Stops At This Stop

Posted on by John Klein

Hedge funds that bet against Game Stop are crying foul as they lose a fortune, because the crowd noticed their weakness and exploited it. Sounds very Wall Street. Is it against the rules? How could it be in a market that has too few rules. The difference now is that the crowd has the power instead of the billionaires, so it can’t be fair, right?

Hedge funds basically borrowed money to buy stocks for Game Stop that shouldn’t even have been available for sale (136%??), and a crowd of investors very publicly noted this situation, explained publicly what they were going to do, and the hedge funds didn’t immediately back down and take a small loss, and so lost the entire amount. As a result of not being able to cover their loss, they were forced to buy the stock they bet against, pushing the price up even further. A short squeeze happened with Tesla in the past year too, part of the reason for its stock price meteoric rise.

Billionaire CEO defends Redditors; CNBC host sounds like a whiner sad that his team made a bad bluff and got called.

Can’t tell if joking… @theserfstv · “lol Gamestop just became an S&P top 500” If true and it qualifies, that would require it be included in the S&P list of the top 500 stocks, like Tesla, pushing its price up further.

@IGN · “Amidst ongoing GameStop stock fluctuations, WallStreetBets has been banned from Discord for allowing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” and has gone private on Reddit.” https://bit.ly/3t25EEC

@JuddLegum · “Funny no one mentions that the primary “victim” of the GameStop trading, Gabe Plotkin, worked for SAC until the firm pled guilty to insider trading in 2013 and paid $1.8B in fines to the SEC and this week, Plotkin got a 2.75B bailout from his old boss, Steve Cohen, SAC’s founder.”

Memes are flowing:

“You said crypto was too volatile? Mmhmm… (Woman tipping hand)

Wall Street: Crypto is volatile.
GameStop: Hold my Beer (mug)”

“GameStop, AMC, Tootsie Roll, BlackBerry: there’s a theme here and it’s elder millennial nostalgia.”

“Hold the line, “They can take our subreddit, but they can never take our $GME”

– Actually they can take it, and will probably try. These folks need to learn about Bitcoin, badly.

ADDED:

Podcast on Sunday

Posted on by John Klein

Jeff Cliff interviewed me for his Facebook Live stream on Sunday. We discussed Saskatchewan politics, media, blogging, censorship, and the Amazon Fires.

For instance, I can link to Facebook, but people trying to link here from Facebook are told my blog doesn’t meet Facebook’s “Community Standards”. If you can figure out why, that would be quite the feat.

Also noticed that http://www.abandonedstuff.com isn’t redirecting to this WordPress address right now, so I don’t know if that’s a permanent problem introduced by WordPress, or something else.

For a Decade It was Harper Horror

Posted on by John Klein

Now, it may be Trump’s turn to make everything worse. I’m not planning on blogging about Trump very much, however. The man gets far too much attention, and that’s one of the things that brought him to power in the United States. While Harper was wrecking Canada, I couldn’t help but write about his lying, cheating, and bad governance. I think I can help writing about Trump. Today is an exception. Sorry.

Many of his supporters are fully delusional. The example below says “Only dopes use snopes,” referring to the meme/fact-checking website with an excellent reputation for explaining the root of misinformation circulating online. To attack Snopes, Stefan cites Breitbart, a racist “news” site which backs Trump.trump-supporter-delusional

What brought up this shameful incident again?

IT Problem At Saskatchewan Government

Posted on by John Klein

What’s going on?gov-sk-down

http://www.gov.sk.ca has been down a for a day.

 

The Forest For The Trees: Harper’s Fudgey Forestry Figures

Posted on by John Klein

I have a feeling that some webpages will be changing significantly in the coming years at the Government of Canada.

“At 0.02% of its forested area, deforestation in Canada is among the world’s lowest”
vs.
“That means human activities disturbed 20,000 hectares of pristine forest every day [worldwide] for the past 13 years,” the group said.

Of that degradation, more than a fifth — 21.4 per cent — occurred in Canada, the study found. That’s more than any other country. ”
That’s 94965000 hectares over those 13 years. At 21.4%, Canada deforested virgin forests covering about 20322510 hectares. Each year that’s 1,563,270 hectares disturbed or gone.
The Harper government, not concerning itself with natural forest, claims these numbers:
“In 1990, 64,000 hectares were lost to deforestation and in 2012 this figure dropped to 45,800 hectares [lost that year].”

How could these two claims be reconciled? Look at the satellite imagery for yourselves, perhaps?

The assumption on the ground in northern Alberta is that everything is fine:

Comparing the Huff Po reported study to the Harper Gov site is challenging, because one focuses on deforestation worldwide and of “disturbed” virgin forest, while the Harper figures focus on deforestation rate reduction. That’s the same technique used to give the impression that carbon emissions were going down, when it was intended to show the rate of the increase was going down. Remember the “intensity targets” trick?

Each view gives a maximized number for the shitty situation. The Forest Watch group gets to give a huge number for any area of disturbed, but not totally destroyed forest, and the Harper government peddled the notion that the rate of destruction was falling sufficiently to allay concerns. To know if the rate of deforestation was falling in a meaningful way, you’d have to calculate if the rate of deforestation takes it to zero before too much virgin forests are lost (which will cause species extinctions and contribute to climate change {causing yet more extinctions}).

source:
Harper Government website:

At 0.02% of its forested area, deforestation in Canada is among the world’s lowest, yet many myths exist about the state of our forests. The reality is that Canada is a world leader in sustainable forest management. Canadian forests are healthy, productive and thriving.

Deforestation is an important issue, since shrinking forest cover reduces biodiversity, affects soil and water quality, impacts wildlife habitat and influences climate change. The Canadian government carefully monitors and regularly publishes reports on deforestation. Our scientists combine satellite and aerial images with information about regional development, forest ecosystems, natural processes and local conditions to help monitor and manage the health of Canadian forests.

Here are some key facts about Canada’s low levels of deforestation.
Myth: Deforestation in Canada is increasing.
Fact: Canada’s deforestation rate is among the lowest in the world.

The annual deforestation rate in Canada in 2010 was less than 0.02% of our forests and the rate has been declining for over 25 years. In 1990, 64,000 hectares were lost to deforestation and in 2012 this figure dropped to 45,800 hectares.

Today, Canada’s 348 million hectares of forest lands represent about 9% of the world’s forest cover, but account for only 0.3% of global deforestation.

Killer Robots By Accident or On Purpose?

Posted on by John Klein

There are companies like Lockheed Martin making autonomous killing robots, and there are companies like Google making self-driving cars (which kill people by accident or poor design). At least cars don’t tend to kill on purpose, and the Google self-driving car hasn’t had a deadly accident (or one it caused, of any kind). So, what’s worse? Intentionally creating machines that can destroy humans, or accidentally doing it? Let’s aim at neither.

Many people have seen the Sci-Fi movie Terminator and Terminator 2. They were made before the WWW, and before Skynet seemed like a possibility. Now we have 3D printers, we have walking and flying robots who can shoot, and we have a global intelligence network those machines connect directly to. We need to be very cautious in Artificial Intelligence development over the coming years, or a small group of people could make a mistake that could cost millions (billions?) of lives.

ConCalls: Documentary Underway

Posted on by John Klein

I was interviewed for the E-Day documentary film being wrapped up this Summer. What’d I say? You’ll have to wait until it’s been all put together. I can’t wait!

Please help Peter put this movie in front of thousands of Canadians.