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Cake day: 2026年5月1日

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  • What I’ve seen indicates SpaceX will become something like 0.1% of S&P and 0.5% of Nasdaq. If a retirement fund is one of those indexes, and they get ‘forced’ to buy at 2x SpaceX’s eventual value, then that’s a loss of 0.05-0.2%. $50-200 on $100,000 principal.

    Most normal people won’t notice that among the usual stock market noise. Over a hundred million account, though, it’s a huge amount of money getting funneled into the thousands accounts able to front-run the index inclusion, which means, in turn, a huge amount of money getting funneled into the dozens of VCs who got into SpaceX pre-IPO.

    It’s like the scam from Office Space where they collect the rounding errors on interest.



  • tburkhol@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzFlipper!!
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    3 天前

    I had a…call? survey? at some point from an entity that probably gave rise to this data. It was basically a push-poll that used question order and positive reinforcement to try to get people to agree that abortion is murder.

    Mostly, it tried to conflate “human” with “a human,” starting out with things like “are cells isolated from humans still human?” “Can cultured cells be called ‘viable?’” “So would you agree that tissue cultured from a human donor is viable, human tissue?”






  • At what point does a tax on equities essentially become a continuous draw-down of wealth on the same money year after year, resulting in absolutely no incentive to invest in business and for that matter a situation where it is impossible to build up any wealth? How will startups be funded? How will large, shoot for the stars projects be funded?

    That’s actually the point: use taxes to force rich people to make high risk investments.

    If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your farm to pay the property taxes, then you sell your farm to pay the taxes and someone else gets to put the capital to better use.

    If you can’t figure out how to turn enough profit on your $10B company to pay the wealth tax, then you have to sell enough of it to pay the tax, and someone else gets more say in how the company runs.

    Wealth tax encourages people with ungodly fortunes to make bigger, more risky bets, because they have to overcome the constant drain of wealth tax. Ultra-wealthy shouldn’t just coast along on the low returns of super-safe investments, because those are the people who can afford to lose part of their fortune.

    Instead, we have the guy with $1000 YOLOing his life savings on GME options, because the $80 he can get from an index fund isn’t going to get him to retirement, while Berkshire Hathaway is sitting of $300B of US treasuries.






  • Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.

    The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.


  • I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.

    Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?