What's Good: Jan. 29, 2021
Stonks, fucking around, and finding out.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. This week’s newsletter is a late-night edition again, sorry, but I promise it is for a really good reason (in my opinion). I just finished watching an incredible series of professional video game matches, it was a best-of-5 that went all the way to game 5, it was extremely fucking hype and I was screaming the whole time. I think that is a good reason, anyway. You can watch the series here if you want, it is the 100T-C9 series from today, the 29th.
Also this week - well, today - I went into the office downtown for the first time since last spring, and it was very bizarre. Not only was the office itself almost empty, but so too was downtown. I walked around a bit at lunch to catch some Pokemon in Pokemon Go, and it was like… a ghost town? Barely anyone walking around, nowhere near the same level of ambient noise, and tons of empty retail space. The poke place that was in my building’s lobby? Totally gone, no sign it was ever there. Spooky as fuck.
Also:
Stonks
I think I want to write a longer post about this tomorrow, as like a special edition thing, but it basically demands to at least be addressed.
The stock market has, uh, been kind of wild this week! The short version is that some hedge funds over-leveraged themselves in a risky bet against the stock of GameStop, and some people on Reddit figured out that they could drive the stock price up if they could convince enough other people to all buy the stock (or call options, which causes the brokers to buy the stock as a matter of course in order to hedge their bets, and if you don’t understand this I’ll explain it tomorrow).
That strategy was successful, and then it wasn’t, and then it was, and then it wasn’t, and now it kind of is? Not clear!
The big takeaway is not that the Redditors are geniuses or that the stock markets are stupid or that any one person or group of people has won or lost, or at least not yet. The takeaway, in my personal opinion, is that individual investors are like a new kind of force in the market, in the same way that hedge funds have been, historically. They are solving their collective action problem and some of them are making money doing it. And then, inevitably, many of them will lose money, or at least they will lose their investments. Probably. My guess is that the institutional investors are going to be better at knowing when to get their money out before a slide, and that they are going to be better able to act quickly during the slide, too.
Anyway, go read Money Stuff for this week - like, all of it, starting at the first article that mentions GameStop:
It is an amazing collective accomplishment to create a new thing, from scratch, that is valuable just because we collectively agree that it’s valuable. It is amazing to find a way to create that collective agreement from nowhere. Once you have it, you can actually do useful things with Bitcoin—as a store of value, a currency, whatever—that you couldn’t do before. Bitcoin created real financial value out of, essentially, the human imagination.
That’s cool but it’s also a terrifying proof of concept. If pure collective will can create a valuable financial asset, without any reference to cash flows or fundamentals, then all you need is a collective and some will. Just hop on Reddit and create value out of nothing. If it works for Bitcoin, why not … anything? Why not Dogecoin? Why not Signal Advance? Tesla Inc.? GameStop?
Right.
Also, Redditors actually don’t like GameStop. Nobody who cares about games likes GameStop. It’s a shitty company. There is a deep and terrible irony to all of this. I am struggling to come up with an analogy, but no one is doing this because they want to save GameStop, they are doing this because they want to make money and fuck with hedge funds. The internet is full of memes because people are looking for a way to connect with each other, and now the stock market has become a meme because people have found a way to connect with each other, to be part of a shared experience, even if they end up losing their money. And also they found a way to fuck with people they don’t like in the process. Fucking with people you don’t like is a core element of the human condition, who knew.
Haha contract go brrrr
Did you know that a bunch of the shit you “agree” to in those giant contracts is wholly unenforceable if you ever end up needing to challenge it? No really, I mean it! But like there’s nothing you can do about it, isn’t that great:
The root problem is that consumers are simply outgunned. Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don’t have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company’s terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies’ policies. That number would probably be much higher today.
A professor from my law school also makes the point that even if consumers knew what was in the contracts, that might make them more enforceable. Which, okay, point taken, whether a consumer knows what is in the thing they allegedly agree to is an important part of the analysis.
But my hope is that analysis of these contracts leads to a reform in how we litigate adhesion contracts generally. It’s not actually the case that consumers have an opportunity to negotiate these contracts ex ante or select from alternatives in the marketplace that have the terms they desire. Companies aren’t willing to spend the time and money bargaining, and they all end up adopting the same terms - terms that are unfavorable to consumers, like compulsory individual arbitration.
You know what would be a super cool and effective policy that Biden could do? Ban compulsory arbitration. If it’s so great, let consumers opt into it! Free markets! Nyeh!
Finding out
Well, some folks sure did fuck around:
Twenty-three days after a mob ransacked Congress in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win, federal prosecutors have charged more than 150 individuals for their involvement in the breach and have opened over 400 case files.
And over three weeks and a steady stream of charging papers, some themes have begun to emerge.
Yes, dozens of people simply incriminated themselves, posting selfies from the Capitol Rotunda or bragging to frenemies on social media who quickly ratted them out to the FBI.
But the feds have made pretty quick work of that group, and their priorities have shifted in recent days to others who engaged in violence against police and the media during the attack — and especially those who came prepared for battle.
“Look at Jan. 6 as like a bug light for domestic extremism: It brought everybody there, but everybody wasn’t of the same capabilities,” said Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, which has catalogued the hundreds of court filings related to the Capitol attack.
As the government works through one of the most expansive investigations in its history, it’s largely dealt with the trespassers. Now, it’s after the conspirators and seditionists.
Snitches get plea deals
lol:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.
Democracy dies in darkness
I don’t know, this is kind of heartwarming but also deeply depressing:
The coronavirus vaccine had arrived in Leon County, Fla., and suddenly CD Davidson-Hiers’s iPhone was lighting up with calls and texts.
Seniors over 65 could now get the shots, but many said they were hitting a wall when they tried to register with the local health department. The agency’s phone played an error message when they dialed, and an online appointment form seemed to go nowhere.
Could Davidson-Hiers help?
It was the first sign for the 26-year-old Tallahassee Democrat reporter that the technical and logistical problems hindering the nation’s vaccine rollout were hitting her north Florida county, too. So she started responding. She didn’t have all the answers, she told one anxious caller after another, but she would try to find out.
Don’t get me wrong, she is a hero, but this should not be necessary. Our country is failing its most vulnerable citizens and we need to get our fucking shit together. Every Democrat should be running on this.
Adventures in wonderland
City council meetings don’t often get heated in Sequim, Washington, a small town of roughly 7,000 people popular with retirees from Seattle.
But five days after militia members, crazed Trump supporters, and QAnon believers violently broke into the U.S. Capitol, a city council meeting buzzed with one question: did Sequim Mayor William Armacost still believe in QAnon?
“Do you still stand behind your belief that QAnon is a truth movement?” Armacost critic Marsha Maguire asked during a council meeting held on Zoom.
Armacost didn’t say anything, but the QAnon questions weren’t over. Next up, a Sequim resident who gave his name as “Josh” had an urgent question for Armacost: Could Armacost hold off on joining any new QAnon insurrections, even if just for a few weeks?
“At the very least, for the rest of this month, if you could promise not to commit any act of insurrection, that would be great,” Josh said at the meeting. “Just as a citizen of Sequim, I don’t like to be represented by terrorists. So if we could promise to finish out this month without killing anyone, that would be great.”
Did you not read the colony policy
Personally I think that when dystopian video game song lyrics become reality it generally indicates that your business plan is problematic, these people seem to disagree:
Despite graduating college with a degree in engineering, James could only find employment in the service industry. While continuing to search for technical positions, he noticed job postings for a company called Revature. The company, which calls itself the “largest employer of entry level software engineers,” advertises positions in states like Kansas and Alabama, as well as in Texas where James was living at the time.
“One day someone is going to ask you where you got your start,” read one Revature job posting. “This is IT!”
As James — who asked that his real name not be used in this article due to the confidentiality clauses in his contract — looked more closely at Revature, he realized the company wasn’t recruiting for a typical job. Instead, it was recruiting college graduates from all over the country to participate in a three-month training program, which prior to the pandemic was held in person at one of Revature’s six campuses. During this training period, Revature provided associates housing and paid them $8 an hour — although housing costs were deducted from that wage. After students completed the program, successful graduates were placed on a tech project for a Revature client. The idea was that if all went well, that client may hire the Revature associate to a full-time position.
Video games good
Gene Park wrote a great opinion piece about video game journalism this week, and while it’s obviously mostly targeted at journalists, I think understanding the major points is also valuable for, you know, the rest of us. He’s right, you know:
Reporters need to understand what video games are before they write stories about video games. That’s because video games are more than just a medium. Video games can serve an almost limitless number of functions, from a consumer entertainment product to a living library for government-censored speech and research. Video games are closer to rock-and-roll or hip-hop, a living culture in which about 2 billion humans on Earth participate.
So, imagine sending a health reporter to cover the impact of listening to certain rap lyrics over and over again, all while not understanding the context of the lyrics, where they come from, or what they’re saying. This is essentially what New York Times reporter Matt Richtel, along with his editors, did when they published this front-page Sunday story from January, “Children’s Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers.”
The headline and premise seem sound. There are many valid concerns, as well as unknowns, over the amount of exposure we’re all getting to digital media while the U.S. remains on lockdown from covid-19. But the framing of the piece is flawed and embarrassing, using a Colorado parent’s worry over their child’s Xbox usage as its case in point. This framing conflates digital screen time to video games, which are two different things. The piece quotes a Stanford University professor who warns of a period of “epic withdrawal” because young people won’t be able to “sustain attention in normal interactions without getting a reward hit every few seconds.” This may sound like many games, but it doesn’t encompass the totality of what video games can offer.
The practice of parachuting in to an unfamiliar topic or coverage area to recount tales of moral hand-wringing is a poor one in general, but it can be particularly harmful when it comes to video games, an understudied industry which requires more and closer scrutiny. Relying on stereotypes and broad generalizations obscures those issues by reducing video gaming to a kind of uniform, monolithic hobby. Through that kind of a lens, you’ll never see the industry’s real problems or even comprehend the issue Richtel’s story tries to address.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.