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Cake day: May 1st, 2026

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  • The very broad funds definitely will - VTI/VTSAX - but at lower weights and under less time pressure than the rigid index funds (VOO/VFIAX). That takes off a lot of the liquidity squeeze and (presumably) reduces their loss.

    But you have to remember that people who use these funds intentionally invest in obvious losers and willingly overpay for hyped stocks because they believe, in the long run, that buying obvious losers is more than balanced by also buying the unexpected winners.

    SpaceX is just the first time an oligarch tried so obviously to rig the passive investor structure to his favor, and I’m glad the S&P people didn’t cave.







  • 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.







  • 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?





  • When an alcoholic sets about seeking forgiveness, they’re supposed to go around to the people they’ve wronged and apologize. They’re also supposed to recognize that they make poor alcohol choices and need to give it up.

    Maybe the MAGA people could recognize that they make poor political choices and give up their voting and their activism.

    Like, I try to think how I would react if I made a choice so monumentally bad that thousands of people died, people were tortured, or an entire national economy thrown into disarray. There’s no reparation I could pay to compensate; no sacrifice I could make to balance the scale. That’s kind of the point of forgiveness: the wounded party has not been made whole, maybe can not be made whole, but accepts that trying to wring compensation out of the offender will only make another injured party. But there’s still the question of how to keep the offender from doing it again.