Tonight on GeekNights, we review Hades. It's great, and exhibits a level of polish that is honestly rare. In the news, reddit nerds are gaming GameStop stock leading to interesting consequences, Microsoft continues to struggle with Xbox Gold vs Xbox Live, and the Internet sort of went down for a bit earlier today.
Things of the Day
Episode Links
On Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/46722382
Live Stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8xzHK22FE&feature=youtu.be
We paying back Reggie for all he’s done for us.
Surely nobody is still buying GameStop shares now, are they?
Some are. Others are diversifying. The current big thing is shares in Nikola, a propably-a-scam electric truck company.
Really? I’m surprised to hear it. Shame. I was actually hoping they’d remain private.
This kinda made me hope they could be a part of decent energy reform when dealing with last mile shipping.
I mean, they might still be! They’re really not doing anything different to Tesla(ie, taking pre-orders on vehicles that don’t exist and they can’t make yet, promising things they can’t currently deliver), it’s just that they’re further back in the process, and there’s not really any evidence they CAN deliver yet.
If it makes you feel any better, the Nikola truck is exactly as real, currently, as the Tesla Semi.
I’m mostly uninterested in their electric vehicle offerings. Only reason I’m interested is because I do have faith in hydrogen fuel cells as a store of excess energy, better than most of our current stores.
For that reason I’m a bit hopeful they manage to make hydrogen a viable fuel source for anything.
I figured, but you do understand it’s the relevant part of their business, considering that it’s their primary focus of development right now.
If you’re curious, here’s a video that talks about some of the dodgier aspects of them.
Well I understand that now, that’s sorta why I consider it a shame they’re scammier than I originally thought.
Well, if you want one positive, they might actually have less of an issue with hydrogen distribution than it sounds - there’s a LOT of fueling stations that are already set up for LPG, and it’s not THAT hard to convert some of that to Hydrogen, which solves one of their big problems.
I mean somebody on wallstreetbets literally posted about buying in at the literal peak today so who the hell knows what these absolute mad lads are up to.
I don’t know how I feel about this whole situation other than “huh maybe pinning your entire economy to a game of trading fictional value is a bad plan.”
Oh yeah, the WSB discord got shut down(For hate speech and misinformation, both of which are both true and relatively well evidenced), and WSB itself has been flipped to a private subreddit. There’s also some talk about the SEC going after them, because their approach to trading, particularly what they can and cannot do or say while doing so could be described at best as “People who don’t know the regulations exist, and think the SEC can’t find any records of it if they don’t say it in public.”
It’s a weird situation for sure, but “fictional value” has a lot of great uses, like dollars.
Ah. This is all making more sense now.
And there’s a throughline that runs from r/wallstreetbets to r/thedonald to Gamergate and 4chan. There’s a shared aesthetic happening here but also a common worldview, the nihilism that Levine talks about that comes from some combination of boredom, lack of purpose (shared or individual), and a disintermediated, hyperconnected network that brings together enough individual sociopaths to create something that resembles a community.
The recent stock hacks got the attention of one Elizabeth Warren.
Not a fan of ascribing collective action to upset capitalist systems as inherently alt-right. No doubt there is a large representation of “internet piece of shit” in r/wallstreetbets but articles like this are dangerously close to equating populism with fascism.
kay I’ve read about it a bit more now, and while I think articles like this are an interesting framing, it’s maybe a knee jerk reaction. The crossover between racist shitheads and people making money from anti-wall street shenanigans makes it a messier situation than it could be.
