ryandward

Yeah, before today I'd have likely dismissed such comments as "conspiracy theory" but, RobinHood literally disabled the ability to buy, or even search for these stocks on their platform.

The biggest flaw of conventional economic theory is that "people are rational".

Even as an econometrician, I would never call it dumb. It's a virtual incarnation of Occupy Wall Street. These guys are probably spending less than those who protested several years ago did. Heck, you can buy a stock and still go to work. No need to forego weeks of labor.

Nobody is gambling money away. The sentiment is that they are knowingly _throwing_ it away to send a message.

John Maynard Keynes quips that "in the long run we are all dead."

If I'm not mistaken, that's kind of the point. People are willing to throw money away to punish Wall Street.

Exactly -- reducing the barriers to market entry while increasing widespread market understanding reduces the _unique_ opportunity for arbitrage that Wall Street has enjoyed.

This emergent behavior seems a lot like DDOS, but in the stock market.

This kind of emergent behavior is reminiscent of DDOS attacks.

I agree, there might even be a correlation between "incorrect confidence" and creativity. It's important to note though that other countries have been dealing with the fallout of their bad mistakes for centuries, while the US is still relatively young.

A few weeks back I went to the LibreOffice conference and the vibes were really encouraging. It is really a strange time we live in, where there are these fundamental structural changes in gatherings, bringing communities together in a totally virtual space.

These FOSS conferences are a huge deal and really thrive on community support. I encourage you to go, if for no other reason to get a feel for where the projects are going.

There's something fundamentally different that seems to cut cleanly along cultures.

Growing up in a Mexican culture, I have always been taught to be chaste and pious, but it just isn't something I internalized. Instead, my peers were a much bigger influence.

It seems more common in some other cultural contexts to internalize this kind of self-denial with overtones of purity.

Even as a gay man, I never found the need for dating apps, since there isn't as much of a binary distinction between friends/acquaintances and romantic partners.