Chapter One: Bozeman or Bust (lots of bust)
I had done it once again, like so many other years before, by traveling north to one of the harshest and coldest states that a hobo could possibly go to during the dead of winter, late-January 2021: Mon-fucking-tana. Or as the locals jokingly say, "Montucky". (edit: Shout-out to Montucky Cold Snacks, the cheap horse-piss watered down beer that is Montana's equivalent of Washington's "Rainier Ale" or Oregon's "Session Lager"). I digress.
If I was a goose, I'd surely be the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of the flock…the black sheep shitshow of a goose flying in the completely wrong direction at the worst time of the year. As forementioned, this was not the first time, nor second time, that I've done this. In fact, it's become a habit, if not straight-up routine.
Laramie, Wyoming circa November 2016. Glendive, Montana circa January 2015 Minot, North Dakota circa January 2014. Yukon, Canada circa November 2013. Bellingham, Washington circa January 2006. The list goes on, and on, and on…
And here I am. Bozeman Fucking Montana, circa January-February 2021. The locals say it's an unusually warm winter, which by Montana's standards might include 5 inches of snow in the afternoon and temperatures dropping below 10F degrees at night. However, according to the high standards of a low-class hobo born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, this weather is colder than a witches tit.
Now, that's not to say that I ain't prepared though. I assure you that I am. Sixteen years of living on the road and rails has made this black goose a well-seasoned bird, with all the trimmings. I have a military sleeping bag that can keep me alive down to negative 30 temperatures. My military backpack is waterproof, and so are the snowboarding pants that I wear under my insulated Carharrt overalls. I have alpaca wool thermal pants, merino wool socks, thermolite waterproof boots, thinsulated gloves, and several wool and polyster beanie hats. My dual-layer mountaineering tent can withstand hurricane-force winds and all the snow that a blizzard can muster.
Winter? Montana? Bring it bitch. Hit me with your best shot. You know I like it. wink
Sigh. However, DESPITE the freezing temperatures and shit tons of snow, there's a lil secret that I've learned during my many years of traveling, and that secret is certainly DUE to these wintery conditions: Jobs! Lots and lots and lots and lots of jobs! Jobs here, jobs there, jobs every-fucking-where. Hotel jobs, restaurant jobs, retail jobs, construction jobs, maintenance jobs, driving jobs, even jobs just to help other people get more damn jobs!
You want a job during winter? Well they got jobs out northern Californie way, Oregonie way, Montanie way, Washingtonie way, North and South Dakotie way, and every which way can go above above the Mason-Dixon line!
If you can't find a damn job in the Northwestern United States of America during winter, you ain't fucking looking, and that's a fact. If you got one arm and you can swing a hammer, or punch a number on a cash register, then consider yourself hired on the spot and you can start today.
Before this chapter turns into an entire damn book of its own (A Hobo's Guide to Finding Jobs) let's get back to the story here: Bozeman or Bust.
As I begin this chapter, I have a red-wine hangover that is enough to drive me to a bullet in the head. I made a pot of coffee only to puke it back up on my hands and knees in front the porcelain thrown. I think it was good ole Earnest Hemingway that once said "Write Drunk, Edit Sober". Experienced words of wisdom from a fine man that knew everything a man could possibly know about drinking shit tons of wine and writing shit tons of stories. I wouldn't be lying if I was to confess that Mr. Hemingway, along with Mr. Steinbeck and Mr. Twain, are drunken heroes of mine that I could only hope someday to sit alongside in the bookstores of Hell and Hades with a gallon of cheap Merlot. Salut, gentleman.
After puking, rolling cigarettes, drinking coffee, and puking several times more, I was finally able to sit down to try and remember what-the-fuck happened yesterday; a solemn meditation technique that involves tons of coffee and contemplation; a time to worship the asinine achievements that are accompanied in both rejoice and regret.
Yesterday started off sober as a saint. I had a job interview at this place I had found on craigslist, some place looking for fresh warm bodies to fill up their production-assembly line. I took a bus to the address they had given me, which ended up being the adress to the Bozeman City Bank.
"A bank?", I thought, as I wondered around the parking lot dumbfounded and confused for a solid 5 minutes, checking the address several times on my phone, wondering why on earth I've been sent to a state bank. After circling the parking lot, I noticed a door on the side of the bank that said "Job Choices Employment Services: Second Floor".
Godammit. I had been fucking conned. Fucking craigslist. I know what's going on here…this a goddamn employment agency that wants to take 10-15 percent of my paycheck, take away my rights to healthcare and benefits, in the so-called promise of finding me a "great career path of opportunity".
Employment agencies. Just like rats. The only "opportunity" here was them: Creatures of opportunity, parasites hellbent on scavaging peoples money and benefits. "A not-even-close-to-great career path of 9-5 slave-labor bullshit involving years of suckling away your mind, body, and spirit", the sign on the door should have read.
This was definitely a mistake. And anyone that has ever had the unfortunate pleasure of being with me can you tell one thing about me: I fucking love mistakes. I love making them, and I love learning from them. I am a walking-talking connoisseur of mistakes. In fact, I just made a mistake trying to spell connoisseur, so I asked Google "Hey Google, spell connoisseur", and due to lack of interpreting my Alabama accent, Google made the mistake of showing me the word Coitus. I have now learned that the word "coitus" is another word for sex. As a writer and the son of an English teacher, I love learning new words. As a human male, I love sex. So learning a new word for "sex" is a fantastic trade-off for that fortunate mistake!
I digress.
I decided to walk into the bank, up the stairs to the second floor, and down the hall to the employment agency. A well-dressed and very sexy debutant by the name of Tracy stood up and greeted me with a smile that was formal, professional, and admittedly very sexy.
While my dirty mind started playing cheap porn music, along with vivid images of me and Tracy wrecking that office like wild alleycats, I was suddenly snapped back into reality with Tracy's sexy voice, saying:
"Hey, you must be Mr. Huck! Are you here for the 3:00 o'clock interview? Could you please start by filling out this application? You can have a seat over at the desk here"…
Godammit. This employment agency was GOOD. I was Tracy's submissive little slut. I walked right where Tracy told me to walk, sat right in the chair Tracy pulled out for me to sit in, and I started filling out the application with the ballpoint pen that Tracy had somehow put in my hand without me even realizing it. Tracy could have stolen my wallet and the 11 dollars inside of it as well, had she wanted to, and I wouldn't have even noticed. And even if I had noticed, I would have let her do it anyway. Godammit!
As I started to fill out the application, I got to the section I dreaded most: job references. Oh boy…allow me to tell you a little about Huck's references, or lacktherof:
At my last job, I was fired because of a fight that broke-out between my ex-girlfriend and myself, which began with lots of shouting and shoving, and ended with me getting a black-eye from being punched in the face twice. Fun fact: Italian women are fiery as they are fierce, and bold as they are beautiful. And just like their male Italian counterparts, such as Sylvester Stalone or Al Capone, they know how to land a solid right jab. This fight erupted in the worker's dormitory for all employees to hear and see. And although I was the one with the swollen black eye, I was the one they decided to fire. C'est la vie, such is life. Que sera sera, it be what it fucking be.
We can scratch that job off as a reference, without a doubt.
The job before that, I was at a marijuana farm called "Great American Cannabis", in which my managers and co-workers tried to recruit me into a far-right group of sexist and racist baboons called "The Proud Boys".
There was a pre-determining factor in why that farm had hired me, and assumed I would be interested in their idealogical gang. That pre-determing factor was the very same factor that led Google to teaching me the wrong word and definition: my Alabama accent.
Great American Cannabis had hired me based on a phone interview, in which they assumed my southern accent indicated two things, in which case one of their assumptions was right, and one was wrong:
Assumption Numero Uno: Huck has an Alabama accent, which therefore indicates that he has years of experience working on farms, growing plants, and being an honest and hard-worker.
Assumption Numero Dos: Huck has an Alabama accent, therefore he must be idealogically aligned with far-right beliefs including sexism and racism.
Welp, I am proud to say that even that although a 50% winning percentage may be fine and dandy with gambling in Vegas, and can be seen as half full or half empty based on however optimisitic or pessimistic you might be, in the case of Great American Cannabis and The Proud Boys, those odds ended pretty badly.
As it turns out, despite being raised by a racist father and surrounded by bigotry in the not-so-sweet home of Alabama, those very dispositions made this black sheep child rebel from such ass-backward beliefs, and I am staunchly pro-civil rights, which means I am pro-immigration, and a proud supporter of the sufferage movement for womens right.
Obviously, that did not go very well with my co-workers at the farm, and I was fired within the first month. But wait, theres more tragic humor to the story of this farm, which I'll organize in two keypoints:
Keypoint Numero Uno: The farm was owned by Iranian immigrants. I…shit…you…not. That's right. YOU DID READ THAT CORRECTLY. Not only was the farm owned and managed by a minority group of immigrants, those very immigrants came directly from the very country is at the VERY TOP of White-America's shitlist: Iran.
Keypoint Numeros Dos: After I was fired based almost entirely according to my leftist and progressive views on race and gender equality, within just a couple of weeks nearly everybody on the farm was fired and replaced by cheaper immigrant labor in the form of Laotian women. That's right…a white-blooded American-born legal-working male, was replaced by brown-blooded, foreign-born, mostly-illegal-working females, on a farm owned and managed by right-wing racists and sexists that were anti-immigration. Once again, I…shit…you…fucking…not...let THAT shit sink in.
I literally cannot make this shit up, and let it be forever proof that reality, however tragic or ironic it may be, is far greater than fiction. You can write that last sentence in a letter, shove that puppy in an envelope, slap that bitch with a stamp, and mail it to the fucking MOON. Or you can mail it to Iran, or Laos, whichever you prefer.
However, I digress.
So, being that I was fired from Great American Cannabis by a bunch of Iranian Proud Boys, you can scratch that job off of the "reference" list as well. Sigh.
So, how about the job before that? Well, that's a hell of a story too, but I'll make it quick and cut shorter to the chase:
I worked on a fishing boat for a Mormon captain. Although I loved him like a Dad, and he often treated me like a son, my job ended in these words:
"Huck, I really like you. You're one of the hardest working deckhands I've ever had, despite it being a very terrible year for fishing. However, as a man that is a Latter Day Saint of God, as a Mormon, I'm going to have to ask you to leave because of three reasons:
1) You smoke cigarettes, marijuana, and drink alcohol and coffee.
2) You curse worse than a sailor.
3) You are an atheist/agnostic."
And in case you, the reader did not know: Mormons HATE cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, AND coffee. They are forbidden to curse, and they are not even allowed to tolerate the company of anyone that isn't a believer in God.
Well Godammit. How in the hell am I so goddamn misfortunate and unlucky, to be the must FIRST FUCKING PERSON in the entire HISTORY OF FISHING, that has gotten fired for using curse words and drinking whiskey. I couldn't even absorb the fact that my boss was firing me because I couldn't get over the fact that I was possibly the first sailor or fisherman in all of ocean-faring humanity that had gotten fired for doing what sailors and fisherman are guaranteed and known to do best: drinkin' and cursin'
We can also scratch THAT job off the possible reference list as well.
It was at this point in the office of Job Choices Bozeman that the porn music had long since stopped playing in my head, and that I suddenly and swiftly fell deeply into a full blown existential crisis right there in Tracy's office while simply trying to think of a single reference from my last 3 jobs. The unbelievable amount of misfortune, tragedy, irony, and utter insanity of my last 3 job experiences had truly started to sink in, and I was beginning to legitimately lose my temporary grasp on sanity along with my faith in humanity altogether in one great, big, sloppy sandwich of existential fucking crisis.
Allow me to self-diagnose this existential crisis sandwich by peeling off some of the layers of this enormous stinking onion that is in the middle of it all: Either that curse that was put on me a few years ago by a Mexican trainhopping gypsy from New Orleans is proof that curses are indeed fucking real, or either I am the unluckiest son of a bitch on this entire planet that is so very unlucky that I am slowly (or quickly) coming to the conclusion that this entire life is a simulation that is programmed by some sick comedic asshole that specializes in the tragedies of both irony AND misfortune. And though some people in this world call that programmer God or Allah or Jehovah, I call him Jeff. I call him "Jeff in Programming", with same amount of disdain and hatred that Michael Scott refers to "Toby in Human Resources" in the American version of the show "The Office".
(Sidenote: If you do not understand my last reference because you have not watched The Office, then you need to stop reading this book right now, go sign up for one month of Netflix, and spend that entire month binge-watching one of the greatest sitcoms ever made in the history of television: The Office (US Version). Go. Now!)
I digress.
As I collapsed into a full-blown existential crisis while thinking of job references on the second floor employment services office above Montana State Bank, my fantasy-based relationship with Tracy was also about to crumble into an existential crisis as well, based on two very important qualities:
Quality Numero Uno: Tracy and I had no relationship that actually existed outside of my head and a stupid job application form. We had never knocked over all of the filing cabinets, water-cooler, or broken the copying machine with tantric sex. That scenario never existed period.
Quality Numeros Dos: I was about to not only lie, but also commit non-existent adultery to Tracy, thus putting a very real end to a not-very-real relationship.
I stood up from the desk that me and Tracy had never fucked on, and I told Tracy that I had to use the bathroom. And though I did really have to use the bathroom, it wasn't for the purpose of pissing or taking a shit, it was for the purpose of throwing the application in the toilet and sneaking my way down the hallway and out of the employment agency. In which case, that is precisely what I did.
Upon stepping out of the door and back into the parking lot of Bozeman City Bank, I noticed another hot little woman across the street: A dazzling red-headed freckle-faced damsel by the name of Wendy, who promised in her fertile bosom the birth of two-dollar cheeseburgers and loaded baked potatoes. I went inside Wendy's house, and began to have an oral relationship by penetrating my mouth with nearly everything that was offered on Wendy's dollar-value menu.
Stop here, acquire coffee, booze, and cigarettes until I feel like writing again, which may be later tonight, tomorrow morning, or possibly fucking never

I wrote a long reply on why gambling, and loot boxes in particular, are bad...

So, inside some other post, I was asked why gambling is bad... My reply ended up being really detailed, so I'll promote it to a post of its own (just copy-pasting it here; no new words)... [Note: list of 3 points about loot boxes at the end...]
(I work at a company that sells gambling services... I see how the sausage is made...)
By the way, I love PoE and GGG. Still, loot boxes are bad.
I personally get to see the statistics side of oddsmaking. It's always about suckering you out of your money, because by definition all you are doing is paying more money as the price of getting less money (on average), but you also need to feel like you have a chance at getting the upper hand, even though in the long run you don't.
For example, sometimes, if you're really "good" at betting, you just end up working for the oddsmaker on a bad deal. It's really hard for them sometimes to get the odds perfectly right (although the profit margin still takes care of 99.9% of punters). So, if you're a professional gambler making a regular profit, what's basically happening is that you are investing an enormous amount of time and expertise to try and make tiny profits at the margins, and the bookmaker monitors your activity and learns about the market from you, at what ends up being a lower cost than if they hired experts to give them the same info on a salary. Plus you constantly run high risks! Which is why my company is full of ex-gamblers who were able to make a profit for a while, and intelligent enough to realise that they were still getting a bad deal, and come to the company and offer their services directly. (For another way gambling companies guarantee their own profits by passing on the risk to gamblers, research "balancing the books": yes, a professional gambler could make some profits this way, but if you're possibly making profits by taking on a risk that a large gambling corporation wants to get rid of, do you really think you're getting a good deal, especially considering how much time and expertise you sink into the activity? EDIT: more info)
The only way I know of to make a consistent and considerable profit off gambling is when a pro gambler is allowed to make a profit off other gamblers, in a move that a company makes to increase total amounts played. So, for one person to profit, many others are being seriously scammed, and the company is safely skimming its percentages off the top.
There are many different ways a gambling company presents bad deals to you, hoping that your intuition misfires about one of them and you decide to throw away your money. Examples... There are single bets, of course. But then there are also combinations, and these screw with your intuition--you can convince yourself based on a narrative (e.g. team 1 wins first half, team 2 comes back in second half), where in fact the actual hard cold odds are against you. There is "cash out" where you take a fraction of a likely-seeming win early (but at a loss), which of course simply taxes you for your risk aversion. There are "systems", creating more and more complex bets, until you convince yourself you've set up the perfect deal, and yet the company's profit margin keeps growing the more complex you make it.
Anyway, those are the parts I work on as a software guy. (By the way, this isn't the worst thing in the world, it's not as bad, as, say, the military industry or the military itself, or say religions or banks, because at some level gambling is voluntary. And making gambling illegal is a terrible idea-we should fight it through education, not prohibition. Still, I only work there because I'm currently a completely non-creative software grunt (and currently satisfied with that). If I get to the point of pursuing higher-level jobs, I'll look elsewhere.)
But the most nefarious part of all is the psychological work they pull on you. That's not my area of expertise, so if you want it explained you need to look elsewhere (recommended book: Thinking Fast and Slow--it's not about gambling, it's about psychology). They are constantly doing things to 1) give you false hope and 2) artificially trigger some pleasure response in you.
E.g. most people are naturally risk averse and loss averse, e.g. losing $10 brings more pain than winning $10 brings pleasure. In reality, a gamble is about paying, say, $10 to win an average of, say, $9, so that's a terrible and painful deal. In addition to all the advertising and bright colours and encouraging sounds and making you read success stories and all the other psychological manipulations, they can also straight up befuddle you with numbers. So, losing $10 brings more pain than winning $10 brings pleasure, but what if you pay $10 but you're not really at a risk of losing that much, because on average you win $9 back, so you're only really risking a single $, and yet if you get lucky you won't win a mere $10 but millions? Suddenly that sounds good, right? Risk $1 to win $10000000? Of course not: you're still risking $10 and taking $1 losses on average each time you play, and the high rewards are vanishingly rare and built into that average.
That's it about gambling for money. On loot boxes I'm no expert, but, beyond the basic problems (encouraging addiction, exploiting minors who beg money from parents and don't understand how they're throwing it away, generating gambling "pleasure" while giving you "bits" instead of any real value, etc), I can point out a couple of extra scummy aspects:

They can say "the box costs 30 points but all the possible rewards are worth at least 50, the average reward is worth 70 and the best is worth 400"... really??? Those prices are completely arbitrary... Who says the footprints are "worth" 50 or some random hideout decoration is "worth" 200? Talking about average microtransaction point values in a loot box is completely misleading.
Either you (a) lose on the statistics of getting complete sets or you lose on (b) being psychologically manipulated into buying extra stuff you didn't actually want so much (or (c) you just lose by getting useless stuff). Let's say you decide to pick up a couple of boxes and see what you get before buying more stuff. You might just get useless stuff, of course (case c). But what if you get the body armour or wings? Now you might say "I'll get more boxes to complete the set". But the chances of getting any one part of a set are not anywhere near as bad as your chances of completing a set (like map lab trials, but much worse because loot boxes contain many more items), so you are getting totally fleeced (case a). Alternatively you could go "oh look, I got x in the box, I'll buy matching items y and z from the shop later" so you think you got x cheap and y and z at normal prices. But you are being manipulated into buying y and z. Would you really have bought x and y and z from the shop if there had been no loot box? Only rarely. The rest of the time you are overspending (case b).
Loot box gifts are another scummy behaviour, considering people don't have good intuitions about statistics. Most of us get bad results from the gifted boxes, but some will get lucky. Those of us who are already gambling on loot boxes won't be affected by the outcome of a few extra boxes. Those who wouldn't ever buy them normally, and get bad results, who cares. But those who wouldn't normally buy them but get lucky a few times in a row might decide it's a good deal after all. So, it's manipulating us psychologically in a way that is statistically designed to fail at no cost most times and succeed sometimes, which makes money. (While also giving everybody holiday presents or race prizes, making the company appear generous.)

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
📷

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷

The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷

Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷

Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher

Day 70 of SR

Some of you may know me from my previous posts, many of which are among the most upvoted of all time on this subreddit. Just kidding, I’ve never posted here. I’m coming up on day 70 of SR and I figured I would make a post detailing what I’ve discovered.
Introduction
I began whacking off when I was 12. The negative effects were immediate. I went from a popular and liked individual to a member of the untouchable class. Never knew what caused that. Now I do.
At 13, I started working as a blackhat internet marketer. In other words, I was a scammer or con artist. I had immediate success and became “kid rich” in high school. From there, I continued ripping people off until I was 24. (You can read about all of my various scams and schemes in a 255-page book I wrote about my life, and how I changed my life, here. It's free.)
And we're back. Along the way, I became a drug addict. At 14, I discovered weed. At 16, I discovered psychedelics. At 17, I discovered MDMA and other stimulants. My home life sucked (divorced and depressed parents), so I dove straight into the world of drugs.
Overall, from the time I became a teenager, my life revolved around drugs, video games, and scamming people. I also whacked off very generously, considering it to be normal and healthy. I thought it was a waste product. Not an uncommon story.
Accidentally Discovering SR
About a year ago, I hit rock bottom, which you will read about if you decide to read my book. In essence, I was completely broke and living at home, with no friends, and my girlfriend had just dumped me. Coincidentally, I was also whacking off a ton during this time. Go figure.
A string of wild synchronicities led me to read the book Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill. Think and Grow Rich was the catalyst that led me to get “kid rich” in high school, so I basically just followed Mr. Hill’s recommendations on how to outwit the devil to the letter… and it worked. I became genuinely happy for the first time in my life. I was crying tears of joy every morning when I woke up.
Frankly, at the time, I was not convinced that lust was a bad thing, because getting attention from women made me feel so good. Still, since the rest of the formula for outwitting the devil was working so well, I decided to completely repress my lust. I even managed to quit drugs under the guise of considering them to be gluttonous.
Life was good. The results were unbelievable. I moved to a new city. After being antisocial my entire life, people were going out of their ways to converse with me. I had tons of friends. Very attractive women were going out of their way to make themselves known to me. I didn’t know what on earth was happening, but my life was better than it had even been before, despite the fact that I was more broke than I had ever been before. Turns out money doesn't equal happiness. Who knew?
After about two months of completely repressing my lust, I decided to have sex. With all of this new attention from women, my lust then spiraled out of control. Repression doesn’t work. Knowledge is the key. Knowledge allows you to want to retain. At the time, I had the belief, but not the knowledge behind the belief, which inevitably led to a lack of faith.
Fast forward a couple months and I was back to where I was before: scamming, doing drugs, etc. Lust truly is the root of all sin. Lose control of your lust and you’re probably going to lose control of the rest of your life to some extent.
Whoops
I once again hit rock bottom in October 2020. I took a big gamble on a big adventure, and it failed. In fact, I came within a minute or two of certain death, and my plans were ruined. Now, I had $300 to my name, no car, no housing situation, and no more possessions than I could fit into a large backpack.
I crashed at a friend’s house and spent two months mostly moping around. At the end of November 2020, I read a random Reddit linking to montalk dot net and had a bout of gnosis.
Here is where things get interesting.
Randomly, I messaged a random Reddit user, and he linked me to The Practice of Brahmacharya. I was sold. I started doing SR, controlling my passion, and being careful to remember that pleasure comes but never stays, the human body is only clay, and everything will pass away. This was the knowledge I needed to WANT to control my lust. Before, after reading Outwitting the Devil, I was doing it almost against my will.
Results
Magnetism. The point of SR, to me, is not to attract women. But there’s no doubt that doing SR will attract women. In fact, it will attract everything and everyone. But the attraction is mostly mental. People subconsciously sense your high vibration and they look at it curiously. You’ll get a lot of love, but also a lot of hate if people are comfortable enough to confront you. Your thoughts begin to influence reality more than ever before.
Invisibility. This is mostly a joke, but I swear it’s real. When you’re vibrating at a very high level, you become invisible to others. Not literally. But I’ll give you an example. I’m walking down this road and the air is completely still. Two women are approaching, gossiping in a negative tone. As they pass, I say hello. They jump, completely startled, and looked at me as if I had just appeared out of nowhere. I was in their field of vision for, like, a minute. They should have noticed me. This has happened a couple times. I’m aware this bullet contradicts the previous one.
Calm. I used to be an explosively angry person. In fact, I used to get violent fantasies. I used to really hate the sheep. I didn’t understand how they couldn’t see through the lies! May as well exploit them. Now, I love the sheep, even though they still chirp at me occasionally, especially with all of this asinine /\/\@$K usage. (I’ve taken a hardline stance and will not put one on for even a second. Since I’m still self-employed as a copywriter, it’s possible to do since my workplace (read: bedroom) doesn’t require it. I’d recommend doing the same if you are sick of the bullshit. We need your help.)
Ability to disconnect emotion from thoughts. Emotions come and go. The error is when you let external influences affect your thoughts. There will be times when you are tense or sad. For example, it’s hard to feel totally good emotionally if you are tired. In the past, I let these emotions go straight into my neural network, which would lead to entire days full of bad emotions, which I masked with drugs. Now, I relax into the emotions, meditate on them, and they pass quickly. I usually learn something in the process. The thought of being able to control my emotions without drugs is awesome.
Ability to heal trauma. If you are not powered by your semen (lol), you’re not as strong and solid as you could be. This makes it nearly impossible to face the trauma of your past, before you woke up. Now that I have healed my trauma, at least to an extent, my life is just wonderful. I’m a complete stranger to my past scammer self, which is fantastic. IMO, the point of life is to realize your trauma, heal it, then link up with the Holy Ghost, Sophia, and help others heal theirs, too. If you’re doing SR but still not loving life, consider reflecting on uncomfortable moments from your past. Don’t repress them, just like you don’t repress your lust.
Loving life, man. If you ignore the ethics of my blackhat marketing, I was always rich in comparison to my peers, and I barely worked. I was also pretty jacked. I happened to be born with a conventionally attractive face and am quite tall. Despite these intrinsic advantages, life always sucked. Now, life always rocks, no matter what is happening. Do I still get down sometimes? Sure. You can’t feel euphoric always. But now I realize that stumbling blocks are part of the equation, and I take them in stride. I get excited for bad moments because I realize I’m about to learn something big which will make my life even better in the long run.
Difficulties / Relapse
I have not yet physically relapsed. But I have definitely let my mental state get out of control before, to the tune of looking at Instagram models, etc. This has happened twice. It SUCKED! Felt crappy for days afterwards.
When I feel it bubbling up nowadays, I take a deep breath straight into my cranium and hold it for a few seconds. It dissipates. I also channel it into my third eye if it’s a lesser urge and I feel like I can actively control it. Learned these two tricks from posters on here.
If I'm out in public, I straight up look away. I never really looked, considering it to be disrespectful. But man, don't feel bad about looking off to the side if there's an attractive woman walking in front of you.
IMO, the mental leads to the physical, and not the other way around. It’s the same as any other addiction. You can’t physically force yourself to stop if you don’t want to stop, because your mind controls your body. So, work on your mind instead of putting all of this effort into repression. Books can provide the knowledge you need to want to stop. Once you want to stop, it’s easy to do so.
Summary
As far as other aspects of my life go, the past two months have been a wild ride, as I’ve healed an absolutely massive amount of trauma in that time. One night, I did the karma meditation on ascensionhelp dot com and ended up screaming at the top of my lungs for two hours, uncontrollably, almost involuntarily. Scamming people for a decade, then realizing all of that karma in a short span of time, will do that to you!
This post has been all over the place, but I just wanted to let everyone know that SR is a very key part to living a good life. Better financial circumstances? SR can help with that. You want peace? SR. Happiness? SR. You want to stop scamming people, even though you’re damn good at it, it’s easy, and there’s no one to stop you? SR. (Side note: I did get sued by Perkins Coie when I was 17 due to one of my early scams, and I was also visited by a 3-letter agency for a particularly illegal scam, but nothing ever came of either of those instances. I’d like to say I talked my way out of them, which I did, but looking back, it was blatant intervention from my Higher Self which allowed me to talk my way out of them in the first place. Thanks, dude!)
SR is not the end-all-be-all to success in your chosen realm, but damn does it ever help. I really like this community because you guys understand the physical, but a lot of you are well-versed in the metaphysical realm too. If you want to do SR to get ahead in the physical world, that’s cool, but understand that the real power of SR is allowing yourself to access the metaphysical and spiritual concepts of this world that are hidden to the masses. Many posters here can give me a run for my money, which I very rarely experience in real life. Peace!
EDIT: Turns out I can't reply to comments on this post since I have no less than 25 karma on here. To u/UniqueUsername203: Fair question. This is an epic trollzor account, minus this post. I've had to branch outside of poker since I'm banned there for 30 days. If I really wanted to scam people again, I know of better avenues than spamming and pretending to be a girl, though I did that in an automated fashion circa 2010. Didn't work that well, only made like $20 - $40 per week and it was weird as fuck (even though I never directly talked to any of my victims).

GME Explained - When a Meme Stock meets a Short Squeeze (High Effort Post)

I have a new account and I don't know if this will post but this is my summary about the whole GME situation. Removing all the hype and all the myths, this is what actually went down.
I think there is so much spin on the whole situation and I want to present my view of what happened.
First of all, I'm going to explain what wallstreetbets was all about prior to GME.
Wallstreetbets is a subreddit that was originally meant for "investors" who liked to take big financial risks with the stock market. These risks were sometimes taken for fun and sometimes taken in the hopes of getting lucky and getting a massive return on investment in as short a time period as possible. The user base prior to the massive influx was actually made up of somewhat experienced investors who understood the market and the risks they were taking. Yes, they called themselves and each other autistic and retarded. But that was actually really far from the truth. The reason they called each other retards is because when you're posting information about stocks you always have to explain, for legal reasons, that you're not a financial advisor. If you are a financial advisor it's actually illegal to post that information. But the community has a certain self satirizing sense of humour. As a result, some users would say that their advice shouldn't be trusted because they are not qualified to be financial advisors because they are retarded and eat crayons or whatever else they could come up with to be funny. It was also a way to ironically justify some of the gambles they were taking because they knew they were being reckless with their portfolios. If someone was making a decision with an investment where they had a 90% chance of losing all their money and a 10% chance of doubling their value, they would justify going through with it by saying they were autistic or they were so dumb they accidentally hit the buy button. They had a similar sense of humour and used to call the moderators and each other gay. This was not due to homophobia but because the joke was that if you were constantly making decisions which would result in massive financial losses you could only possibly doing it because you like to get fucked.
Sometimes they would help each other out by posting research they had done on stocks that they thought were undervalued or had a potential to increase in value over a short period of time for numerous different reasons.
Wallstreetbets was never meant to be any kind of movement. It was just a subreddit for people who enjoyed taking chances and more often than not lost copious amounts of money.
They even had flairs for posting losses and gains. More often than not, losses. It was more about posting massive losses for shock value or posting gains to brag. They called the losses "loss porn". It was just a way of sharing what they were doing and just getting attention and feeling better about the losses.
So where does Game Stop (GME) come in to the picture?
Sometimes users of the subreddit would post due diligence that was actually really well thought out. Some users had done some research on Game Stop and realized that the shares were undervalued. They weren't expecting what happened at all, at least not initially. The original thinking was that GME was undervalued because, unlike similar companies which had declined such as Blockbuster, the company still has the potential to turn around and increase their revenue as they had capitol and infrastructure and could very easily turn around their business model. They could move away from physical copies of games and physical merchandise and move into esports and online sales. The fact this could happen had been overlooked and as a result there was a chance to get a large return by investing before any such changes were announced and selling after the stock shot up or by holding long as the company gradually improved its earnings.
Quite a few users bought in to GME long before there was a massive uptick in the value of the stock.
Here's where the hedge funds come in to play. Quite a few investors and hedge funds had shorted GME the same way they had shorted Blockbuster. Shorting is slang for short selling. Which is a process where investors borrow shares from a brokerage and sell them immediately hoping they can buy back the shares at a lower price.
To simplify it, let's say you borrowed a share for $10. You now owe the broker $10. But you also sell the share for $10 so your debt is covered. Later, when the value has dropped you buy the share back for $2. So the share you borrowed is now worth less but you only owe the brokerage $2 as you didn't borrow cash but the value of the share. So you only owe the brokerage $2. So you pay the brokerage back $2 and you pocket the $8 that the share decreased in value from the time you borrowed it until the time you sold it back to the brokerage. There is a time limit on the borrowed share as well. The brokerage expects it to be sold back within a reasonable amount of time depending on the agreement.
So short selling is basically a bet that a shares value will decline and you profit by the amount the shares value declines.
Because everyone thought GME would decline in value over time lots of investors and hedge funds thought it was a safe bet to short GME because everyone thought the company would go out of business like Blockbuster not taking in to account the subtle differences between the two companies and that there were hidden ways GME could turn around and become a more profitable company again.
And now I'm going to skip ahead to explain what happened next.
There were some news about changes to the company and some of those changes indicated that the company would turn around. The news increased the value of the shares somewhat. This wasn't initially as big of a deal. However the shares continued to gain value long enough that shorting the stock was no longer a profitable move and was resulting in major losses.
Going back to the example before, if you borrowed a share for $10 and sold it and it was now worth $20 your only option would be to close your position once your time window is up. Closing your position means buying back the share for its current value and returning it to the brokerage. So you would be forced to take a loss of $10. Unlike with shares there is an unlimited potential for losses when you short sell. The more the stock grows in value the more money you lose.
Since the company was turning around many short sellers were forced to close their positions.
What are fundamentals? Fundamentals basically means what the actual value of a stock should be based on a businesses performance and ability to generate revenue. This definition will matter in a moment.
The value of a shorted stock suddenly increasing can result in what's known as a short squeeze. A short squeeze is when the value of a stock suddenly increases and the shorts are forced to close their positions as soon as possible to minimize their losses. The more the stock goes up, the more a short seller loses.
But with stocks the supply and demand can also play a role in their value. This is why the value of Gamestop shares suddenly skyrocketed at first.
To close their positions the short sellers all had to buy back stock at the same time and return it to the brokers. This created an artificially increased demand. It's a temporary increase which is basically a bubble caused by the shorts closing their positions.
Because GME was basically the most heavily shorted stock ever the value increased drastically.
Contrary to popular opinion, this is actually where Reddit played the biggest role in what happened next.
Some of the users of Wallstreetbets were now posting about their massive gains and the public caught wind of what was happening. Everyone saw the stock going up and saw an opportunity to buy in. This is a newer phenomenon. It's colloquially referred to as a meme stock. The public attention increased the demand. Everyone wanted in on the gains. So at the same time that the shorts started closing their positions everyone started buying in. This created more demand and the stock bubbled.
In case you don't know what a bubble is, it just means that the value of the stock is increasing due to heavy demand and interest and not due to the fact that the business is increasing as much in value. When a bubble happens there will always be an eventual correction. Either gradual or sudden depending on the specifics. The correction will return the value of the stock back down to a reasonable amount based on the businesses actual performance and not based on the hype.
So now there was a perfect storm of the shorts closing their positions and many investors buying in hoping to sell the stock once it peaked before its value dropped back down once the buying frenzy stopped.
So, essentially, the GME phenomenon was a meme stock meeting a short squeeze.
The sad part about this whole thing is how many people who didn't know enough about how the market works just thought it was an opportunity to make massive amounts of money in a short period of time. They didn't know what risk they were taking or when the window of opportunity would close.
The hype really didn't help. Lots of different interests were hyping the stock online. This is where the real market manipulation occurred. People who had bought in to the stock knew that the more people bought in the more their shares would increase in value. In addition the short sellers knew that the less people bought in the less they would lose.
This created strong polarization about the situation both online and in the media. And it became impossible for someone who didn't have at least an intermediate understanding of the stock market to discern the hype and misinformation from the reality.
What happened was that there was a lot of buying from retail investors fuelled by online misinformation or lack of knowledge and all the shorts trying to close their positions to minimize losses which created a bubble. The savvy retail investors sold their stock at or near the peak of the bubble and made a killing with return rates of about 1,700% while everyone else lost money.
The lesson learned here is not to believe online hype and information from online sources or even the media if there is a strong conflict of interest.
Anything else you may have heard about the situation is being spun and is fictitious.
There was no rally to try to take out the hedge funds. That was an incidental side effect of what happened. Although that narrative definitely encouraged more people to buy and hold, making the bubble bigger and also creating the demand needed for those selling to be able to cut their losses or earn their gains by selling the stock.
There was no big conspiracy by hedge funds to try to destroy Game Stop although that narrative definitely encouraged those with nostalgia for the business to buy in.
The biggest problem with this is how online narrative turned into a form of market manipulation and how both sides, retail and hedge funds, were manipulating online discussion and even the media to try to maximize their gains or reduce their losses.
There was no silver squeeze either. That was paid advertising by the hedge funds to get people to buy silver to try to shift the buying away from GME and into silver to reduce their losses while realizing short term gains in silver.
There's only one story here. A short squeeze met a meme stock. Any other narrative is either disinformation, confusion or wishful thinking.
The end.
I know I'm going to be hated for this post and I expect to be downvoted into oblivion. But I don't care. I just want people to see what actually happened so that we don't all make the same mistakes and lose money.
Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor and I did briefly own some GME shares to try to take advantage of the volatility and lost about $20.
I hope this clears up a lot of the confusion for anyone trying to understand the GME phenomenon.

A Message to WSB

Ancient Strategy 40.5

Upon a Dead Horse: Chapter One

It had been centuries since the Luddite Wars but the scars across the badlands had still not fully healed. Twisted spires of half melted rock loomed over glass smooth craters pockmarking a desert of orange sand. Sand that had formed from the rust and decay of thousands of tons of burning steel from long abandoned cities. Though rarer now, sometimes the winds would uncover a new pocket of irradiated debris and scour the barren lands with a new wave of radiation. But, other than a few isolated pockets, the battered and scabbed land - bitter and sterile though it was - no longer could be said to be lethal within hours of entering it. Still, with its nightmarish hellscape and it's metal laced grit battering anyone foolish enough to enter, the area more than earned its moniker of Damnation among the survivors. It was said that only a great fool or a madman would ever ride out into Damnation. The sight of just such a rider emerging from a cloud of rust colored sand caused a stir of dread to pass through those that manned the Wall that day.
Still too distant to make out details even with use of the periscope. In wilder days when the winds were still fierce and still hot with radioactive winds a brave soul might have volunteered or been coerced into exposing themselves from the protection offered by the wall to Damnation and venture on top to use a spyglass. But, as the centuries passed and the desert cooled both the Keepers and the Wall itself succumbed to the ravages of time. The sixteen meter tall line of concrete and steel that stretched from horizon to horizon was now just a stained and crumbling shadow of its former glory. Gaps showing exposing the rebar underneath were evident on both sides but, for now at least, the Wall still held. As for the Keepers themselves? That profession which was once viewed as a vital part of the defense of the remnants of humanity had gradually suffered its own form of social erosion. From a respected job to one that was used as a prison sentence to a refugee camp for society's outcasts. The current Keepers were little more than scavengers attempting to carve out their own niche from the scant protection offered by the Wall. So, they contented themselves to observing the stranger through the narrow eyepieces of the periscopes. Watching and waiting.
The stranger was garbed in a fashion appropriate for desert travel. That is to say with no exposed skin and a full face breathing apparatus. The stranger's long coat and wide brimmed hat both appeared to have once been black but had long since been stained orange by the clouds of dust. Gloved hands gripped the reins of the horse tightly while glassy lensed eyes stared straight ahead while a tube extended from the mask to a chest mounted purification unit. He sat stiffly with no wasted movements and seemingly to sit impossibly still atop the saddle. If not for his upright stance and subtle adjustments to the horse's pace as it navigated the uneven terrain, he might have been mistaken for a dead man. The man was obviously still alive. The horse, however, was not.
As the rider and his mount grew closer it became more and more evident that the horse was, in fact, quite dead. The eyes were gone and were now just hollow pits. Bone could be seen jutting out from the rotting flesh along the nose and exposing a bone in one foreleg and part of the ribs along the chest. Blackened rips along the horse's flank were evident where the flesh had ruptured during putrefaction and fluids now weeped from these open sores. Still, the horse walked. Stiffly and mechanically as if it's decaying flesh had somehow been stretched over an automaton. In a sense, that is exactly what had happened.
"Necromancer," Bri of the Evening Watch swore.
"Are you certain?" Vict asked without bothering to rise from his seat. VIct wore the copper badge used to identify a sheriff. The Wall had long since abandoned the position of sheriff, but not the badge. It was now used to identify the First among the Keepers. A position that Vict had held well into his gray haired years. Positively ancient in Wall terms. One day he knew his reflexes would slow and the hand or knife of some upstart would claim his badge. But, for now, Vict's rule had been a successful one. The few crops that would grow near the wall were plentiful and the people in the Wall were thriving as well as could be expected. They had successfully defended themselves from rival Wall tribes that had seized control of their own gates and, as much as was feasible considering the environs of living within the Wall, his people were content. Vict was considered a strong leader. A wise leader. His gray hairs were a testament to that and as long as he did not make mistakes he would be allowed to grow new ones. For now. "His mount is dead," Bri clarified, "It has been ravaged by the desert already. I do not think anything more than proximal arcana could be keeping it going now."
Vict nodded and, finally, arose from the crudely constructed chair to don his own duster. He disliked walking out on the Damnation side of the wall. But confronting this stranger was his duty as First. But, no need to do so alone.
"Can you tell if he's armed?"
"Not yet," Bri admitted, "The light is bad and he is wearing dark clothing. I think there is an electro-rifle on his saddle but he may have a sidearm as well."
"Good enough," Vict said, "We'll assume he is. Summon the others. I want at least six men joining me at the gate. And bring the coil guns with you."
"Those haven't worked in decades, Vict."
"No need to let him know that," Vict remarked as he donned his hat, "We'll just keep that as a surprise for him."
"On it," Bri said with a grin as he scurried off down the corridor towards the living quarters beyond. Some members of the Watch may need to be woken up, Vict knew. The Watch was rarely called upon these days and some had probably long since forgotten what their shift may actually involve. Only a handful, like Bri, were still diligent enough to show up to perform the most minimum of duties. It was a distressing trend but one that Vict himself knew no way of stopping. People guarded the wall from threats along the corridors and from the goodlands. No one cared to stare into the interior.
Vict sauntered towards the door that opened out into the tunnel of the Gate. He soon found himself standing before the massive doors that served as the final barrier between him and Damnation. Fifty meters behind him were doors that opened up into the Goodlands. Those doors they kept ajar most of the day to allow for ventilation. The doors before him had not been opened in years. He wondered if the mechanisms still worked.
He heard the Watch assemble behind him and, without looking to count their numbers or verify they were even dressed and presentable, he signaled the doorman to activate the giant motors that would ease open the doors. It took several minutes for a crack large enough to admit a man on horseback to open. As the doors swung out and away from him, Vict marched forward. He heard the others following him.
The metallic tang of the desert of Damnation stung his nostrils as he edged closer to the boundary of the badlands. As the gap widened the man and the dead horse came into view.
"That's far enough!" Vict shouted.
To his surprise, not to mention considerable relief, the horse stopped short and the motionless rider did not reach for a weapon. Madness was unpredictable after all. He should not expect a reasoned response from a man performing an unreasonable action.
The rider sat there upon his dead horse and, presumably, studied Vict and the Watch. If he was intimidated by their presence he gave no outward sign of it. Slowly, the man lifted one hand away from the reins and reached towards himself. Vict tensed for a moment but relaxed when he saw the hand was not reaching for a holster but rather angling for the respiration unit on the chest. The stranger flipped a switch to activate the speaker. So, he just wanted to talk. That was encouraging.
"I am looking for someone," the stranger's distorted voice crackled from the speaker, "Did another rider come through here some time ago?"
"No," Vict answered.
"Are you certain?" the rider asked, "It would have been many months ago. I can provide a description."
"These gates have not been opened over ten years," Vict clarified, "He didn't come this way."
The rider cocked his head to one side and then seemed to take in the expanse of the wall slowly.
"Perhaps another gate, then?" he asked, "Do you communicate with the other gates?"
Vict shook his head.
"The tribe that took the next gate isn't exactly friendly to our cause," he explained, "The gates further down the line? They may be more neighborly but it's a long walk to find out."
"I see," the rider said, "Then may I request passage through your gate?"
"Are you here to start trouble?"
"Yes," the man replied.
Vict blinked in surprise. He had expected madness, certainly, but being honest about it was new.
"Don't see as to how it benefits me to allow that then," Vict declared. He then motioned back towards the desert,
"Turn around the way you came."
"I can pay the toll if there is one," the stranger offered.
An intriguing offer, actually. Vict almost considered it. Good coin could be valuable in trade with the cityfolk. Still, if they found out he let trouble in then the cities may also attack in retaliation. Good coin spent no better than no coin when you were dead.
"Tempting, but I'll pass," Vict said, "I told you to turn around. I won't ask again."
The speaker crackled as the man sighed.
"Very well," the rider said, "I had hoped to do this another way. But if you insist."
Quicker than he thought would have been possible, the stranger's hand flashed into the interior of his coat. It was out again in an instant and an object was hurled at him. Vict retreated half a step and reached for the knife on his own belt. To his surprise, the object landed gently on the sand near his feet. It was not an attack after all. Curious, he stepped closer and looked closer. He felt the blood drain from his face. It was not a weapon, no, but it was definitely still a threat.
"You're a marshal!" Vict hissed angrily.
"And you are interfering in my lawfully sworn duty," the Stranger replied, "Will you grant me passage?"
This was bad. The badge that laid upon the desert floor before him was not like Vict's own. It was not a piece of metal. This was an actual biolocked minicomp. This badge could only be carried by those who had the full weight of the Restored Pan-Continental Alliance behind them as well as the Oligarch itself. Each badge was said to be a miniature mainframe that could be used to open any digital lock, access any account, and take control over any computer system if needed. If it still used a computer, it would yield to the badge if the wielder wished it. If that wasn't bad enough, if it was handled by anyone other than the biolocked owner it would administer a lethal discharge. Still, Vict hesitated.
"We don't really have a lot of use for the PCA this far out in wastes," he remarked, "Figured they forgot all about us."
"Just focused on other more pressing matters at the moment," the marshal clarified, "Cooperation now would be in your best interest."
Vict recognized a threat when he heard one. What's more, now that the badge had been thrown out, he was certain the Oligarch itself was listening in on them. The last thing the Wall needed was a cybernetic army marching down upon them.
"Yeah, well," Vict said as he stepped slightly to one side. Not quite yielding passage but not completely blocking it either.
"I still have to consider the people beyond," he explained.
"You have my oath my quarrel is not with you nor the people of the wall or the points beyond," the man said formally, "My bond is the apprehension of a singular individual."
"Do you swear," Vict asked, "That you will cause no harm to anyone other than your current assignment?"
"I make no such guarantees," the stranger countered, "I am entrusted to enforce the Oligarch's law. However, if you insist, I swear I will not exercise more force than is deemed necessary to achieve this goal and I will not interfere with any matters that I may observe that are outside the scope of my immediate objective regardless of their legal stature within the PCA save for Class II felonies or above. Such acts would supersede any oath I am authorized to provide."
Legal speak for "if I see someone being murdered, raped, or dismembered I'm legally required to interfere. But I won't stop people from lying, cheating, gambling, or partaking of illegal substances." Considering the authority the badge was offering, it was actually a very generous concession. A little too generous and one that immediately raised suspicions.
"And what do you expect in return for such an oath?" he asked.
"You have armed men behind you," the stranger noted, "Are they available if I require the assistance of a posse?"
"They're armed," Vict confirmed, "And trained for what it's worth. But I need them here."
"I did not ask that they be removed from service indefinitely," the stranger said, "I am asking if I have need of additional gunmen if you will provide them."
"And if I saw no?"
"Your gate is mechanized," the marshal pointed out, "Presumably computerized as well. As would be many of your wall's defenses."
"So I either take your oath and cooperate willingly or you take it by force?" Vict replied before grunting, "And if I tell my men to fire?"
"Then you simply have to hope they kill me first before I shoot any of them," the stranger said, "Otherwise I will have their corpses start shooting at you."
Vict sighed.
"You also offered payment before?" he reminded the stranger.
"An offer that was conditional on me not having to reveal my badge," the stranger said, "What is your response?"
"Your oath then," he said, "I need something to show we enacted our duty to protect the interior."
"Then you have it," the stranger said, "I swear to harm no one beyond this gate save in purview of my lawfully sworn duty and the scope of my current quarry."
There was a chirp from the badge. Vict assumed this meant the Oligarch had acknowledged the oath. If memory served, the oath of a marshal was considered a law in of itself. The badge would make certain its wielder stayed true to this pledge. With lethal force if necessary.
The rider came closer and now Vict could smell the rotting flesh as well as see it. The horse did not breathe, he noted. It moved silently and robotically with no external cues from its rider.
"Could you hand that back to me, please?" the rider asked while pointing at the fallen badge. Vict hesitated.
"It won't sting you as long as I am present and have given you authorization to touch it," the marshal assured him. Vict could not afford to lose more face in front of his men. This encounter had been humbling enough as is. He picked up the silver bar. Nothing happened. The surface was cool to the touch but did not otherwise harm him. If not for the dancing lights just below the metallic surface he might suspect it was a forgery. He handed it back to the rider and hoped he did not appear to be in a hurry to be rid of the thing.
"Thank you," the rider said and looked through the tunnel ahead.
"What town is beyond that gate?" he asked.
"The closest one is the town of Clean Air," Vict told him and shrugged, "It's an older settlement. Mostly just a few farmers and a saloon. Not much happening there. But you can get a bed for the night if you need it at the saloon." The rider nodded and started to ride forward. Without knowing quite why he did, Vict decided to add, "If you continue west and follow the ridge line you can find the Healing Valley.."
The horse froze mid step.
"What did you say?" the rider's speaker crackled.
"If you ride a few days west along the ridge line you will find the Healing Valley," Vict said, "At least, that's what I've heard. Everyone is heading there these days. Maybe your man is well."
"These Healing Valley," the rider asked, "What is it?"
"I don't know, really," Vict admitted, "Some new commune or settlement. I don't know. They say there is some sort of spring there or something that has a healing arcana. All I know is that the lands are very fertile and they say even mutants can drink from these waters and be renewed."
"You said it is to the west along the ridge line?"
"Yes," Vict said and, before he could add more detail, the dead horse surged forward into a gallop. The horse and rider went through the gate into the good lands at a pace no normal steed could hope to maintain. The horse kept this breakneck pace up without tiring as it flew past the settlement of clean air and angled towards the ridgeline beyond. As the sun sank the horse galloped on without showing other signs of fatigue. The rider, meanwhile, reached up with one hand to unbuckle the straps of his mask. Moving with the horse and anticipating each movement as if they were somehow joined together, he managed to free himself from the confines of the mask and breathed unhindered for the first time since leaving the Citadel across the wastes.
By the time the sun rose again the horse was beyond even his ability to sustain. The leg bones had cracked until the wear of racing along the rocky path at full speed and ruptures had appeared all across its flanks. He eventually led it to the side of the road and into a small gully between some stones. There he released his grip upon its body and allowed the flesh to resume its normal decaying processes. It was of no concern anyway. He could tell he was in the right place.
"Kincaid's here," he subvocalized. The implant just below his right ear heard him all the same and the Oligarch's response was immediate.
"Have you made visual contact?"
"No," he admitted, "But I can see evidence of his work. There is a valley below me. Lush fields of green with crops too large to grow by natural means."
"You are certain this is his work?"
"There's no death," he said, "I can't sense any at all around me. Even the soil. There is no decomposition taking place. The ground itself is essentially sterile. The only thing keeping these crops alive is his will." The Oligarch was silent for a moment. That in itself was troubling. It's processes worked many times faster than a human's. What could cause it to hesitate?
"Repositioning a satellite," the Oligarch explained for him, "And initial telemetry indicates you may have a bigger problem than we thought. That valley extends for several kilometers to the north and south of you. I estimate its total area to be in excess of 400 square kilometers."
"His power is still growing," the marshal concluded grimly.
"Even our worst case projections did not account for this," the Oligarch confirmed, "The area of influence is enormous and for him to sustain that much power without arcanic blowback is unheard of. This should not be possible with the resources available to a human mind."
"He's not exactly human anymore," the rider reminded the Oligarch.
"No," it confirmed, "He is not. Still, the organic strain should be crippling. He must be using his own power to sustain himself. That should be creating a feedback loop."
The rider nodded.
"Maybe the valley is a way of bleeding off the excess?" he suggested.
"Plausible," the Oligarch said, "But that creates a scaling issue. At some point he will be exerting more just to keep the blowback from consuming him than even his own enhanced vitality can maintain."
"When will that happen?"
"Uncertain," the Oligarch admitted, "I already stated this does not fit within current models. There is more."
"Don't tell me," the rider said, "The zone of no death means that my own arcana will be diminished."
"Or absent entirely," the Oligarch admitted, "Given that he cannot sustain this level of involvement indefinitely I believe this most likely indicates he is aware of you and that you are walking into a trap."
"So what do you suggest?" the rider asked, "Wait it out? See if he collapses and then go in?"
"The sphere of influence has already corrupted the local ecosystem and is likely impacting residents as well," the Oligarch said, "If this is allowed to progress unabated the damage is likely irreversible and may have a cascading effect on neighboring ecosystems."
"So if I don't walk into the trap," the rider translated, "We may have a full on ecological meltdown that will cost millions of lives. If I do go in and try to do damage control, I'm going in without my arcana?"
"You could return to the Wall and recruit more allies," the Oligarch suggested.
"No good," the rider said, "Once we go in then Kincaid can twist them too. They are all living people. Can you send a drop ship in?"
"If I could spare one do you think I would have sent you?"
"No," the rider agreed and sighed, "All right, into the trap I go."
The stranger returned his attention to the dead horse beside the road. In the short time he had been distracted a swarm of insects and all manner of flying and burrowing creatures had descended upon the animal. It's hide now was a virtual living carpet of creatures feasting upon the first real meal they had had in who knows how long. Before this he was certain it was only the power of Kincaid's aracana that had been keeping them alive. Alive but starving. Well, if Kincaid didn't know he was here before this had just sent up a big flare. Grimacing, he reached into the swarm of insects to retrieve his rifle from the saddle.
Walking into the valley below was surprisingly uneventful. No one rose to challenge him nor did any feral creatures attempt to accost him. If he didn't know better, he would think this was just another agricultural sector in the PCA. In fact, now that he was closer, the crops closest to him appeared to be the standard genetically engineered high yield wheat hybrid grown in the AgSec. Only a full meter taller. As he drew closer he caught the sounds of someone in one of the fields ahead of him. Curious, he slung the rifle's strap over his shoulder and checked both pistols were firmly in their holsters. Cautiously, he approached the source of the noise.
He found himself stepping into a small clearing among the dense grains occupied by an elderly man wearing what appeared to be tattered clothing that had a homespun look to it. The trousers were frayed at the ends and had been patched so many times and with such a variety of fabrics it was difficult to determine the original coloring. A brown vest covered his chest and left his arms exposed. The man was facing away and appeared to be attempting to cut down a swath of the grain using a sickle held awkwardly in the man's left arm. This was despite the fact that the man's right arm appeared to be more than twice the size of his left and had an uneven lumpy appearance as well as several gnarled scars across the surface. Holding his right arm stiffly, the man swung the tool. The stalks tumbled to the ground around him and the man cursed again.
"It's growing back too damned fast!" the man shouted at last.
"What is?" the stranger asked, "The wheat?"
The farmer wheeled around with his blade held high as if preparing to strike. The stranger, though armed, held his hands out to the sides in a gesture of peace. The farmer looked him up and down as if evaluating him before deciding to lower his blade.
"Who are you?" the farmer asked.
"Just a friend passing through," the stranger replied, "I heard you back here and thought you might need some help."
"Friend, eh?" the farmer asked with a snort, "You don't look like any friend I know." The stranger nodded his head towards the crops.
"What seems to be the problem?" he asked.
The farmer rolled his eyes back towards the recently felled grains and snorted.
"Look for yourself," he instructed, "See those stalks I just cut? Watch em."
The stranger did. It did not take long to notice what the farmer wished him to see.
"They are regenerating," the stranger declared.
"That's one way of looking at it," the farmer snarled, "Being a damned nuisance is another. There is supposed to be a path here to get back to my house. I can't clear it faster than it tries to grow back. I can't even leave those grains on the ground too long or they start sprouting as well."
"Can you burn a path?"
The farmer shook his head.
"Doesn't work," he explained, "Fires just go out and the plants heal themselves. You're new, aren't you?" The stranger nodded.
"I just came from the Wall," he explained, "I heard of a place called the Healing Valley and thought I would see it for myself."
"Healing Valley?" the old man spat, "Guess now that the Minister's here calling it plain old Coppertown ain't good enough for the likes of them."
"The Minister?"
"Look, son," the old man said patiently, "I ain't got all day to spend here talking to the likes of you. Now, you want to talk then you can help. You reap and I'll bag 'em."
The stranger seemed to consider arguing but finally nodded. He unclipped the respirator and mask from his chest before unslinging his rifle. He then doffed his coat and hat before bundling the gun and smaller items inside the confines of the coat. The stranger could be seen clearly now and the old man found himself staring at a younger man with sharp features and a hawkish beak of a nose. The stranger's hair was black and full unlike the old man's stringy gray locks. The hair was kept brushed straight back in what appeared to be a choice of convenience rather than aesthetics. The stranger's face was neither cruel nor kind nor even particularly handsome. It was just an everyman face. So why did the old man feel so certain this stranger who called himself a friend was hiding something behind those dark eyes?
"Name's Yacob," the farmer introduced himself, "What do they call you?"
The stranger didn't reply. He simply picked up the sickle and started hacking at the grains with quick and efficient motions. He did not have the skill nor the technique of an actual farmer, but he made up for it in speed. Yacob found himself hobbling along after the man while shoveling fallen grains into a sack.
"So, not big on names, eh?" Yacob remarked, "That's fine. I'll just call you Cat for the moment."
"Cat?"
"Because you should mind what curiosity did to one of those," Yacob snapped, "You just keep cutting and I'll answer your questions. But only until we get to the porch. Once we reach the house the deal's done."
"How far is the house?"
"Not far else I wouldn't have made the offer. So stop wasting time and ask what you came for. I know you ain't here to admire wheat."
"Fine," the stranger said, "Tell me about the Minister." Yacob shrugged.
"Not much to tell you," he said, "He showed up here about a year ago. Big talking man like you. Wouldn't tell us his name either. Just started talking like he was a preacher man. Going on about the rightful place of man and unshackling ourselves from the burden of slavery. Real 'make the world a better place' nonsense. Folks didn't really listen to him at first. But then the miracles started happening."
"Miracles?" the stranger grunted as he cut, "Like what sort of miracles?"
"I was getting to that!" Yacob snapped, "Don't rush me! Now when I say 'miracles' I don't mean loaves of fishes falling from Heaven. I mean like Bailey Moskva being able to walk again. Or Happy Tam regaining his vision. People in the town just started getting better. Healthier. But it didn't stop there. The crops were dying. Only they just stopped. Vegetables that were dying on the vine the day before got better. That kind of miracle."
The stranger, who was just now starting to breathe heavy from the exertion, only nodded his understanding and continued to hack away at the grains. He used to tool more like a machete than as a harvesting tool but, again, it was still better progress than Yacob could make on his own.
"In the early days we all thought that, well, maybe this Minister was onto something," Yacob went on, "He kept talking prosperity and we were feeling it, ya kin? Even the most piss poor farmer was having a bumper crop. All these lame folks who worked in the mines were getting healed up. Even the sick and the dying were up and walking around. It seemed like the good days would never end and people were praising the Minister and all his bollocks."
"But not you?" the stranger asked between gasps of exertion.
"Oh I fell for it to," Yacob said, "Me a hardcore believer, that I was. I even stood there smiling proudly as he took my Abby into his inner circle."
"Abby?" the stranger asked.
"My daughter," Yacob admitted with a sigh as he bent over to pick up more of the fallen wheat, "My little girl. She was such a delight to me and looked after me after the passing of my Elsie. All of twenty two years old and when the Minister said he chose her I was proud as a peacock."
The stranger slowed his frantic hacking.
"Something happened?" he asked, "With Abby?"
"Bah!" Yacob said, "Never you mind. That's none of your concern. I told you what you wanted to know. Now ask something else!"
"Why didn't you ask him to heal your arm?" the stranger asked.
Yacob froze in place and blanched.
"What?" he stammered.
The stranger paused and turned to point at the engorged and irregularly shaped right arm held limply at Yacob's side.
"Why didn't you-?"
"I heard what you said!" Yacob shouted, "Stand aside! I don't want any more of your help! Be off!"
The stranger didn't move.
"I meant no offense," he said, "It just appears that you have had a-"
The stranger moved his hand to indicate the swollen right arm. Yacob, seeing the movement, misinterpreted and jumped backwards while yelping. To the stranger's surprise, the right arm moved. Not only did it move on its own, he heard a faint whirring sound as it did. Yacob howled in pain and dropped to the ground. Blood trickled from an open wound in the arm that wasn't there before.
"Now you see what you made me do?" Yacob asked between clenched teeth, "That metal cuts right through!"
The sickle fell from the marshal's limp fingers. Those bumps. He recognized them now. They were in the approximate position and size for servo motors. Which could only mean one thing.
"That's a cybernetic arm," he said out loud.
"'Course it it!" Yacob snapped, "I lost the real one sixteen years ago in the mines! The mechasurgeon fitted me with a new one. Never really gave me any problems until this skin started growing over top of it."
Of course, the marshal realized. He should have realized. With the field of the arcana flooding the area even old wounds, healed wounds, would be affected. Growing a new arm would be impossible with the prosthetic in place. But escasing it with a new layer of skin was still possible. He felt sickened at the thought of living flesh growing over the metal arm and getting trapped inside the motors and actuators. The skin stretching and tearing only to heal over and do it again and again. He suddenly understood the bitterness of the farmer. He picked up the sickle, turned, and hacked at the vegetation with renewed vigor. Kincaid would pay for this. He would pay.
"Wait," Yacob said, "I told you-"
"I'm getting to your house," the marshal growled, "That was the agreement. You answered your questions and now I am doing my part."
He paused for a moment to lower the blade but only for as long as it took to unbutton the cuffs of his sleeves and to roll them up. He then resumed his relentless hacking and slashing. After a few minutes of labor he found himself staggering free from the dense vegetation and standing upon a wooden platform. Blinking in confusion, he lowered the tool and realized he was standing on the porch that had been his original objective. He dropped the sickle and turned to go. He found his way blocked by a cursing Yacob limping after him while dragging the marshal's coat and rifle in his wake with his one functional arm.
"Slow down!" Yacob gasped as he joined the marshal on the porch, "I can't keep up with your-"
Yacob'e eyes grew wide as he froze in mid step. The marshal looked in the direction of the man's gaze to see if he could find what had alarmed the man. It took him a moment to realize it was the fine parallel lines of the scars running along the marshal's own forearms. The lines, usually too faint to see, were an angry red from his recent exertion.
"It's just an implant," the marshal said between gasping breaths, "I'm a cyborg like yourself."
"Like me nothing," the farmer counted, "Them's battle implants. Are you a deserter?"
That was an interesting question.
"Do you get many deserters here?" the stranger asked as he retrieved his property from the limp grip of the older man.
"A few," Yacob admitted with a shrug, "Mostly PCA. Sometimes Oceania. Which are you?"
"I'm . . . not a deserter."
The old man snorted.
"I'm not," the marshal said, "It's complicated."
"Well," the old man said with another shrug, "At least now I know how you were able to push yourself like that. I hear those implants really juice you boys up."
The marshal didn't answer. Instead he turned to take his leave.
"Wait," Yacob said as he placed a restraining hand on the marshal's chest, "I didn't mean to yell at you earlier. It's just . . . it's not a good idea to talk about the Minister like that. Not out in the open. Not everyone sees him the way I do."
"I understand," the marshal said and then stepped to one side, "I have inconvenienced you enough for one day."
"You know him, don't you?" the old man asked as the marshal stepped up beside him, "That's why you were so keen to ask me those questions. Is that why you're here? You're after him?"
"Thank you for your hospitality, Yacob," the marshal replied, "I should go."
"Wait," the old man pleaded, "You should know about something if you plan on facing him."
"What is that?" the marshal asked while turning to face the smaller man. With a pained expression on his face, Yacob lifted his mangled prosthetic. The marshal heard the whir of servos fighting against the flesh coating. The farmer held up his arm and showed the unlined palm of his hand to the marshal. There was a peculiar bulge there.
"This," Yacob said just before a lightning bolt erupted from the palm of his hand and tore through the marshal's chest only to explode out the backside. The marshal crumbled to the porch with a look of confusion still painting his features.
Tune in for our next exciting episode!

[Scottish Football] How one of Scotland's biggest clubs was liquidated and had to start all over again

Obviously this isn't set in England, but spiritually this piece is within my English Football series. The first six episodes covered Nottingham Forest's 21st century woes, the dickpic that consigned Notts County to the non-league, a reignited rivalry between Derby County and Leeds United, Stoke City's legendary shithouse era, the English Golden Generation of the 00s descending into farce, and Wimbledon FC's controversial relocation to Milton Keynes
This spin-off piece follows on from the main question raised by the Wimbledon FC/MK Dons saga. When does a club stop being a club? Is it the legal entity or something rather more intangible? These were questions posed with regards to one of the titans of Scottish football earlier this decade.
Background - The Establishment Club
Rangers FC has long cultivated an image as Scotland's 'establishment club', it isn't just a sports team, but an institution that embodies a particular way of living and worldview. Alongside other institutions like the Church of Scotland, the club is perceived as embodying traditional and small-C conservative Scottish values. Alongside Celtic (more on them in a bit) Rangers have dominated Scottish football since the league started. No club other than the two Glaswegian sides has won the league since 1985. Rangers have 54 league titles, Celtic have 51. The joint 3rd best sides (Aberdeen and the Edinburgh pair Hearts and Hibernian) have just four a piece. And yet as a legal entity the club ceased to exist in 2012. What happened? Does Rangers FC still exist?
It would be impossible to tell this tale without telling the tale of the Old Firm and the profound political, cultural, and religious divides involved. Glasgow's two largest clubs have a rivalry that defies comparison to anything in the rest of Scotland or in England. Essentially Rangers FC and its supporters represent Protestantism and British Unionism, while Celtic FC are considered to be aligned with Catholicism and Irish Nationalism. When the two sides meet, the Scottish saltire is rarely flown by supporters. Rangers supporters prefer the Union Jack or Ulster Banner, Celtic fans are likely to fly Irish tricolours. It is as if somebody took the socio-cultural conflict of Northern Ireland and transplanted it into a football ground.
Which is sort of what happened. Ultimately a big factor was migration to Glasgow in the early 20th century - Irish Catholics in Glasgow set up Celtic FC as their club, while Protestants from Northern Ireland (who are historically of largely Scottish extraction) who worked in the shipyards of the Clyde came to adopt Rangers which was located near the shipbuilding areas. Local Scots, being generally Protestant, inclined to support Rangers and many would have shared the religious and political feelings of the newcomers from Northern Ireland. This has meant that at matches both clubs have sections of support who chant about the Northern Irish conflict - some Rangers fans have a 'songbook' including the Loyalist anthem The Sash (which commemorates King William III, the Dutchman invited to become King of England and Scotland who defeated a Catholic army at the Boyne in 1690), while Celtic fans might sing in support of the Irish Republican Army. This involves by no means the majority of supporters, but it is important in setting the atmosphere at games.
Rangers FC had until the late 1980s an alleged policy of not signing any player known to be a Catholic. This led legendary Celtic manager Jock Stein to joke that if offered a Catholic or a Protestant to sign for Celtic, he would sign the Protestant in the knowledge that Rangers would never sign the Catholic. I cannot find evidence of any player ever transferring directly between Celtic and Rangers in the postwar era, with the low number of players who have turned out for both having had a 3rd club in between. Another example of the intensity is the way in which the clubs traditionally share shirt sponsors. This sounds innocuous, but the only way to sponsor one of the clubs without triggering a mass boycott by the other supporters was to simply sponsor both.
No other football rivalry in Britain has a dynamic like this (Liverpool and Everton did to a far lesser extent before about the 1960s, but sectarianism largely died out there decades ago), even in the days when hooliganism was a serious blight on English football it never quite reached the sort of scenes on display at the 1980 Scottish Cup Final.
Which club is the 'biggest'? It is impossible to say. Rangers have had more League titles, but Celtic being the first British club to win a European Cup in 1967 is a fairly potent trump card. What is without a doubt is that they are the two best supported Scottish clubs and their rivalry is possibly like no other.
Chasing the Rainbow
Avid readers of this series will notice a theme. The 1990s were a boom time for football and everyone involved in the sport. TV revenue started to really take off, as did the prizes for winning European competitions. Many clubs sought to capitalise on the windfall and Rangers were no exception.
Their chairman, Sir David Murray, had become one of Scotland's weathiest businessmen by leveraging debts against future revenue. He spent big on Rangers in the hope that they would win a major European trophy and repay his investment. Top players like Paul Gascoigne came to Rangers where before it was fairly rare for big name players from other leagues to move to Scotland. Domestically his investments paid off, from 1989-97 Rangers won nine League titles in a row, equalling the record set by Jock Stein's great Celtic side between 1966-74.
Unfortunately this did not translate to the windfall a Champion's League win would have given. While Murray was bankrolling Rangers, other clubs around Europe were likewise chasing the new massive financial prizes. Rangers came close to getting past the group stage of the new Champion's League format in 1992-93, but no Scottish club would enter a Champion's League knockout round until Rangers do so in 2005-06.
The debts mounted and Murray sought ways to manage the debts and hedge them against future revenue anticipated from TV fees and European prize money. He allowed the Bank of Scotland to buy a stake in the club with a mortgage allowing them to recover their losses in the event of the club defaulting on its repayments. Nothing to worry about, surely? David Murray had become a wildly successful businessman by effectively managing credit lines and debt against future income to fund expansion.
But a far bigger problem was just three small letters.
EBT
Put simply, Employee Benefit Trusts are a way of not paying tax, it was legal in some cases at the time but is generally illegal now.
Murray sought, from 2000, to pay his players through EBTs. This meant that they would be able to offer high net wages to players while cutting tax costs. In Britain most employees have all their tax payments deducted by the employer, so schemes like this and ones where employees are paid in dividends are a way of essentially not paying tax.
By 2010 HMRC had begun to investigate the case, concluding that Rangers may have evaded £49m in taxes, a vast amount for a club already overleveraged in debt in a league not known for being particularly wealthy.
By about 2008 Murray had had enough of Rangers and was looking to sell up. He had gambled and lost huge amounts of money on the club, which was now saddled with huge amounts of debt. The prospect of paying £49m to HMRC if the courts ruled against Rangers deterred any serious buyer and it took some years for a buyer to emerge. Another serious issue was the sheer amount of debt Rangers had to Lloyds (who had taken over the Bank of Scotland), with fans in 2009 threatening a boycott of the banking chain if the bank called in its debts.
Would a buyer emerge and save Rangers from this predicament?
Well, a buyer would emerge in 2011. Not the other bit, sadly.
Enter Craig Whyte
Craig Whyte had once been Scotland's youngest millionaire as a venture capitalist. He bought the club for £1 from Murray but desperately needed to leverage some funds to settle the Lloyds debt, so he borrowed a cool £26.7m against future season ticket sales. This on the face of it should have set alarm bells, even the biggest clubs don't make huge amounts of money on matchday tickets in relation to their massive costs.
Whyte also indulged in a bit of tax fiddling. But rather than setting up an avoidance mechanism and letting the lawyers fight it out, he just stopped sending Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs the income tax payments for the club players and staff. Definitely not the sophistication of Murray.
Matters only got worse. In early 2012 BBC Scotland aired a BAFTA-winning documentary about Whyte and Rangers, which revealed that Whyte had been once banned from working as a company director for seven years. The Scottish Football Association agreed, Whyte was not a 'Fit and Proper' person to own a football club.
At about this time Rangers entered administration. When this happens in Britain, the company's creditors can agree to a 'Company Voluntary Arrangement' (CVA) which essentially means agreeing a plan for the company to continue operating while in administration so the creditors can recover their debts. HMRC, with the outstanding £49m tax case from Murray's era plus the money owed by Whyte's outright failure to pay tax, voted against allowing this to happen.
In the absence of a CVA and agreement with creditors, this meant that Rangers FC as a company ceased to exist in June 2012, with all assets transferred to 'Sevco Scotland Ltd'.
Could this have been avoided? In the end, the £49m owed to HMRC which proved such a millstone has been substantially reduced and the cases around it are still ongoing. But ultimately, Rangers had vast amounts of debt not just to HMRC.
For his part Whyte would be bankrupted by his loan to buy the club and would be faced with a far longer ban on acting as a company director.
Sevco FC?
Sevco inherited everything Rangers had. The players had an opportunity to transfer their employment to Sevco, which also gained Ibrox Stadium and Ranger's membership of the Scottish Premier League.
For the club owned by Sevco to be able to play in the SPL next season, 2/3rds of members had to vote in favour. Clubs such as Aberdeen, Dundee United, and Hearts bowed to fan feeling that Rangers could not continue where they left off. In the end, no club voted in favour of Rangers remaning in the SPL with only Kilmarnock abstaining. This event would generate a huge amount of bad feeling and bitterness from Rangers fans who felt that supporters of other clubs were content to throw them under a bus for reasons not of their making. There was definitely a sense of schadenfreude from supporters of other clubs, watching Scotland's 'Establishment Club' go to the wall.
Could Rangers join the Scottish First Division and gain promotion to the Premier League? First Division clubs didn't want to face the consequences of a Premier League problem, so they also rejected it.
In the end, the Scottish Football League allowed Rangers FC to rejoin the league in the Third Division, a largely semi-professional league three divisions below the Premier League. Their first competitive game was a Challenge Cup (competition for the two lower leagues in the Scottish Football League) tie against Brechin City, who represent a sleepy town of just 7,000.
Clawing their way back up
Most of Ranger's players had refused their statutory right to transfer employment to the new company. Nonetheless, the 2012-13 season started well with their first home league game setting a world record for the best attended fourth division match in history as over 49,000 attended Rangers vs East Stirlingshire. A strong league performance saw Rangers confirm promotion into the 3rd tier by the end of March.
2013-14 saw another promotion as Rangers had an unbeaten season in League One (the leagues were renamed at about this time) to secure promotion to the Championship, the first league which would be wholly filled with professional clubs after the mix of professional and semi-professional that plies their trade in Scotland's lower leagues.
Rangers didn't make it three back-to-back promotions as they lost a promotion play-off final 6-1 to Motherwell, one of Scotland's more successful non-Old Firm clubs who had suffered a stint in the 2nd tier.
During this season they met Celtic in the cup. Some Celtic fans placed an advert in a newspaper claiming that the 'Old Firm' was over and while they had enjoyed a rivalry with Rangers FC they did not recognise the new club as the same entity. This caused some controversy, not just with Rangers fans, but with Celtic fans who were indeed looking forward to the first Old Firm in some time. The accusation that Rangers were 'Zombies' or 'Sevco FC' would become a common one from Celtic supporters at games and remains as such.
Rangers won the 2016-15 Scottish Championship to secure promotion, while also beating Celtic in a Scottish Cup semi-final. But, the 'Gruesome Twosome' of Scottish football would once again grace the top flight together.
Same as before?
Celtic had done very well out of the previous few years. They had won a succession of League titles at a canter with the accompanying European qualification giving them financial muscle the other clubs couldn't compete with. Rangers finished a respectable 3rd, but Celtic once again dominated the league.
After an embarrassing elimination out of the Europa League at the hands of a semi-professional side from Luxembourg, Rangers didn't improve on their 3rd place and Celtic won again. It wasn't until 2018-19 that Rangers finished 2nd.
With Celtic winning again.
Could Celtic's domination be broken before they won 10 titles in a row and broke the record jointly held by 1960s-70s Celtic and 1990s Rangers? Perhaps not yet.
2019-20 started well, Rangers had a fantastic run in the Europa League under Steven Gerrard and beat Celtic at their ground for the first time since 2010. COVID put paid to an increasingly close title race with Celtic awarded the title based on Points Per Game with the season abandoned.
This season has very much been Ranger's season though. At the time of writing they seem, barring a miracle/disaster, overwhemingly likely to win the League this year and deny Celtic the coveted ten in a year.
Postscript
Is the Rangers FC of today the same club as that pre-2012? Displays from Celtic fans would say not, and as a legal entity it certainly isn't the same. But UEFA allows for 'sporting continuity' for a club in terms of identity and honours even if the holding company or corporate structure changes. This suggests something that many football supporters would agree with - a club is as much as community asset as it is a company or business and the stories we have looked at explore the issues when the business and the community collide.
Next time, we'll take a look at how Arsenal Fan TV revolutionised football social media while turning their club into a laughing stock

Porn is a new type of drug that is injected into the brain through the eyes

Entering the 21st century, we have completely entered the era of pornography. Pornography began to flood in the late 1990s. At that time, it was disc spread. Many people could find pornography at home. Later, the new millennium entered the Internet age. , Pornographic content spread more severely, became more widespread, and it is still free to browse. Later, when we entered the era of smartphones, it was easier to browse pornography than to find stones on the ground. In our country, pornographic content is illegal, while in foreign countries, certain pornographic websites are even legal, which exacerbates the proliferation of pornographic content. However, foreign countries have also realized the great harm of pornography in recent years. They call pornography the new drug. (New types of drugs). There are many rebooting websites and rebooting books abroad, and our country also needs to pay attention to this aspect.
On the surface, cocaine and pornography do not have much in common, but more and more studies have shown that chemical drugs can induce the brain to release exciting chemicals, and watching pornography has the same effect.
Just like drugs, when these exciting chemicals (such as dopamine and oxytocin) are delivered to the brain, they build a new pathway in the brain. This pathway can fundamentally induce porn users to browse pornographic information. When the brain pathways are activated by pornographic information, the brain can release chemicals at the same level as when viewing pornographic information for the first time. This process is similar to the process of drug addiction. Porn is injected into the brain through an eye. drug!
To equate pornography with drugs is the latest scientific research abroad. This understanding is correct. Thinking about the state of looking for pornography, it is really like a drug addict looking for drugs. Studies have shown that watching pornography can cause your brain to release the same pleasure chemicals as cocaine. When drug addicts take more drugs or porn viewers watch more pornography, the neural circuits in their brains will become stronger, making it easier for them to take drugs or watch porn again, whether they want it or not. content. Just as addicts will eventually need more and more drugs to get pleasure, or even just to make themselves feel normal, sex addicts will quickly develop tolerance when they get used to watching the large amounts of dopamine released by pornography. In other words, even if pornography can still make the brain release dopamine, they can't be as cool as usual.
Like drugs, the more stimulus, the more boring afterwards. You must look for heavier flavors and more excitement to achieve the pleasure of tasting the forbidden fruit before. Many people have become psychologically perverted afterwards, and their sexual orientation has also been distorted. Watching pornographic masturbation will bring a series of evil consequences, which will make people fall into a vicious circle. At first, sexual orientation was normal. Later, in order to stimulate dopamine secretion, I would look at abnormalities. As my psychology became more and more abnormal, my sexual orientation began to be distorted, and I would learn to imitate the contents of pornographic films.
It is estimated that there are 2 million heroin users in the United States, and 600 to 800,000 of these people are heavily addicted to heroin. Compared with the above data, 40 million people in the United States watch online pornography every day-this new type of drug. The reason why Internet pornography is a new type of drug is that the brain responds to drugs and sexual arousal in the same parts. Pornography is really a kind of drug. As a 100 billion-dollar neuro-drug industry, pornography is changing people’s concept of sexual behavior more rapidly through the accelerated development of the Internet. Pornographic information is pervasive on the Internet, and it inhibits people’s sexuality. The normal view of orientation leads people to a state of evil, perverted, indecent, and irresponsible beasts.
Imagine that the brain is a forest. Hikers pass by the same place day after day and gradually step out of the way. Browsing pornographic information will also generate neural circuits. As people browse pornographic content again and again, these neural circuits will be continuously strengthened in the "forest" of the brain, and these neural circuits will eventually become paths in the "forest" of the brain. "Thanks to" the Internet, current pornography mixes the most powerful dopamine that the body can release and many other elements-endless novelties, shocks and surprises-all of which will stimulate the release of dopamine in large quantities. And because Internet pornography provides endless content, users can move to new images (postures, costumes, heroines, etc.) every time their pleasure declines to keep dopamine at high levels for a few hours. Professor Jeffrey Satinover of Princeton University described the effects of pornography to the U.S. Senate committee: "It's like a heroin we invented. Users can use it secretly in their homes and inject them directly into the brain through their eyes."
The American Addiction Medicine Association used to believe that addiction is mainly a behavior. Recently, inspired by the new brain science community, the American Addiction Medicine Association redefines "addiction"-a brain disease related to the neural reward system. The powerful influence of Internet pornography on the neural reward system is clearly in line with the new definition of addiction. Dr. Hilton believes that the impact of pornographic images on the natural brain reward system is unique. Unlike the rewards brought about by food or doing other things, the rewards brought by watching pornographic images can lead to "continuous changes related to nerve synapses and plasticity." In other words, Internet pornography not only stimulates the increase of dopamine levels in the brain, and thus produces pleasure. It also literally changes the physical organization inside the brain, so that new neural pathways crave pornographic information to trigger the desired sense of reward.
Pornography is a mixed drug. It triggers two addictive chemicals in the brain by causing excitement (the "hi" feeling caused by dopamine) and creating orgasm (the "relaxing" effect of drugs). This mixing mechanism makes pornography more likely to become addictive and easier to develop tolerance. The tolerance of pornography requires not only larger doses, but also more novelty in content, such as more taboo behaviors.
Although the effects of Internet pornography are similar to the combination of chemical addictions, the effects of Internet pornography exceed those of chemical substances.
For example, the "mirror neurons" in the brain give us the ability to learn: observe a behavior and imitate it. Professor Struthers wrote that because of mirror neurons, “watching pornographic videos creates a neural experience by which the viewer indirectly participates in what he sees.” This unique interactive addiction through The dual stimulation of the brain and the body is realized. In the words of Professor Strathurs, "Pornography involves visual mechanisms (watching movies), motor mechanisms (masturbation), sensory mechanisms (genital stimulation), and the neurological effects of excitement and orgasm (caused by addictive dopamine). Excitement)".
The study of the brain confirms such a serious fact: pornography is a drug release system, which has obvious and powerful effects on the human brain and nervous system. As Dr. Deutch pointed out, "Those who watch porn are unaware of the extent to which pornography reshapes their brains." Indeed, they do not know that pornography is "creating new neural circuits in their brains."
Research on nerves has revealed that Internet pornography has a powerful effect on the brain. Its effect is as powerful as cocaine and heroin, which are addictive substances. In a statement to the U.S. Congress, psychiatrist and former Yale psychiatrist Dr. Jeffery warned the public: With the advent of the information age, the addictive stimulation of Internet pornography has become almost irresistible. We seem to have created an unprecedented substance that is 100 times more powerful than heroin. Internet pornography can be watched privately at home, it is directly "injected" into the brain through both eyes!
In 2014, a research paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Psychiatry stated that frequent viewing of pornographic pictures can make the brain slow to respond to sexual stimulation. German scientists point out that this means that the brain needs more dopamine to feel the same degree of "orgasm", which leads to the search for more pornographic images. "Psychology" magazine once published a paper saying that these dopamine surges mean that people who watch pornographic pictures need more tasteful sexual perceptions and experiences to arouse sexual desire. German scientists believe that viewing pornographic pictures may cause brain shrinkage, and the more you look at them, the more severe the brain striatum area associated with rewards and stimulation. This is the first time scientists have discovered that viewing pornographic pictures is directly related to physical injury. In addition, scientists also found that the more time spent watching pornographic pictures, the more different the brain, the more you watch, the deeper the addiction. In 2013, researchers at the University of Cambridge found that when people addicted to pornographic pictures watch pornographic pictures or videos, the "drug addiction" area of the brain glows in a brain scan. When young people who are addicted to Internet pornography browse pornographic pictures, their brains will "glisten like a Christmas tree with colorful lights." In the brains of people addicted to pornographic images, these areas responsible for processing rewards, stimulation, and pleasure are exactly the same as the highly stimulated areas in the brains of drug addicts and alcohol addicts.
Research shows that among all forms of online entertainment (such as gambling, games, surfing the Internet, social networks), pornography has the strongest tendency to become addictive. When pornographic images enter the brain, it will induce the reward center to start stimulating dopamine, which triggers a flood of chemical components, including a protein called DeltaFosB. Usually the role of DeltaFosB is to create new neural pathways to connect with what you are doing (viewing pornography) and pleasure. With the repeated overload of dopamine, viewers become numb to those scenes, and they often find that they cannot feel normal when there is no high release of dopamine. Some people say that they feel nervous or negative until they regain pornography. As they sink deeper and deeper into this abyss of vices, they will become more and more flavorful. Many people who try their best to get rid of this bad habit say that they find it hard to stop.
Like any substance with addictive potential, pornography induces the release of dopamine into the "reward center" part of the brain (also known as the reward channel or system). The reason why pornography is a behavior that aggravates the degree of psychological distortion is because as some pornographic viewers' tolerance increases, the scenes that have excited them become boring. It can be expected that they will often spend longer watching pornography, seeking more heavy-tasting themes, and trying to regain their previous excitement, as a compensation for the boredom caused by old themes. Many watching People find that sharp themes such as violence are permeating their sexual fantasies and habits.
The content of pornography and the way people interact with it have undergone dramatic changes in the past few decades. Internet pornography has the following six characteristics.
(1) Free of charge. People who watch pornography can browse pornography for free on the Internet. In the past, they had to go out to buy discs and books.
(2) Easy to obtain. People can easily access pornographic content through the Internet. Nowadays, most of them have mobile phones, and the Internet is more convenient.
(3) Freshness. In the past, pornographic resources were relatively single, and it was easy to get bored. Internet pornography has many options and can provide continuous freshness.
(4) Large amount of resources. There are huge amounts of pornographic resources on the Internet, and there are dozens of gigabytes or even hundreds of gigabytes in the hard disks of many prostitutes.
(5) Diversified locations. In the past, you could only watch it at home, but now you have a mobile phone and you can watch it everywhere, which increases the possibility of watching pornography.
(6) Easy to carry. Drop it into your mobile phone, mobile hard drive or laptop, and you can take it with you.

[Chronicles of Elyria] People paid $10k to be kings and queens in a failed crowdfunded game; lead dev still pretending he’s ‘working on the game’ after closing the studio and laying off all staff.

 Remember, Remember, the 5th of NoRender...

I am surprised there aren’t any posts about Chronicles of Elyria on HobbyDrama yet! The community was so rife with drama from start to finish that I don’t even know where to begin.
Throwaway because I will probably be doxxed if I post on my main.

What is Chronicles of Elyria?

Chronicles of Elyria was pitched as a Kickstarter in May 2016 as a dynamic MMORPG with procedurally-generated quests, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements. The goal was $900k, but they made about $1.3 million in the initial campaign, and through their subsequent crowdfunding efforts made close to $8 million total over the next few years.

What went wrong?

In terms of lofty ideas, Chronicles of Elyria was right up there with Star Citizen, but with a fraction of the funds. We’d be here all day if I went into detail about all of the game’s proposed features, because it’s like they were trying to be Crusader Kings meets medieval life simulator meets Harvest Moon meets survival game meets action RPG all at once. Browse through their Developer Journals; even without a background in game development, it’s clear that the scope of what they were trying to pull off would have been ambitious for a major studio, let alone a small crowdfunded team.
The game’s initial release date was a laughably unrealistic Q4 2017, so it was no surprise that this would get pushed back again and again over the course of development. However, on March 24, 2020, lead developer Caspian made an announcement that rocked the community: State of Elyria: Into the Abyss (autoplay warning). In his typical long-winded fashion, Caspian spent the bulk of the post outlining the milestones the team reached over the past year, but only in the last few paragraphs did he mention that due to financial stressors from COVID-19, they ran out of money and had to lay off the entire team, shuttering development of Chronicles of Elyria. Because of several factors I’ll cover in the next few sections, the community did not take this well. In less than two weeks, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office reported they had received over 150 official complaints against Soulbound Studios, the most they had ever received for a company in that amount of time. Community whales formed a 'CoE Lawsuit' discord and discussed plans for a class-action lawsuit, demanding accountability and refunds. Some of them even pledged over $20k on the game, and they weren’t going to let Caspian cut and run.
Amidst threats of legal action, on April 9 Caspian dropped another blog post, A Letter from Soulbound Studios to Our Community claiming that the March 24 post came from a “very emotional place.” He said that the community misinterpreted his intent, and that he was actually trying to communicate that he was still working on the game while looking for ways to secure additional funding. As you can expect, this was just as poorly-received as his last announcement.

Wait, why did people spend so much money on this game? And how did the drama get so spicy?

By its own design the game stirred up drama even before release. With social stratification based on medieval feudalism literally built into the system, there was no way around it; the developers cheekily called it the “Dance of Dynasties.” There were multiple tiers of "pledges" and if I’m remembering correctly, the prices after the kickstarter were $500 for a Mayor title, $1000 for Count, and $3000 for Duke. The most coveted were of course the King/Queen titles, which had people shelling out a whopping $10000 for the chance to be royalty in an unreleased game. Even with the limited supply (6 kingdom slots per server iirc), these kingdom packages sold out all but one server. A few monarchs even purchased TWO kingdom slots to guarantee their supremacy on their chosen server.
It’s very difficult to overstate the cult-like mentality of the community during the “peak” years of 2016-2018. There was an official CoE discord server where the developers frequently engaged with players, but most of the drama happened in what were called the Discords of Elyria. These were community-run discords for individual kingdoms, duchies, counties, towns, and baronies. Each had their own cliques of ‘advisors’ and elite roleplaying cabals.
No, ‘elite roleplaying cabals’ is not an exaggeration; these people were spending thousands of dollars for a title to justify RPing as nobility to lord over the peasant rabble. This attracted a lot of entitled narcissists; the game’s structure practically encouraged it! I’ll give you an anecdotal example: I was really active within a kingdom discord and was eventually appointed as an advisor (the equivalent of what a guild officer would be in a normal MMO). This title was almost useless until release, so it was mainly just a glorified clique with a secret discord channel where we would theorycraft and talk shit about people we didn’t like in the kingdom. But I was the only one on the advisory council that did not possess a noble title, and a Countess kicked up a big fuss about this. Just like the real-life aristocracy, she was scandalized! Wording it in an RP-appropriate way with paragraphs of purple prose, she claimed that the $60 I pledged to the funding of the game wasn’t enough to prove I was fully committed. She and her cronies were so bothered that they tried to get me off the council. They went around DMing a bunch of people, accusing me of being a spy because I used to RP with some guy that left for a rival kingdom, and dredged up screenshots of year-old discord posts as proof my conduct was “unbecoming” of a representative of the kingdom.
There’s a saga behind that story and many others; I can absolutely go into more detail in another post if enough people are interested in the byzantine “Dance of Dynasties” and the inter- and inner-kingdom drama that went down during the development of this beautiful disaster of a game… and developer involvement in said drama. If you want to waste several hours of your life, there is plenty of RP cringe archived on the read-only forums. For now, that’s just a small slice to help illustrate how detached from reality and cult-like this community was. Going back to the downfall...

Early Red Flags

As I alluded to, there were already red flags when the game was first pitched on Kickstarter. Despite hitting the initial $900k and going well into their stretch goals, the devs were still encouraging players to crowdfund long after the Kickstarter ended. There were several additional promotional events (somewhat outdated post that doesn't include everything) selling both cosmetic items and mechanically useful items, despite the developers going through hoops to justify over and over again why the game was not pay to win (it was). Eventually, the constant promotions and gamey tactics prompted community members to question why we were seeing more promotional events than development updates.
The devs then admitted that the original Kickstarter campaign was meant to raise enough to be able to create a demo to attract investors and secure a stream of income that didn’t rely on crowdfunding. Unfortunately, no investors took a gamble on a risky debut from an inexperienced team, and despite Caspian making a few weird statements on Discord and implying they had “other sources” of funding that they did not have to divulge to the community, he too later admitted that they were relying solely on crowdfunding to make this game work.
Well, this news was a departure from their previous claim that all they needed was 900k to develop the game for a Q4 2017 release, and that all funds would be used towards the development of Chronicles of Elyria. No one knew this was all just for a demo to attract investors, and people were justifiably upset.

The Community Begins to Turn

There was (and still is, last I checked!) a particularly loyal and obsessive subset of the community. At the slightest hint of criticism they’d quickly jump in to defend the game and devs. The community moderators were no better, and a lot of posts were censored or deleted from the forums. The developers had built up a sort of cult of personality with their over-involvement with the community. Despite a hilarious lack of transparency about the actual development of the game, they were… uncomfortably close to the playerbase.
Caspian complained about specific players on the official discord and publicly accused two kingdoms of cheating during a cheap browser event meant to (surprise) raise more money. A player made a post on the forums saying the community outreach manager should be replaced (he was known for being snarky and condescending). Said community outreach manager actually private messaged people that upvoted the post, basically saying “if you think I should be replaced, please don’t contact me if you ever need anything in the future.”
Yes, that came from the guy handling outreach.
The "Map Selection" event was rife with its own kingdom vs kingdom drama, but the devs weren't able to redeem themselves here. After months and months of delays for a map event, Caspian failed to deliver the high-resolution maps as promised on November 5, 2018, claiming they were taking too long to render.
"Remember, remember, the 5th of NoRender" became a meme and rallying cry across the community in reference to the constant delays and deception, to the point where people were banned just for saying it in the official discord.
Then there was the issue of Prelyria. Prelyria was the low-poly pre-alpha client of the game they were developing. Meant to be like a graybox, it became a lot more involved than that and seemed to eclipse the development of the “real” game. People felt they had been bamboozled when they looked back:
Pre-alpha video May 2016
Pre-alpha video September 2019
Some players with industry experience were pointing out that the amount of time the devs were spending on building the Prelyria assets and developing the low-poly client first (it was a lot more involved than a simple graybox) was actually going to be more cumbersome and definitely not save all the time the devs hoped it would. At this point, Caspian still looked like a well-intentioned idea guy with his head in the sky, and most people didn’t think he was intentionally scamming anyone. Personally, I believe Caspian definitely started out in earnest, but he spoiled his own vision with mismanagement and obfuscation.
Funding was always a touchy subject.
Despite first claiming they only needed $900k to finish the game, then saying no wait actually we need like $3 mil, Chronicles of Elyria raised almost $8 million in total and after 4 years in development had nothing close to a minimum viable product.
We later learned that $500k of that initial $900k came from Caspian himself. This of course was not disclosed until after the Kickstarter.
On March 20, 2020 (four days before the infamous Into the Abyss announcement), the devs released an exciting update claiming that Pre-Alpha Testing Has Officially Begun! Players that had pledged (iirc) $1000 or more now had access to test Alpha I! But excitement quickly faded as players realized this wasn’t really an alpha, but a 10-15 minute demo showing off movement and parkour mechanics and ONLY that. I didn’t have alpha access so I don’t know how bad the demo really was, and those who played it are still under NDA, but I heard it was terrible, and looked like something that could be slapped together in a couple weeks using Unity store assets.
Let’s look again at the timeline Caspian pulled out at the end of 2017 when he admitted the Q4 2017 release date wasn’t going to happen:

V3 of the Website (Q3 2017)
ElyriaMUD (Q4 2017)
Alpha 1 (T1 2018)
Server Selection (T1 2018)
Settlement / Domain Selection (T2 2018)
KoE (T2 2018)
Design Experiences (T3 2018)
Alpha 2 (T3 2018)
Beta 1 (S1 2019)
Prologue & CoE Adventure Toolkit (S1 2019)
Exposition (S1 2019)
Beta 2 (S1/S2 2019)
Stress Test (Any paid account)(S2 2019)
Launch (S2 2019)

By March 2020, the only milestones they hit were V3 of the Website, Server Selection in November 2018, and Settlement/Domain Selection (after a series of delays that included a period of radio silence lasting over 100 days, it began somewhere around Summer 2019 and never officially concluded).

The Downfall

Now for the big question I’m sure all of you have: why was it such a big deal when he announced they ran out of funding?
Indeed, projects are cancelled or become vaporware all of the time. While it's obvious Caspian and team were drowning in too many ideas and not enough tangible progress, why was this scummy enough to warrant hundreds of complaints to the AG and a class-action lawsuit?
About a week before the March 24 announcement, Caspian launched the “Settlers of Elyria” event. It’s hard to explain out of context, but basically all the unclaimed duchies, counties, and baronies were going on sale, and players could purchase them at reduced prices.
Yes, up to a day before he announced he laid off the entire team, he was allowing people to spend thousands of dollars on fake titles. Worse was the fact that this event was designed for new members of the community that didn’t have a chance to buy titles before or weren’t able to because of the prohibitive cost.
Illegal? Maybe not. Fucked up? Absolutely. This, combined with Caspian taking a PPP loan right afterwards painted a damning portrait of a man squeezing every last penny out of this failed endeavor before he ran.
Caspian kept the official discord open for a couple days after announcing the shuttering of the studio, but on March 29, he “fired” all of the community mods and deleted the discord, claiming that people were saying “horrible, unimaginable things” about him. There were rumors that he was cheating on his wife with a (much younger) community member. Apparently, a dev was corroborating these statements and providing receipts. Whether these awful rumors were true or not, Caspian’s reaction in the mod forum was nuclear.

The Future of CoE

After nearly six months of radio silence, a few days ago on December 17, 2020, Caspian gave interviews to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com and released an “update” video that is a nothingburger rehash of old 'gameplay' footage and platitudes. He keeps saying that CoE is in development, but he has nothing to show. He keeps saying some of the staff have volunteered to work on it, yet based on their LinkedIn profiles it looks like most of the original team have found jobs elsewhere. He refuses to release the results of the studio’s audit. The new FAQ on the website is an obvious attempt to avoid lawsuits and in the two interviews he hilariously continues to extol his own transparency while being as transparent as a brick wall.
People are still able to find justifications for Caspian's actions and to this day are in the community-run discords and subreddit trying to keep the hype train going. Maybe it's a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost fallacy, but a lot of people still maintain absolute trust in his vision. I personally did not invest a significant amount of money (but I did waste my time, RIP), but it's still as saddening as it is maddening. Yes, those "Dance of Dynasty" posts on the forum might be cringey now, but people put SO MUCH creative energy and passion into coming up with lore for their kingdoms and duchies and towns and such, and despite being a skeptic for most of my time with the community, it was an incredibly unique experience to be part of this group. I just wish they would move on; put that energy into something productive and not waste it on a failed game. Caspian used them and he will continue to use them if people keep giving him a platform.

EDIT: added more links
EDIT2: Obligatory "wow I didn't expect this to blow up!" but I really didn't! Thanks for the gold x2!

definition illegal gambling video

When it comes to gambling, be it at a land-based casino or online, it helps to know the gambling laws of the US state you are in because they all have different stances when it comes to the issue. What may be considered legal in one state may not necessarily be legal in another, so it pays to know more about these things lest you want to wake up one day being charged with illegal gambling with Define Illegal gambling. means the making, placing or receipt, of any bet or wager in this Commonwealth of money or other thing of value, made in exchange for a An 'illegal gambling business' is defined to be a gambling business which: Is a violation of the law of the state in which it is conducted; and; Involves five or more persons who conduct, finance, manage, supervise, direct or own all or part of such business; and; Has been or remains in substantially continuous operation for a period in excess of thirty days, or has a gross revenue of $2,000 in any single day. State laws also govern gambling. ILLEGAL GAMBLING BUSINESS. Title 18, U.S.C., Sec. 1955, makes it a Federal crime or offense for anyone to conduct an 'illegal gambling business.' An 'illegal gambling business' is defined to be a gambling business which: (1) Is a violation of the law of the state in which it is conducted; and Illegal gambling is any type of gambling that is specifically prohibited by state law. Gambling Involves a Bet. While most instances of gambling occur when someone bets money, courts have ruled that gambling can occur whenever a bet is made using anything of value. However, illegal gambling is still a problem that some engage in and for which law enforcement can arrest a person or group. Definition of Illegal Gambling Generally, when someone engages in gambling activities where the outcome has a basis of chance rather than skill, there are at least a few participants and there is a wager with monetary exchange, it is gambling. The effort is a component of AGA’s “Stop Illegal Gambling – Play it Safe” initiative which is uniting gaming and law enforcement to expose the massive illegal gambling market that preys on consumers, siphons tax revenues and funds violent crime. AGA also launched a new website – StopIllegalGambling.org – to serve as an information hub. An 'illegal gambling business' is defined to be a gambling business which: 1. Is a violation of the law of a State or political subdivision in which it is conducted; 2. Involves five or more persons who conduct, finance, manage, supervise, direct, or own all or part of such business; and. 3. The definition of legal gambling usually requires a specific state’s reference. In Nevada, most forms of gambling are legal where all other states may consider the activity illegal. Most legal gambling throughout the entire United States occurs through state lotteries, scratch off stickers, bingo and similar forms of monetary exchanges. Definition of illegal gambling business Search Within illegal gambling business Definitions Click here to search for " " within illegal gambling business Definitions

definition illegal gambling top

Evicted #KCPublicWorks - YouTube

Can casinos being put up in our country really boost tourism?Subscribe to the ABS-CBN News channel! - http://bit.ly/TheABSCBNNewsWatch the full episodes of T... What happens inside the brain of a gambling addict when they make a bet - and can the secret to their addiction be found within the brain itself? BBC Panoram... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Please LIKE and SHARE www.facebook.com/marktolentinolaw and subscribe www.youtube.com/marktolentinolaw for more details about Philippine Laws. You can email ... View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-does-money-laundering-work-delena-d-spannMoney laundering is the term for any process that “cleans” illegally... Can casinos really throw you out? If you learn card counting, are you going to end up chained in a casino basement, getting pistol whipped by security? In th... What is an underground economy? Whether you call it a black market, a grey market, or just the shop down the street, its about connecting people with goods o... Hank describes how our brains respond biochemically to various addictive substances and behaviors and where those responses have come from, evolutionarily sp... hiya!! pls ignore the yucky voice and walk through. this is all really just to help people who need it and to keep it for myself in case I ever lose the sket... America’s eviction problem is now being described as an epidemic. Our half-hour documentary, “Evicted,” takes an in-depth look at the issue across the Kansas...

Illegal Gambling | CriminalDefenseLawyer.com

definition illegal gambling

definition illegal gambling - win

Belgium declares loot boxes gambling and therefore illegal - definitely reminds me of a certain Game Theory from 3 months ago...

CSGOLotto cover-up "definitely illegal" says Video Game Attorney. Is Gambling as Well.

Dear Reddit. I have started writing a book of short stories about my life as a hobo. True to my nature of blowing money faster than it came, or blowing the opportunity of even making it, I love you assholes and will let you read the book for free as I write it from the beginning. Enjoy