Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Yes, I'm sure Robinhood or Schwab will allow me to open a $2M short position when my portfolio is $[sufficiently small that I'm debating the costs of a couple of thousand for a helicopter charter].
It's easy enough to synthesize 100x leverage by synthesis through options. If you have $25k for a margin account you could do it no problem. Of course, your funds would be rapidly vaporized if you were even a little bit wrong on timing or you needed more margin for volatility to keep it from getting called before it dips.
As a Russian emigrant, I feel this whole war is a severe case of déjà vu. It's as if the US government is going through a stolen Russian playbook, appropriating everything.
"Special operation"? Check. "$EnemyCapital in 3 days"? Check. "We haven't even started yet"? Check. "Goodwill gestures"? Check.
(It's actually a common joke on the Russian Internet. So common, in fact, that it has already stopped being funny.)
The constitution lost its power long ago, and is now a mere fig leaf of legitimacy. Plenty of things ought to be unconstitutional based on a plain reading of the constitution. Civil forfeiture, unlimited gun rights, qualified immunity, FISA courts, various “emergency” powers, deportation of US citizens, etc, etc. The trouble is that a huge portion of Americans don’t really care about any of this, so long as these violations are used to stick it to liberals, all is forgiven.
I find such framing challenging because you are correct, the Constitution lost its power a long time ago, but I would not limit the cause of that lost power to only a rather recent ideological adversary, those you imagine would say “stick it to liberals”.
Unfortunately for everyone but the parasitic ruling class that is plundering America and the world, the changes and damage done to the Constitution in the name of progress have not only been the primary vehicle of that damage from the start, but they have had compounding and exponentially negative effects that are clearly accelerating the impact.
The problem with “progress”, i.e., changes framed as positive, is that it is easy to hijack the innate nature of young people to want to differentiate themselves from their parents as a natural and instinctual process of development/maturity. It allows for malevolent, usually older people, to whisper in the ears of young people things like “don’t you think what your parents do is silly and should be undone?”, not knowing or realizing what their parents do not only protects and preserves, but is also the foundation that allowed everything we have to have been created. It is generally a form of grooming young people to tear down the protective walls holding the Epstein/Biden/Trump Class style super-predators at bay.
I personally am concerned that we are effectively already locked in the dungeon, but we just don’t know it because it has WiFi and is nicely decorated…for the time being.
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Americans deep political confusion is really something to behold. How do you both hold the contradictions in your head? Every presidency no matter it's so called political ideology, liberal or conservative, have the same exact policies on mass surveillance? The Patriot act and fisa amendment was bipartisan, Obama voted for the Fisa amendment, Biden voted for the Patriot act.
The young people conservatives fantasize/complain about tend to be left-wing, their ideology has practically zero representation in politics, how do you make those the scapegoats of some confusing grand Jordan Peterson style social psychology argument it makes no sense. And how does republicans tossing civil liberties to "own the libs" mesh with libs slashing the same civil liberties? It's like the spiderman pointing at each other meme.
People don't understand that the way the media makes money is by stoking the "two sides" war.
People are so insanely ideologically charged up, the deepest conviction possible coming right from their lizard brain, all because they are lost in the sauce of an industry that is dependent on showing them random ads as frequently as possible.
It's actually kind of hilarious, and if you're one of these people, take a step back and see what's going on.
Exactly, representatives from both parties need to be forced to add FISA amendments that add privacy protections, most of everybody agrees with that enthusiastically if you explain it to them. Yet people are divided into their respective bullshit partisan trench lines by the two party theater.
The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
> You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
In this case, unlimited means literally everywhere.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Except that the analogy is that they already have, or can easily create, that list. If they couldn’t, their value proposition would be lame. “We know you’re looking for a specific license plate, here’s a million hours of footage from all over the city, have at looking through it all.”
Only for paying customers, which you aren't of course. If those customers paid public storage to inventory their stuff, then that inventory is their property. Surely it would be inappropriate to use their inventory data to find your naked photos. A violation of privacy even. (/s, kinda)
I was enumerating the likely defense, not that it's valid.
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