Current Conditions of the Market:
Let me be clear: this is not the typical conditions of the market where stocks fluctuate double and triple digit percentages per day. There’s a place for that - the casino. In recent weeks, herds of new traders are pouring into the trading scene hoping to get a piece of the volatile market that has turned the rags to riches, or the other way around. The stock market as a whole, under normal conditions, moves gradually in both directions, guided by trends, innovation, speculation, earnings report, and financial changes. What we are in right now is a hysteria-filled environment that is risky for both veteran traders and novices. Any uninformed, reckless decision can produce different results - by chance. Be wise and do not let chance underlie your success or bankruptcy stories. Please do your research first before investing into anything and whatever you do, do not make the mistake of over-extending yourself with margin (brokerage-provided capital) that you cannot repay should things go south. People have and continue to make this fundamental mistake that will ruin them financially for years. Stock investments should be about long-term growth, stability, and supplemental to your income. Investments should give you access to the opportunity of financial freedom, but should not be your primary source for income. Do not listen to stock gurus and paid-only discord groups - they don’t make money from stocks, they make money from you. Lastly, this atypical market condition is the perfect storm for spontaneous “pump and dumps” where stocks become inflated, and based on fool’s theory or musical chairs (whichever you prefer), the last one that gets out gets burned. Be smart, be patient, do the research.
Basic Stock Jargons & Short/Long Positions:
Long - you’re buying and holding a stock with the intention for it to increase in value.
Short - you’re borrowing shares from a lender (brokerage, investment firm, individual investors), selling it to someone, and hoping to buy it back at a lower price. Your profit is the difference in the sell and buy back price. I’ll provide a real world example because this concept it a bit more complex:

• Person A is a share lender. They want to lend the share and get paid a small interest rate as compensation.
• Person B asks Person A to lend him that share temporarily. Person B does not pay anything upfront, but he promises to pay Person A in the form of interest over time.
• Person B finds a buyer Person C. Person C wants to buy a stock so it can go up. Person C is “long” on this stock. Person B, however, is short on this stock because he wants the value of the stock to go down.
• Person C pays Person B $10 for the stock. Now, Person C has spent $10, and Person B has gained $10.
• Two hypothetical situation happens now:
  • Scenario 1: Stock value increases to $15. Person C is now up $5 and he sells because he’s making nice gains. Person B needs to buy back that share at $15, but he only gained $10 profit initially. Now he needs to fork up $5 to buy back the share, and then return the share back to the lender + any interest accrued. In this scenario, the “short” lost money, the “long” gained money, and the “lender” made interest money.
  • Scenario 2: Stock value decreases to $5. Person C is now down $5 and he sells to cut losses. Person B needs to buy back that share at $5, but he already has $10 in profit initially. Now he pays $5 for the share, leaving him still with $5 profit, and returns the share back to the lender + any interested accrued. In this scenario, the “short” made money, the “long” lost money, and the “lender” made interest money.
• The above scenarios help to show why “shorts” (typically hedge funds or experienced traders) might want to manipulate the stock price to go down. Hedge funds have an incredible amount of power in the market, which I will explain in a bit, and can often create serious price movements to invoke price action that benefits themselves. Shorts, therefore, have the opposite intention of longs. They want share prices to go down, and in the process, can bankrupt certain companies that rely on the stock market liquidity to stay afloat. In other words, when investors leave a stock because it is dropping in value, the company loses that money that they could have used to pay off debt, grow the business, develop new products, pay for expenses, etc.

Market Manipulation:
Market manipulation is not new to the scene. Investors have long known of the existence of stock market manipulation tactics, and every day, we may observe some levels of manipulation in specific stocks, specific categories or industries of stocks, or the entire market. Market manipulation is defined as any actions performed with the intention of moving a certain stock price in favor of the manipulator. In this case, these are the wealthy “whales” or hedge funds, both of which have enormous capital capable of shifting stock prices at alarming speeds. Keep in mind, not all hedge funds do this and not all hedge funds are “shorts”. Some are “neutral” and act as lenders to make money, some are “growth-based” and invest just like everyday traders with the intention of raising share prices, and others are “short” which are probably perceived to be the sadistic groups of the bunch. Below, I will be discussing how manipulation occurs and on different scales.
Manipulation Tactics on a Spectrum:
Market manipulation can happen in certain stock, sectors, or the entire market. There are probably far more types of manipulative tactics than we know, but I will describe the most basic types and the strategies behind it.
Scenario 1:
Let’s say a hedge fund just opened a short position on stock X. Stock X is rising in value because general investors see it as a potential growth stock. Hedge funds are not too excited about this increased share value, so they can “hedge” or protect themselves, by selling put options. When they sell puts, they are anticipating that the stock will continue to surge, which causes the puts to become worthless at expiration, but on the contrary, they will be collecting the “premium” or money paid upfront by traders that bought the put. At the same time, this hedge fund will slowly “cover”, or buy shares of Stock X, so that the increased value of the shares will offset the short position which is losing money. The manipulation here is by using the sheer amount of capital in hand to bolster the stock, both creating favorable conditions for the puts that they sold and the share that they purchased as cover. If they want to add another level of manipulation to this, they can also purchase call options, which will result in profit if the stock price goes up. In this scenario, hedge funds make money at the expense of put option buyers and other shorts that do not have manipulative power or capital to recreate this same strategy.
Scenario 2:
Let’s say a hedge fund just opened a short position on Stock X. Stock X is rising in value because general investors see it as a potential growth stock. This hedge fund does not want to risk extra capital to cover their short position (by buying shares, selling put options, or buying call options), so they try a different route. Keep in mind that hedge funds are typically heavily invested in many stocks and assets, meaning they have a lot of power in deciding the direction of many stocks that have potential to instill widespread fear across the entire market if it drops. Take for example, if Apple and Google began to hurl downwards, this can create panic in the market where everyday traders might sell their shares at a loss. This in turn might ripple through the market as other investors in other stocks are predicting a downward trajectory across the market since these big name stocks are losing value so rapidly. Conveniently enough, hedge funds own a lot of these big name “FANG” stocks.
If I am a moderately sadistic hedge fund, I can sell off a large holding of shares (in the scale of multi millions or billions) that are in the same sector as Stock X, which would incite fear across the sector, creating panic sell offs. The price will drop sharply across the board, including Stock X, and the short position will produce big profits. Because this hedge fund sold off a large chunk of their shares at a good price, they can now cover their short position (essentially getting rid of it), and then buy up these same stocks that were let go earlier, only this time at a much cheaper price. The hedge fund has now made money not only on the short position, but now they got into the stock at a cheap price in which they can explore other manipulative tactics to bolster the price again. This can be done by encouraging analyst upgrades, publicizing “newly” purchased positions without disclosing the fact that they previously owned it, etc.
Scenario 3:
This one involves technology: algorithm trading (commonly referred to as algo trading). This one is a really intricately designed manipulative tactic that investors really have no way of getting around. Algorithm trading is the process of using high-speed super-computers and a team of traders to constantly monitor market activity and trade when opportunities arise. In this case, the hedge funds do not have to do any direct manipulation of the market, which makes this 100% legal. How this works is by taking advantage of how trading works and the time it takes for a trade to be made. For you general investors, we have mobile apps and web-based trading platforms to trade. When we like a stock, we have to go through the motion of inputting the stock ticker symbol, the amount of shares, the price we are willing to pay, hit submit, and confirm the trade. For hedge funds using algorithm trading, all this is done autonomously, which makes submission of an order several magnitudes quicker. When an order is submitted, it goes through a brokerage (Fidelity, Webull, ETrade, TDA, RH, etc.) and the data is rerouted to a clearing house (intermediate party that verifies and processes the trade). Clearing houses are responsible for making sure your orders are filled, but they take it on a first come first serve basis. So if a stock is moving quickly, hedge funds have a serious edge in getting in cheaper and faster as well as getting out higher and faster.
Algorithm trading is integratable as part of the buying and selling strategies mentioned in the two previous scenarios, which is why they can almost guarantee profit. Algorithm trading also uses a lot of data in their backbone to determine the trades that have a high chance of profitability, and it acts on various factors such as volatility, volume, interest activity, news, etc. In some cases, these algorithms can be set to do some extremely sadistic things. I’ll start by talking about “market orders” vs “limit orders”. Before you make a trade on your brokerage, you will notice an option that says “market order” or “limit order”. Market orders are an agreement that you will purchase the stock or option contract at the best price in the market in the momentary space in time. There is of course a huge risk to that because in that short moment in time, there may not be anyone selling at a good price, and instead, some people might set sell limits at ridiculous prices. For example, some people set a sell limit at $1000 for GME. If you did a market order, and you get really unlucky, you might end up snagging a share for $1000 each, when the actual share value might be $300. However, when you set a “limit order”, you are agreeing to buy a share at a maximum price that you designated.
In the event that a hedge fund siphons a ton of shares of a company, the algorithm can be set to sell these shares at a ridiculous sell limit. Remember, when they buy or sell, it’s processed significantly faster at the clearing houses, so if you’re that one unlucky trader that went for a market order on a stock, you might end up purchasing it at a huge premium set by the hedge funds themselves. Moral of the story: DO NOT PURCHASE AS MARKET ORDER - ALWAYS PURCHASE AT LIMIT ORDER.
I’m am not a financial advisor, so take everything I said as gibberish.

I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
 
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547
I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T

Intro

• "The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
  • "I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
• "For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
  • "We're spread way too thin."
• "If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
• RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
  • Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
  • ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
  • Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
  • Widespread match fixing
  • The Pandemic
    • "People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
    • "People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
      • "To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
      • "Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
      • "People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
• "It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
  • RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
    • He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.

CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association

"Who does this union really fucking serve?"

• RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
  
  • He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
    • He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
      • He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
    • Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
    • RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
    • Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
      • "and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
• He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
  
  • "We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
  • He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
  • "They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
• He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
  
  • He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
    • He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
  • He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
    • RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
  • "I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
  • "Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
    • "Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
    • "That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
• He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
  
• He also says their rankings are a joke
  
  • "Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
• He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
  
• "Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
  

ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission

"They have been put in an impossible position."

• RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
• "ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
  • "Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
  • "Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
    • Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
      • Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
  • "They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
    • "They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
• ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
  • He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
    • Also says more coaches being banned are coming
    • He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
• ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
  
  • "I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
  • "So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
    • "Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
• RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
  

Stream Sniping

"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"

• RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
  • On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
    • "Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
      • He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
        • He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
        • The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
        • "ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
• He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
• "All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
  • He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?

Match Fixing

"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."

• RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
  • "Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
• "Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
• Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
  • Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
    • They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
      • "I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
        • "Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
• RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
• "There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
  • "It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
• "It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
  • "I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
• He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
• "That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
  • "All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
• "I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."

North America

"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."

• RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
• There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
• He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
  • RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
  • He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
• He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
  • He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
    • They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
    • When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
    • "was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
    • He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
• He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
  • He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
• He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
  • He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
• He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
• He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
  • Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
• RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
• RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."

Talent

"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."

• RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
• He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
• Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
• He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
  • He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
• He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
• He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
• New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
• He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
• He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
• He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."

Valve

"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"

• Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
  • Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
• In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
• RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
• He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
• RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
  • A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
  • RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
  • RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
• RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
• Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
  • They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
• RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
  • Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
• He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
• Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
  • RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
• "It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
  • Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
• "Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
• "People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."

Closing Statements

"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."

• RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
• "We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
• "There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
• "How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
• "Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
• "The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
  • He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
• He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
  • "If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
    • "They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
• He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
• "Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
• "This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
• "You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
  • "Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
• "Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
  • "You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
• "I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
  • "I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
• "I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."

Your 14-minute Thursday report in 3497 words. Part 1.

anti-corruption: Defense Ministry official busted with bribery & tampering with draft during war

NSS report says: a Colonel, who had oversight over subdivisions, received a ֏975K bribe from a conscript to transfer him to another location on Sep-13-2020. Part of the bribe was transferred to his online gambling account.
When the war began, a draft was declared and recruits began training at a location in Armenia. The Colonel took a ֏1.2M bribe from a soldier in exchange for not sending him to the front lines.
During the winter draft, the Colonel took a ֏5.2M bribe from another conscript and used his connections to send him to the desired service location. A similar ֏1M bribe was requested on January 6th from another recruit.
The Colonel took another ֏1.4M bribe to help promote a conscript and allow him to work at a hospital instead of regular service.
On October 22nd, during the war, the Colonel decided to help a friend move from bordering Khndzoresk (Syunik) hospital back to Yerevan. As a result, the clinic became understaffed and couldn't fulfill its duties. Moreover, the Colonel then helped the same friend not to be deployed on Syunik borders as a soldier and instead to handle tasks in the rear, on October 26th, in exchange for a ֏300K bribe.
On October 13th, during the war, the Colonel and his accomplices wanted to help a soldier to leave Artsakh. When they learned that the latter was already on the "deserted" list, they took steps to remove him from the list.
Then, he learned that his friends' sons received a draft notice, and use his connections to remove them from the draft list.
After the war, on Dec-13, a friend asked the Colonel to make sure that his son, who was serving in Lusakert, wasn't sent to the front lines. The Colonel contacted the Lusakert facility but learned that the soldier was not among those who were supposed to be sent to the front lines. Nonetheless, the Colonel decided to defraud his friend by claiming that "he took care of it", and received a ֏200K bribe.
The colonel and over a dozen others were arrested. Illegal weapons were found under their possession. The investigation continues to expose other possible suspects.
https://youtu.be/ifo13WJLpsU
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042334.html

bill: harsher punishment for treason, spying, espionage

BHK MPs drafted a bill to increase punishment for traitors, spies, passing of state secrets. They want to raise the maximum punishment from 15 years to 20-life. The authors explained the move by citing many media reports about alleged "treason" incidents.
The bill was discussed at a relevant Parliamentary committee. The chairman QP MP Vladimir said he supports life imprisonment as the minimum punishment. However, during the discussion, they agreed to settle on 15-20 years plus property confiscation, or a life sentence.
The committee found the espionage punishment too harsh and asked the bill author to reduce it from 15 to 12 years. The BHK author agreed.
The bill was approved unanimously and will be debated/voted on the Parliament floor later.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042354.html

Jalal is back with another position

The wounded ex-Artsakh army commander Jalal Harutyunyan will serve as the Republic of Armenia's Defense Ministry's Head of the Military Control Service. He will replace General Movses Mosi Hakobyan who quit on November 18th.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042353.html

Russian-Turkish ceasefire monitoring group begins operations

Russian troops are using ORLAN-10 and FORPOST drones to monitor Am-AZ troop locations and movements.
https://youtu.be/ToSLqUDj6OE
https://factor.am/335089.html

ECHR received Armenia's complaint against Azerbaijan regarding 228 POWs / Azeris counter-claim for 13 POWs

Armenian families submitted a petition to ECHR to require Azerbaijan to provide information regarding 228 individuals. Azeris want to know data about 13 people.
(From the language it is unclear to me whether the petition is for confirmed POWs, or it also includes families of missing soldiers who want to know whether their relatives are POWs. Likely the former.)
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042406.html

Red Cross visited 4 Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan

They were able to establish contact with families.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042428.html

Russia expects UNESCO to soon visit Armenian monuments that went under Azeri control

https://factor.am/335437.html

Russia removed tomato import ban on 13 Armenian firms

Russian regulator will allow 13 Armenian sellers to export tomato and pepper to Russia again after earlier finding a food virus in them. A similar ban was implemented against Azeri tomatoes.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042433.html

US Congressman demands an explanation from the US ambassador to Azerbaijan over "congratulatory" statement

Rep. Bred Sherman wants to know why the US ambassador to Azerbaijan Lee Litzenberger congratulated Azerbaijan's Economy Minister with "de-occupying territories and US's willingness to aid Azerbaijan with rebuilding those territories". He reminded the US officials that the US is a member of the Minsk Group and should take steps to ensure Artsakh's safety and prevention of a new war.
Bred Sherman praised Biden's appointee Anthony Blinken for stating that the US will review its military assistance to Azerbaijan after the latest war in Artsakh.
Artsakh MFA yesterday released a statement urging countries, officials, and organizations to refrain from such "congratulatory" statements.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042370.html

de-occupy Hadrut NGO

... aims to help 13,500 Hadrut residents who lost their homes during the war. It was founded during the war by activists who held protests in front of various embassies. In the early days, they received aid from President Sarkissian's office. The latter gave shelter to 25 families.
Today the NGO aims to help refugees with employment, while simultaneously lobbying for Minsk Group to de-occupy Hadrut so residents can return. "I hope that one day our NGO will shut down because Hadrut is no longer occupied," said co-founder Meri Davtyan.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042286.html

govt session: financial aid for Syunik border villagers

The government approved a new aid package for residents of Syunik's Shurnukh and Vorotan villagers. Those who lost their homes will qualify for the same aid package as Artsakh refugees: one-time ֏300K payment plus monthly ֏65K payments for 6 months. There is another pending aid package to build new houses for them.
Context: Two dozen houses in Vorotan and Shurnukh went under Azeri control because they were built on the Azeri side of the internationally-recognized borders.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042362.html

bill: disability ranking to be replaced with degrees of functionality impairment

The government approved a bill, yet to be approved by Parliament, to reform the disability system. The disability assessment process will analyze the person's level of functional impairment while taking into account surrounding conditions.
"Today, the system is run under a 1993 law that does not do a comprehensive assessment of the surrounding environment, person's ability to function in public life," says the govt.
The draft bill will repeal the 1-3 Categories and Disabled Child category. A person's functionality impairment degrees will be light, medium, heavy, or deep. Disability will no longer be considered a permanent health problem. The assessment will be based not only on the factor of health problems but also on the environmental factors of the person's activity and participation in public life.
Healthcare and Social Ministries, NGOs, the UN, and the EU worked together to create and test an assessment methodology.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042365.html
Tags: #DisabilityLaw #disabled

bill: require unknown Telegram/Facebook media channel owners identified before "linking" by mass media

QP MPs want to require social media channel operators identified before a "mainstream media" can link to them. It doesn't restrict citing "anonymous sources", however. It also requires outlets to disclose sources of revenues for transparency. Read yesterday's news for context and arguments in favor or against it.. The debate continued today.
QP MP Arthur: For example, a legitimate news organization with an editorial staff of 30 people generates information, holds interviews, etc., while a Telegram channel that we do not know where it is managed from and by whom, begins to disseminate sensationalized information and over time becomes more "legitimate" than real media outlets because media outlets "advertised" them.
This is also a national security risk because it is very possible that such sources are being operated by an adversary country to spread instability and an atmosphere of fear in the country. //
The co-author criticized the critics who "claimed that the bill intends to ban anonymous sources. That's not true. This also won't affect the protection of journalists' source secrecy."
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042357.html
If you're interested in more debates:
https://youtu.be/MTHwRa4YjgY , https://youtu.be/ThDNVwZYEp8 , https://youtu.be/S6C_NocS9N0 , https://youtu.be/3_-i2Z23ubI , https://youtu.be/wiPnmfeLNJ8
Tags: #MediaLaw #TelegramLaw #FreeSpeech

rumors and rebuttals: Artsakh army isn't being dissolved

Serj's won-in-law Mishik earlier circulated rumors that were denied by state officials. Today, Kocharyan-ally Vitali Balasanyan, who serves as Artsakh's Security Council chief, confirmed that the army isn't "disintegrating." After the restructuring process, there will be subdivisions with professional contractors, he said.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042344.html

rumors and rebuttals: Azeri flag won't fly over Artsakh govt buildings

Vitalik Balasanyan also denied rumors about Azeri flags being installed on Artsakh govt buildings in Stepanakert.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042344.html

rumors and rebuttals: Azeri families won't resettle in Stenapakert / none are shopping in market

Vitalik Balasanyan said there are false rumors about two districts in Stepanakert being populated by Azeris, and Azeris allegedly freely shopping in Stepanakert market.
"Dear citizens of Artsakh, on behalf of the authorities of the Artsakh Republic, I assure you that despite the irreparable losses inflicted on us as a result of the war, the state is always committed to fulfilling its responsibilities to ensure the security and normal life of the population. Accordingly, I urge you not to pay attention to the false news. Everything is being done to create and expand the necessary conditions for a dignified life of the people of Artsakh."
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042344.html

rumors and rebuttals: Artsakh envoy won't stop operating in Russia

The Permanent Representation of the Artsakh Republic in Russia will not be terminated, said the Artsakh govt in response to rumors.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042367.html

rumors and rebuttals: no single currency in EAEU trade bloc

EAEU would like to inform you that you've been misled about alleged plans to establish a single currency among member-states.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042427.html

location "Hollywood, Yerevan, Armenia"

There is a district called Hollywood in Yerevan, Armenia. Gamblers were caught running an underground casino in there. This is the second such bust in the past few months. The police say ֏5.5B in damages was done to the state.
https://youtu.be/sp0Sb--e_ms?t=60
https://factor.am/335320.html

anti-corruption: prosecutors charge education officials with ֏1.2B auction shenanigans

Prosecutors said: State Oversight Committee (SOC) audited the "National Center for Educational Technology" government-affiliated agency's finances between 2013-2020. Every year, the agency submitted a report on the work done by them towards servicing the education system. The bill was ֏700M annually.
It was revealed that between 2012-2015, they granted an auction-based contract to the same company. It received a combined ֏2.8B in funding. The law requires the auction-holding officials to examine the market and take other steps before the auction. They failed to do so.
Later, during 2017-2019, the same company was selected to do the job, but this time it was only paid ֏300-400M annually, far lower than during the previous years.
֏1.2B in damages was done to the state. A felony case is launched.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042389.html

re: Armenia's $750M eurobond sale / lowest % in history / $3B demand by investors / economy news

Read yesterday's news for context.
Pashinyan: The issuance of $750M eurobonds is a strong positive signal for the start of the economic year. The issuance was done under the most favorable conditions in the history of our republic, with the lowest 3.8% percentage rate. Our previous record was in 2019 at 4.2%. The demand was for $3B but we decided to issue only $0.750B.
First, it provides a guarantee of macroeconomic stability. Second, this is the first serious signal of overcoming the post-war economic shock, which shows that international investors have confidence in the economic future of Armenia and the policy pursued by the government. //
Economy Minister Janjughazyan: this was part of our long-term plan and we had planned to do it while drafting the 2021 budget. We planned to issue fewer bonds but decided to add $250M because of favorable terms. We plan to use that extra cash towards the stabilization deposit, as a safety pad, to be used throughout the year if necessary.
As long as our budget has a deficit we will have to borrow. But this is only part of the story; the country's overall debt burden is calculated based on various indicators. So far Armenia has been rated as a country with a lower debt burden.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042351.html, https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042352.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042363.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042393.html

how many people did leave and arrive after reopening air traffic with Russia?

The governments of Armenia and Russian worked on an "app" to allow mutual travel after taking a test. By February 15th, there will be 4-route flights in 2 directions. There were several flights in the past few days.
3900 left and 3400 arrived. 1423 Armenian citizens left and 1263 Armenian citizens arrived. "More people were willing to leave in December than today," noted Diaspora Committee chief Sinanyan.
"Some people flew to Russia but had to return due to a problem. This wasn't due to the COVID app implemented by us. Preliminary data shows that they went to Russia with a paper QP code which raised the suspicion of Russian authorities. We will work with them to resolve this," said Deputy PM Mher. (say what??)
"We need to better inform the public about the existence of this app. Restoring routine flights will help the tourism industry," said PM Pashinyan.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042358.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042383.html

Pashinyan about the suspended Amulsar gold mining project

He repeated his earlier position that "Decisions must be made that take into account Armenia's best interests."
"The mining industry plays a very important role in the development of Armenia's economy, including in the security context."
"We must make decisions to make investment programs acceptable for the Armenian public while taking into account interests of Republic of Armenia."
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042368.html

COVID stats

1829 tested. 147 infected. 352 healed. 11 deaths. 4637 active.
"We're negotiating for vaccines via COVAX global initiative. Separately, we're negotiating with Russia for Sputnik-V. Vaccines should be available in March. It will be targeted at specific groups. It won't be mandatory," said Healthcare Minister Avanesyan.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042341.html , https://youtu.be/vXz3pHx1BlM?t=92

the consumer market price increase in the past 12 months

Armenia's consumer market inflation was +4.5% from January to January. Food +6.4%. Alcohol & tobacco +10.8%. Clothing +2.6%. Utilities +0.6%. Appliances +5.8%. Healthcare +5.6%. Transport +5.7%. Telecom +0.5%. Leisure & culture -0.8%. Education +2%. Dining +1.6%. Misc +3.5%.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042323.html

Parliament MP stops a citizen's suicide attempt

Someone tried to jump from Kievyan bridge. QP MP Gor Gevorgyan was nearby and stopped the attempt. The police took the distressed person to a station.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042329.html

psychological support will be provided to war participants and the public

Emergency Ministry says 15-30% of people have PTSD after the war. Today the government approved a plan to provide psychological aid to war participants and others. The target group includes families of missing people, POWs and their families, those who received disabilities, families of those who died, those who fought in the war, IDPs, civilians who were affected in any way. The program will work in Armenia and Artsakh.
The government will purchase services from experienced mental health service agencies.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042403.html

Armenia will grow industrial marijuana on mass industrial scale / incentive to boost land utilization

Hemp is a type of weed that contains less of the substance that makes you feel high. The government wants to grow industrial hemp on a mass scale to boost mood land utilization and revenues.
Pashinyan: this is going to open room for many speculations. It's important to present the project in detail so the public will have a full understanding of what is being done. Unfortunately, "hemp" is interpreted as something else, while in reality, it is a very important industrial raw material. The growing process has risks but there are oversight mechanisms that have been tested in many countries.
Deputy PM Avinyan: the US, Russia, and China have a great experience with industrial hemp production. The practice was examined by the Economy Ministry. We're talking about industrial production only. It will significantly activate agricultural land utilization. Today, 40% of lands are gone unused. This is part of our plan to boost the production of high-value agricultural products.
https://youtu.be/ssZgr2DR3DM?t=7
https://www.healthline.com/health/hemp-vs-marijuana#marijuana
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042372.html

Education Minister says the "controversial" parts of Church/History merger were "resolved"

Education Ministry wants to merge the school subjects "Armenian Church History" and "Armenian History". Critics said it will shrink the church-related materials too much, others called it treason, while others supported the decision, stating that it's all part of our history and having a separate class is inefficient.
Education Minister Dumanyan says he met colleagues at the National Academy of Sciences and they resolved the conflicts "that caused a noise earlier." He will reveal details soon.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042379.html , https://youtu.be/V0sC3dx-gzU

Major education reforms: "education alone will not solve all problems, but there is no problem that can be solved without an education"

... said PM Pashinyan during a govt session while discussing education reforms. Kids in 1-5 grades will no longer receive grades; tt will be pass or no pass (still needs Parliamentary approval). "There will be a criticism. How can you not grade? But this is a comprehensive program that emphasizes the student's needs and preferences," said Pashinyan.
"We need to pay attention to how the time is spent in schools and what skills are being taught in school hours. It will reflect in our society 15-20 years later. It will define whether we have a technological product or not.
What we were doing in 12 years (school length) can be done within 9 years, but a 9-year school isn't the solution. Instead of shortening the school, we're trying to fill the gap in a way to have a 50% higher efficiency by the end of the 12th year.
In developed countries, education starts not from school but from preschool. The lower the education entry age the more developed the countries are," said Pashinyan. (the govt has a plan to make sure 70% of kids attend preschools by 2023)
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042394.html

cancer stats in Armenia / annual rate / drops among children / fewer abandon treatment

world
9.6 million people die from cancer annually. 1/3rd is possible to prevent. Another part can be cured with the help of early detection.
Armenia
Cancer was the 2nd leading cause of death in 2020. It has increased in the past 10 years but at a small rate. Lung cancer is more common among men, and breast cancer among women.
First time diagnosis by year: 2018 - 8762, 2019 - 7908, 2020 - 7050.
Deaths by year: 2018 - 5199, 2019 - 5434. 2020 - unavailable. (55% men, 45% women)
The cancer rate went up by 1.5x compared to 1990. However, it declined by 2x among children under 14yo.
Fewer people abandon treatment. 3 years ago 53% of lung patients did so, today it's 40%. Breast cancer treatment abandonment went from 47% to 22%. (I translated the word բարձիթողության as "abandonment". Correct me if it refers to something else.)
Artsakh
The number of cancer cases has decreased in Artsakh: from 345 to 260 YoY.
prevention
Oncologist Safaryan says the early detection helps to avoid complications and save lives, even if it's the type of cancer that is known to reappear. There are many patients who defeat cancer. "Smokers should get a lung x-ray twice a year. Those working in chemical plants should get a frequent screening. Do not ignore symptoms and չգցել ականջի հետև. You can defeat it more easily when it's at 1-2 stages. It's a lot harder when it advances to 4."
Preventing cancer isn't easy. The causes of this disease are many. Genetics, bad habits, obesity, surrounding environment. A genetic test can reveal the likelihood of suffering from illness. Some women choose to undergo a mastectomy to prevent possible breast cancer in the future.
"I decided that if 1-in-100 is destined to be cured, I will be that one," said Ashkhen, a woman who recently defeated cancer.
More: https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042291.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042364.html , https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042405.html

cancer diagnosis, surgery, and radiotherapy are free

The treatment was made free recently. The Oncology Center urges the public to get screened as part of an early-detection initiative. The pilot program began in Vanadzor; 307 women were screened.
Cancer diagnosis, surgery, and radiotherapy are free, while the medication has a co-payment.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042423.html

today in history

2004: Mike Zuckerberg founded Facebook to steal your SSN
1949: Sri Lanka declares indpendence
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042309.html

president meets donor

Artsakh president Arayik met donor Alec Baghdasaryan and thanked him. "Only with the joint efforts of the Armenian people is it possible to quickly overcome the difficulties and to plan development programs." Alec plans more charity programs relating to education.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1042326.html

donations to Artsakh & recovering soldiers

www.1000plus.am (recovering soldiers & their families)
www.HimnaDram.org (for Artsakh & Armenia)
www.ArmeniaFund.org (U.S. tax-deductible)

archive of older news

http://www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/Daily_Anti-Corruption_Reports

disclaimer

All the accused are considered innocent unless proven guilty in the court of law, even if they "sound" or "appear" guilty.

I'd been wanting to drive cross country for a few years before I actually did it (Virginia to Utah). Sadly as a single person whose friends all have their own relationships, jobs, and lives... I felt like it was never going to happen. I didn't want to go on such an adventure solo because I'd be lonely.
​
Well in mid 2019 I got offered a job out in Salt Lake City, and I decided to pack my life up and just go. I filled my little hatchback with everything I could take, hugged everyone goodbye and hit the road.
What I expected: A dull, boring trip where I'd hate every minute of it, wishing I has the ability to teleport, and missing my friends.
What I got: The absolute BEST trip of my life (okay second best because Disney exists).
​
To start, with just yourself on the open road... you are your own DJ, planner, and decider. Each day I did only what I wanted, making the stops I wanted to stop at, listening to the music I wanted to, as well as a couple of audiobooks. I planned a few of my stops in advance, and sometimes I just pulled over and looked up what was local. I stayed in the hotels I wanted to stay in, ate what I wanted to eat, you get the gist.
​
The only actual downside to this trip was the fact that my car had EVERYTHING of value to me inside it, so it was a little nerve wracking each night that someone might break in and take something. But each night I brought my PC and most important documents into my hotel with me for safe keeping.
​
My trip began in Virginia and went through WV into Lexington, KY. Then I went through Indiana an Illinois (which had a pretty big manure smell) and ended that night in Kansas City, staying the night at a Casino where I could relax with a DEEP bath and have a drink. The majority of the next day was driving through Kansas where I made constant jokes to a Toto that wasn't there, and stopped to eat at this fantastic dive that had Bison Burgers, going all the way into Denver, Co. Then on my final say I had a choice of taking the Wyoming route or the southern Utah (Moab) route. Thinking I'd visit Moab with friends at some point, I went through Wyoming, then down through the Canyons into Utah.
​
This trip is what taught me that it's okay to go at it solo, that you don't always need others there with you to get out and have a good time. When the pandemic is over, I plan to finish the trip at some point, by driving to the West Coast (I have friends I can visit in LA) and back to my new home in SLC, so I can say I have fully driven from one side of the country to the other.
I really want to do this again someday. I'd prefer not to put unnecessary miles on my car, but sadly car rentals are hella expensive if you plan to return the car someone else (not like they're cheap to bin with). After I finish from Utah to Cali, perhaps one day a run along the southern boarder would be fun :)
​
If I could have done anything different (and I'll keep this in mind for next time), it's that I'd do this as a vacation instead of a cross-country move. Since I was starting a job and needed to get settled, I didn't have a ton of time to dilly dally. Next time I'd like to stay an extra night or so in the cities I visit, meet some people possibly and just have a good ol' time. Solo trip with some others mixed in along the way.
Tips: - I borrowed a proper GPS from a friend instead of using my phone, and this worked out really well. - I used the Hotel Tonight app to schedule each of my hotels. The App worked REALLY well, but don't let a hotel trick you into thinking you haven't paid already. I did get charged twice and had to make a few calls because of it, but the hotel did recognize their mistake and remedy it. - Obviously if you have your entire life packed in your car, park in well lit areas. - Yelp is your best friend for interesting food places on the road.

TL;DR - I use the craft beer industry as a way to understand Capitalist Propaganda, how Capitalism and Socialism are inextricably linked to each other, and how through the use of propaganda, companies use the "illusion of choice" to coerce you into believing that you prefer the products that are most favorable to them. In order to change this into the consumer's favor, you need to be an informed consumer in the free market, and raise class consciousness to overthrow the tyranny of Capitalist Propaganda, that is called "Marketing".
***************************************************************************************
You can't understand Capitalist Propaganda unless you have a solid understanding of what Capitalism is beyond the literal definition of the word, which is just an abstract ideal. Propaganda plays off of the discrepancies between the ideals of Capitalism, like the free market, which is another abstract ideal, and the reality of Capitalism in practice in America, which can be characterized as Trickle Down Economics. Capitalism sought to be a pragmatic alternative to its economic predecessors, a fact which drives Capitalist Propaganda. However, through layers of abstraction throughout the years, it has become more of a religion, as critics refer to the increasingly ideological concept as "Supply Side Jesus", meaning you give all the money to the rich, it'll trickle down to the poor, and they can "vote" on the actions of the capitalists through monetary interactions in the free market.
Capitalist Propaganda is engrained in America, because at the time of our founding, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations", which is considered the Bible of the Free Market. This groundbreaking work utilized Newton's Laws of Physics, which were en vogue at the time, to describe how interactions in the marketplace would balance each other out, just as the laws of Newtonian Physics do.
The very noble purpose of Wealth of Nations was not create the oligarchy we have today, but to do the opposite. He wanted to describe a system that would protect individual freedoms and be truly democratic. Just as Lenin and Stalin bastardized the works of Marx, so too have capitalists in America bastardized the intentions of Adam Smith.
Capitalism and Socialism are best learned side by side, in my opinion, to avoid falling into the trappings of either ideology that our brains like to do. Which one is better? It depends on the market, but the answer is almost always somewhere in between.
Through learning how Socialist concepts can be applied to problems in Capitalism, you can cut through the propaganda and will see for yourself that these problems can be solved if we just drop the labels and do what's best for society and the individual. The problem is always finding the proper balance.
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
WHAT? CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM ARE JOINED AT THE HIP?
Yep. You can never live in a pure economic system. Purity is always an illusion. If you want something to be pure, you have to put a lot of energy into making it that way. Nature likes to mix stuff up. This is why ideologies around racial purity and fascism always fail. There are people who want a "pure" economic system, but they are usually the people at the top and would only get richer from more purity while the rest of society loses freedom and slowly starves.
In a nutshell, Capitalism promotes laws that benefit those with money, while Socialism promotes a safety net that benefits everyone. Every single human is born into Socialism. As a baby, you need food, someone else works for it and gives it to you, but then at some point, you are expected to exchange labor for capital, and buy your own food. See? The two are forever bound as the yin and yang. You can also grow your own food, but for that you need land, which is capital.
These interactions are very tricky. I only want to tell you enough so that you can start to see Capitalist Propaganda, because right now, you're like a fish in water that can't see water. I often use this line to describe a person who can't see their own homegrown propaganda. The best way I found to study Capitalism is by relating it Socialism, the "air" above the "water" of Capitalism, if that makes sense.
I always find it best to look at a microcosm to understand these concepts. And today, that microcosm is beer.
Mmmm....Beeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr.....
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Before I poison your mind with my own propaganda, picture you're on vacation and you walk into a bar and want to order a beer. If you really want to understand the power of propaganda in your own life, really think of this before we break this all down. Really think, what makes you decide which beer to order? Do you like to look at the labels on the tap or bottle? That's obvious propaganda. It has absolutely nothing to do with the taste or quality of the beer itself, but sways your opinion toward logos you've seen before, which is why you see so many beer advertisements, which means that money that could've gone into quality is instead going into propaganda, and you're already biased towards an inferior product. Interesting. You really can't help being swayed by marketing, but at least you can be conscious of that fact, and that's important in order to be an informed consumer.
Do you ask the bartender for a recommendation? Why would you do that? You don't know the bartender any better than the beers in front of you. How do you know they aren't paid more to offer you a beer that sucks and is 12 years old and the owner wants to get rid of it? Do you ask for a certain style of beer? Do you ask for a local beer? And once you finally narrow it down to a few choices, do you ask for samples so you can make up your own mind? You should always do this. Then we get into "flavor propaganda", which we'll discuss later. Jeez. Did you every realize there was so much complexity behind being an informed consumer and just ordering a simple beer? Maybe you'll give in and just tell the bartender to pour whatever. Choice is difficult sometimes.
If you really visualize this and take a minute to let this sink in, you'll start to understand how external forces hijack the processor in your mind to manufacture desire through the illusion of choice. However, your health and enjoyment of the beer is not the goal for these external forces, they only want you to purchase. The perfect example is fast food. They know their product sucks, but they know you'll keep buying it, but that doesn't keep them from lying about how delicious it is in their ads. There is far more at play behind the curtain. There is a science behind addicting you to things, this is reinforced by a corporate tax and subsidy system that contorts the free market pushing centralization of production through homogenization and use of chemicals to hide the homogenization, and simply because there is more than one option, they make you feel like you have choice. This, in a nutshell, is how the illusion of choice works in the free market. It's not about what YOU want. The producer manipulates you to think you want what they have. Through this, they deceive Americans into buying products with a list of ingredients that a person would never freely choose to consume. So if you want to order a beer with no shit in it, then you're shit out of luck in America. You could in Germany, but we'll discuss that later.
While you're standing at that bar, you aren't conscious of the fact that your interests are in direct opposition to those of the bar owner's. Capitalists hide this fact with their perfect smiles, but Marx described this in detail. You want the best beer for the cheapest price, and the bar owner wants to sell you the cheapest beer at the highest price you'll pay. It doesn't stop there. The bar owner flips roles in the same situation with the beer distributor, who does the same with maybe another level of distribution, and continues to the brewer, then goes to the brewer versus supplier, supplier to farmer, and even though you'd think it stops there, the farmer has to deal with suppliers of equipment and seeds, and on and on.
Add to this list their auxiliary staff of HR, drivers, managers, brewers, bottle/keg makers, and of course owners, none of them care whether you actually like the beer you're drinking as long as you keep buying more. That's the big driver here.
Did you ever realize that every time you buy a beer, your own capital is partially responsible for creating and sustaining all of these jobs involved? You, my dear beer drinker, are the true job creator. Budweiser can brew all they want, it means nothing without buyers, who are the true engines of capitalism. Instead, you're treated as a rube by suits in a boardroom somewhere.
Capitalist Propaganda tells us the billionaires are job creators, but this is a lie. Jeff Bezos can't drink enough beer to sustain all these jobs. So why do we let him hoard all the money? Wouldn't the economy do better if we spread out Jeff's money so more people could buy more beers and more jobs would be created? According to Socialist Economics, yes. That's actually, quite simply, a Socialist Free Market. Did you even know that existed? The power hungry greedy people who are too lazy for manual labor go to such great lengths to make sure you don't learn it. They want you to think that only Capitalism allows you choice in the market. I'm sure you can guess why they say that.
Capitalism maintains itself by exulting the wealthy who use their economic power to punch down. The only way this system won't fall into fascism and fail is if the consumers start to punch back. Where Marx envisioned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as they usurped power from the Bourgeoisie, a modern alternative is just teaching people to understand the system we live in, so that we can just start making changes in the way we live and to whom we give our money.
See that? Capitalism and Socialism can get along nicely, so long as the consumers are informed.
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ALIENATION OF LABOR CAUSING LONELINESS IN SOCIETY
What I described within the previous section is what Marx called "Alienation of Labor". Each step in the process of making your beer is isolated from the others, so no one feels ownership over the end product or a true connection to the consumer, or job creator. Even the bartender selling it is alienated from the profit of their labor in serving the beer, so they only focus on the service aspect of giving you the beer, because that is where they earn their tip. They can't really fix anything about a shitty beer other than to offer you a different brand. The capitalist owner is usually not there. Their only interaction is setting the rules for everyone in the bar to follow, and pay themselves more than everyone who has to follow those rules. This is part of the conflict between the classes. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just pointing it out. The bar owner themself has to spend money on propaganda to attract customers that could be spent in other places, so has to find ways to cut costs. Unfortunately, they buy cheaper beer...and this is why you end up with IPAs. No one is connected to the products, so they only look at prices and find the cheapest, passable product. This is the race to the bottom of Capitalism.
Compare this to when brewpubs were a new thing. The brewer would come out and talk to you about the beer, you would give feedback that could effect future batches and it connected everyone to each other through commerce. It makes business "social" and I think nearly everyone enjoys that, but it is losing out in competition with chain breweries that enforce isolation and make cookie cutter propaganda and cookie cutter business models so they can turn owners into managers and suck all the profit back their corporate headquarters and offshore accounts. They kill the experience and make everything transactional. And all the kitsch they hang around their cookie cutter chain bar is just to hide the fact that no one in that place cares about anything other than not getting fired. Everyone is effectually alienated from everyone else. It's worth a read to check out this page on Marx's Theory of Alienation.
This alienation is the root of a lot of misery in society. Humans are communal animals forced to live in a society of individuality and alienation. As they mope around, they seek an escape. And that is why advertising is so nefarious. It seeks to manipulate you in that state. Imagine driving home from your alienating job to you empty home, but looking up and see a billboard with bunch of actors laughing and drinking beer. They take pictures that make these actors look like friends. It's just for show. They aren't selling beer to those laughing people in the picture. They're tempting lonely people to drown their sorrows. Capitalist Propaganda is used so your brain doesn't understand what it wants. It wants friends, then sees the words Bud Light. So when the bartenders asks...Make it a Bud Light. Look at how much money they spend to manipulate and capitalize on people's suffering.
Propaganda in Communist countries is controlled by the government, so it's clear who the enemy of your freedom is. Capitalist Propaganda hides behind the layers of complexity of the same economy you rely on to survive, so you never know what's propaganda or where it's coming from. Marketers find every way imaginable to get their disinformation in front of your eyes, even enlisting your friends on Facebook in annoying MLM schemes. Propaganda invaded everything that can be legally monetized. It's in the media, and not just commercials anymore. There's product placement, stories injected into the news, and even movies and social media created an entire industry of "lifestyle propaganda", telling you how to live your life and indulge in overconsumption. It's REALLY hard to get away from Capitalist Propaganda. There is so much money and research behind it and so much depth, even this long post is only barely scratching the surface. I just want to open your eyes to it.
I can't make you see all this. No one can. I can only describe it as best as I can. What you will experience when you understand this is what I call "Economic Enlightenment", similar to what Marx called "Class Consciousness". Once it happened to me, the world looked amazing, and the shitty propagandists selling us false hope all look like clowns in a very odd circus of vanity, despair and mediocrity.
Once I understood this, I saw clearly how we are increasingly trapped in a form of Corporate Slavery, led by seriously ridiculous oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Augustus Caesar or something. That's why he has that haircut! This is a guy who stole a company and hired "screen psychologists" from Las Vegas to get you hooked on Facebook the same as casinos do with slot machines. He wants to be the funnel for propaganda throughout the world. He wants to be the kingmaker, decide what people buy, who they like, what views they hold. He can only do this because so many companies spend so much money to put their propaganda on that platform. They can only have this much money because the free market is not actually free. It's bought and paid for on platforms like Facebook and Amazon. The money that was supposed to "trickle down" is instead being spent on Capitalist Propaganda on these platforms, to get the proletariate to trickle their money up through endless, nonsensical online purchasing and local businesses who send the town's money to people who can't do anything with it but buy up properties that increase your rent and cost of living.
When people get drunk on the power of propaganda, they forget the lessons of the past. Propagandists always fall prey to their own delusions over time. In reality, your life is better without Facebook. There isn't anything on there that is healthy. Even if you just want to talk to a few friends, you are going to fall for the propaganda there. You can't help it. And if your bar advertises on Facebook, just think, that money could've gone into purchasing higher quality beer then sold at the same price, instead of going to Mark Zuckerberg so he can drop $30 million to buy the houses around him so no one can spy on him while he spies on you. You really gotta watch out for a guy who combines spying and propaganda all into a single app and thinks he's going to bring 200 years of peace to America. History is littered with knuckleheads like that. It's best to get off Facebook and encourage everyone else to do the same. Zuck only wants to lead himself to the Promised Land, and he's using your ignorance to fuel his own delusions by deluding you into thinking you want what he has to offer.
Let's get back to beer.
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
IPAs AND THE FREE MARKET VS THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM
I like beer. When I worked in Germany, it was easy to walk into a bar and, like Farva, just order a liter o' beer. Often, there would only be two choices, light color or dark. As a matter of fact, even at the most famous beer festival in the world, Oktoberfest, people mostly drink the same standard type of beer, and no one complains about the lack of choice. It's quite easy. You can order with one finger. No need to see a menu or ask what's in it. It's simply beer. This worked for centuries. Consumers are fine with it. Prost! Have you ever shared a story like this and people say, "Oh, that would never work in America. Americans want choice." Yeah. Because we are flooded with Capitalist Propaganda.
So if consumer choice isn't pushing for a selection, why would a free market call for it? Imagine there are two bars and one of those bars says "30 beers on tap" and the other doesn't. You're more likely to choose it, and the other bar will have to compete in some way, often by copying. This forms trends, and people mistake this for something customers wanted. Trends are always marketing. Don't believe me? What happened to fidget spinners? So now you have a bunch of beers that no one asked for, yet will now demand. Competition creates more Capitalist Propaganda to create demand for something you never even wanted, but makes you think you do. And that's the best propaganda. You think you are thinking for yourself. This is the fallacy of consumer choice.
If you want to understand just how important that last paragraph is, consider this, "consumer choice" is the same propaganda they used to get you to carry around a device that spies on you 24/7 and sends that data to people you don't know, and you can't stop it, can you? You chose that. You wanted it. Not only that, but you paid $1,000 for the device to opt into their spying program, for the privilege of being mind controlled by the propaganda their AI selects for you. Did you read the Terms of Service? As bad as you may have thought Communist Propaganda was, Capitalist Propaganda is far better, and far stealthier. You believe you have freedom of choice. But your only choice is usually take it, or leave it. Oh, you need it for work? Maybe find a different job. Or just succumb to mass surveillance, and next year, you can drop another grand on a device with a marginally better camera.
There is a way to free yourself. You just have to understand the nature of propaganda. It took me a while, but I eventually broke free. Under Socialism, there would be laws against the exploitation of consumers. Capitalist Propaganda tells you that this takes away your freedom. This is a lie. Regulations give you the freedom to not have to worry whether the beer you're drinking has poison in it.
Germany has a lot of regulations on beer. It has the Reinheitsgebot (purity order), a law passed in 1516 that states that beer can only consist of water, hops and barley. Note, this is a different use of the word "purity" from earlier, as beer is itself a mixture of things. Historically there have also been regulations where beer could only be sold regionally, so no matter what part of Germany you were in, you only got a certain brand of beer at the bar, but it didn't matter because they all had the same ingredients. They could make wheat beers or unfiltered, but they were generally variations of pilsners and lagers. One meaning of the word "Lager" in German is "storage", meaning the beer was brewed in a way that it could be stored, allowing them to brew in bigger batches and store it.
Lagers use a more complex brewing process, so only larger breweries would make them, but this worked because of protected territories. America has a similar system, because each state has its own regulations on alcohol, but this is changing as corporate lawyers fight to homogenize the rules favorable to them, but the consumer loses control. Big brands tend to be lagers as they have general appeal to a wide audience. Did you notice this is the second time I pointed out that corporations create homogeneity? Without regulations, corporations create Fascism. That is why I tell people that we already live in the NWO but corporations rule the world instead of governments. Why do you think so few conspiracy theorists make this connection? Propagandists are paid a lot of money to keep even our small community confused about the reality of what's happening. Now, check out conspiracy and you'll see what I mean. They are spreading propaganda for the NWO over there and don't even know it. I tried to point that out and they finally banned me. Oh well. They'll figure it out in their own time.
In America, in 1978 it became legal to brew beer at home. This is what led to the explosion of new beers in the US decades later. Americans don't have purity laws, so could test new recipes. But people didn't generally like IPAs before, so how did they become so popular that they control 30% of the market? Marketing, of course. Create the market and tell people what they want.
IPA stands for India Pale Ale. It was invented by the British as an easy way to make a beer that they could drink in India. People only drank it out of necessity, as the other beers couldn't make the trip. IPAs are very easy to make and very forgiving, because if you mess it up, it already tasted bad anyway. As people started trying to get into microbrews, they often didn't have the capital to make lagers at small scale, and also wanted a simpler process so they didn't have to hire or train expert brewers, IPAs are cheap and easy to make at smaller scale.
In order to make it drinkable, brewers experimented with many different flavorings. This created a cult following of craft IPAs, where people would drive hours to stand in line for hours to try the newest concoction. The trendy nature of the craft beer world kept people training their palate to adapt to the taste of an IPA, making people start to actually like them. The flavorings made people think they were different, so even if they didn't like it, marketing tactics kept people coming back to try the latest blend. Your palate can adapt A LOT. Swedish people love Surströmming, but watch this video of Americans trying it for the first time. They tried to get me to eat it several times, but I would rather sit in a sauna until Tuesday to avoid smelling it while watching them eat it. It really smells that bad.
IPAs enticed people with popular, aromatic ingredients like bananas and pineapple. This is what I call "flavor propaganda". It's not bad in and of itself, but it can be easily misused to cover issues with quality or hide the taste of preservatives. Since we don'e have laws like Germany, you're left to rely on the knowledge and honesty of the bartender to find out. They don't make this info readily available, which is another form of Disinformation.
So if you think you actually like IPAs, just remember, you are just like a Swede eating rotten fish. A lot of propaganda went in to making IPAs popular, but it's the cheapest, easiest product to make that can be sold at the highest price, so they become popular. This is what business students call a business plan. To overcome the bad taste, IPAs were marketed as "classy" to shame you if you choose the more expensive to produce and more appealing pilsners and lagers, which were given a bad name due to being associated with major brands like Bud Light. This makes it harder to market microbrew lagers, which can only fetch a certain price due to association. And this is what is referred to as the "race to the bottom" in Capitalism.
Instead of trying to innovate ways to produce the beers you want, they just figure out how to get you to pay more for an inferior product, just like they do with BBQ. They make you think you want it. From this you can understand why "food" is full of junk that you wouldn't feed your dog. Whatever legal poison helps cheapen the product is considered "smart business", another propaganda term designed to hide the reality of doing immoral and harmful things to other humans for profit. If you make money on it, it's good. As if there aren't better choices we could come up with if there truly were a free market with an informed consumer.
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
STRENGTHEN THE FREE MARKET BY BEING AN INFORMED CONSUMER
We don't need a Communist Revolution to make positive changes, so take off your ski masks and put your Antifa flags down. I like microbrew culture and still enjoy IPAs, but understanding the marketplace is how I do my part as an informed consumer and job creator to help create the world that I want to live in. I encourage you to do the same. Vote with your dollars. Don't let the Zuck-type sociopathic, corporate people in a distant land decide what you consume by looking at ads on his platform. Visit local breweries and talk to the brewmaster. Don't reinforce alienation from labor. Connect with the people who make the things you buy. Support independent entrepreneurship. These are the paths to a brighter future where we share in the abundance of wealth.
Discover Economic Enlightenment for yourself and realize that We The People are ultimately in control. Wealth inequality is greater than it was in France before the French Revolution. Don't let this train take us into the depths where another Lenin will arise and spend the night shooting people.
How you choose to spend your money today is what decides what will become the society of tomorrow. And remember, you always have the choice to buy nothing at all. I never saw a billboard that said that.
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
LET THEM DRINK BEER!
I hope this gave you a glimpse behind the curtain of Capitalist Propaganda. Propaganda isn't just political, it has invaded everything and it's at full blast right now. I hope you can piece together how Capitalist Propaganda is actually designed to make you subservient by controlling what you want so they can maximize their own profit and teach you to accept whatever they offer, the homogenization of choice. However, your life is your own and you should remain in control of all aspects of it, including your desires.
Richard Wolff is an economist who studied at three elite universities in America and discusses how he was not able to even learn about Socialist Economics in the ivory tower, even though Capitalist Propaganda calls universities leftist. He found no department in America that is even willing to teach it or study it. Capitalist Propaganda censors these ideas, especially at the university. People in power don't want the serfs to learn about themselves. Check him out on YouTube. You'll realize that unchecked Capitalism leads to Fascism and Slavery, which is why they want to get rid of the minimum wage, so that we can return to sharecropping which is already increasingly happening in America under different names, like "student debt", "mortgages" and "insurance". Don't you think it's odd that a person has to go into debt so they can generate profits for corporations who really ought to be paying for this education themselves? If you have to go into debt before they'll hire you, it's much easier to negotiate against you.
If you want to see other examples of propaganda, check out this random tweet from one of America's Top Capitalist Propagandists. These are very odd pictures, and the only thing I can see in them is that they must be promoting those outfits, likely the blue dress, maybe those men's outfits as well. One thing you know is that she didn't become a billionaire by letting any single opportunity to enrich herself at the expense of others pass her by. I didn't look it up, but I am certain they sell that blue dress, or whoever does paid her to post this.
That's the main reason celebrities use social media. It's marketing. Their whole schtick is to sell garments made in a sweatshop in a foreign country by people who can't even afford a beer to Americans who are facing bankruptcy and homelessness themselves.
Read the replies of the tweet. These people have influence that vastly outsizes their understanding of their impact on the world. There are guillotines in the comments. There usually are. I'm seeing them a lot lately.
This type of propaganda is everywhere. And it's destroying America. Just like propaganda led to the demise of Nazi Germany, we could be looking at the same thing, but worse. It could start off as famine.
If you're having trouble deciding between the beers you are being offered, it's probably because you don't want anything at all, in which case the proper choice is: nothing. Or, try tap water. Maybe you're just thirsty. Now ask yourself, when you envisioned yourself at a bar, did you ever think to order water instead? Did you entertain the idea that you didn't even want a beer. That's the power of suggestion.
What if the rest of the world just cut America off from the means of production outsourced to areas with cheap labor? We would have our own famine and likely war. And if we have a revolution here, with the masses in the country being so disinformed about everything and not having any sort of class consciousness at the moment and instead stuck in alienation, the leader that rises here will likely lead to something horrifying. And we censor ourselves from pointing out the simple fact, that the only way America will survive is to tax the deluded royalty like Kim and Mark back to reality, so they can't indulge their reckless, childish delusions by selling off the very fabric of our nation to the highest bidder.
That doesn't make me a Socialist, that just makes me honest.
Enjoy your beer!
***************************************************************************************
***************************************************************************************
Thanks for reading and I hope I helped you understand how you can empower yourself. I'm excited about the one I wrote for Election Day tomorrow to keep our NOPOL spirits up while all the politics clouds the airwaves. Cheers!

Link to my original post
And we’re off! My journey has finally begun on my quest to watch all of the Bond movies in a year. So we’re rolling back the clock almost 60 years back to 1962 to watch the first iteration of Bond in the very first film. Dr No is a film that I have seen before, possibly ten or so years ago. So my memory of it was hazy at best. Going into it I had a vague memory of a couple of key scenes but couldn’t actually remember any of the plot, which was actually quite exciting. I knew the villain but didn’t know his motives or plan which meant it felt almost like the first time I was seeing it.
So let’s get into it, here are my ratings and thoughts of each category.

• Story - 5/10 - The overall story for this film was quite a nice idea. Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of John Strangways, the local MI6 Station Chief. While there he discovers a plot by Dr No, who is a high ranking member of SPECTRE, to disrupt an American space launch using a radio beam weapon. How very Bond. This plot does a few nice things. It gives us a simple whodunnit style story that we can get to know Bond through and also sets up SPECTRE for the later films in the series, showing that they are a powerful force to be taken note of. However, a couple of things about this film just didn’t feel right. For me the film was a bit too much investigating and not enough action. This made the overall tone of the film feel a lot different to what I’m used to in a bond film (obviously at the time that wouldn’t have been the case as it was the first one, that’s more of a personal taste thing). Also I felt as if the ending was a bit of a damp squib. We’d spent all of the film building up to Dr No and purposely not being show him (which was great) only for his grand reveal to be somewhat tame (maybe even lacklustre?) and short. However this film managed the successfully lay the foundations and formula that could be built on over the many editions that follow.
• Gadgets - 2/10 - Well, there's not really much to say in this category because there wasn't any! We see the first introduction of Bonds Walther PPK and there's a Geiger counter at one point so I guess I can give a couple of points but really can't go any higher than that. Sorry 007, have you ever heard of a man called Q?
• Cars - 2/10 - Again, the same for this category. I feel bad for giving such low scores! I know this film had some budget issues which could go some way to explaining the lack of fancy cars and gadgets. Another reason is that they simply weren't prominent features of Bond movies yet and would come in later. However, I feel like I can justify a couple of points because there were a couple of nice vintage cars and a hearse which will always get a point. Other than that, nothing really to note.
• Villain - 6/10 - Dr No is an interesting fellow. A Chinese-German scientist who was formerly the treasurer to the powerful Tongs, where he stole $10million in gold bullion and "escaped" to America only to became a high ranking member in SPECTRE and relocated to Jamaica. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, and he has BIONIC HANDS! Such a cool character, with a rich and interesting back story. The only issue with him, he was just a bit...meh. For three quarters of the film he was purposely kept off screen to keep his mystique and make meeting him that much more special. And while the dinner scene when we do eventually meet him was good, it didn't blow me away. He was just a bit bland. I didn't feel scared of intimidated by him. I didn't feel like he would be a threat. He was just some rich scientist. He had so much wonderful backstory to make him an interesting and complex character but he just wasn't. He will still go down as a classic bond Villain but I feel like that's more to do with him being the first than anything else.
• Henchmen - 3/10 - Not really much to speak of here either. Professor Dent took the role of main henchman and while he seemed like a nice enough chap he was overall a bit useless and was soon dispatched by Bond.
• Secret Lair - 8/10 - Now this is what I'm talking about. Secret underwater mountain base with a weird hotel/prison service attached. Yes please! Everything about this place looked luxurious and expensive, from the bedroom/cells to the marble floor. Also a nice little Easter egg was the Portrait of the Duke of Wellington which was actually missing at the time of filming. Of course it was Dr No that stole it all along! Extravagant, eccentric and overall excellent. Also, as a side note, I feel as though Dr No should shop around more for his fish tanks. He paid $1million for that thing which is literally 10% of his entire wealth. What a nutter.
• Fight Scenes - 2/10 - This is so frustrating! I wanted so much more from the fight scenes! James Bond is all about long and thought out fight scenes. And I know this will come in time but it was still frustrating. They were all just too short, too easy for Bond to win. You could argue that the earlier fights were easier for Bond because he's and elite agent and trained as such. I can forgive that slightly. But the final fight. Dr No might as well have just jumped into that pool reactor for all the fight he put up.
• Bond Girls - 5/10 - We were treated in this film to two iconic Bond Girls. Firstly, Sylvia Trench, who while mostly irrelevant in this film and just used to show the audience Bonds charm and way with women, will also feature (I am lead to believe) in the next film. She does get a couple of points though, for being a feisty character that I am excited to see more of and for leading Sean Connery into delivering the now famous, "Bond, James Bond" line. We were also given Honey Ryder in this film (who in my opinion is the original Bond Girl). She was lovely and had a good reason to want to see the demise of Dr No, however, she didn't really effect the plot in any meaningful was and was mostly around to be Bonds eye candy.
• Iconic Moments - 7/10 - There were quite a few good moments littered throughout this film. We've already spoken about the "Bond, James Bond" line so I won't go on about it too much. There was also the first time we meet Honey Ryder with her coming out of the ocean that has lived on and been referenced in other Bond films (namely Daniel Craig doing the male equivalent in Casino Royale). Also I feel as though the dinner with Dr No fits into this category as it is the first time the we see Bond interact with SPECTRE, which is one of the main subplots throughout these early films.
• Bonus - 5/10 - I feel as though this movie deserves a few bonus points. Although it is pretty basic and stripped back compared to what we have come to expect from Bond films it is a good enjoyable film that I enjoyed watching and it does a good job setting up the franchise and the SPECTRE storyline which is present throughout. It also gets a couple of bonus points for the introduction Felix Leiter, who features in a handful of Bond films over the years. I also have to give some bonus points for the iconic soundtrack, which has become a staple of Bond movies.

Overall this film was enjoyable. It did feel like a slightly stripped back version of Bond but you can definitely still identify it as a very Bond film. You can also see how this movie was so popular when it first came out. Bond is a cool, suave ladies man that goes to exotic locations and fights baddies. What's not to like? I think this film should be taken for what it is and that is the first building block in the franchise that everything after it grows bigger and more extravagant from. And although it might not have all of the features that we have come to expect from a Bond film, it still is an important movie in the franchises history.
Total - 45/100

Mods please pin this as a resource!
Current Conditions of the Market:
Let me be clear: this is not the typical conditions of the market where stocks fluctuate double and triple digit percentages per day. There’s a place for that - the casino. In recent weeks, herds of new traders are pouring into the trading scene hoping to get a piece of the volatile market that has turned the rags to riches, or the other way around. The stock market as a whole, under normal conditions, moves gradually in both directions, guided by trends, innovation, speculation, earnings report, and financial changes. What we are in right now is a hysteria-filled environment that is risky for both veteran traders and novices. Any uninformed, reckless decision can produce different results - by chance. Be wise and do not let chance underlie your success or bankruptcy stories. Please do your research first before investing into anything and whatever you do, do not make the mistake of over-extending yourself with margin (brokerage-provided capital) that you cannot repay should things go south. People have and continue to make this fundamental mistake that will ruin them financially for years. Stock investments should be about long-term growth, stability, and supplemental to your income. Investments should give you access to the opportunity of financial freedom, but should not be your primary source for income. Do not listen to stock gurus and paid-only discord groups - they don’t make money from stocks, they make money from you. Lastly, this atypical market condition is the perfect storm for spontaneous “pump and dumps” where stocks become inflated, and based on fool’s theory or musical chairs (whichever you prefer), the last one that gets out gets burned. Be smart, be patient, do the research.
Basic Stock Jargons & Short/Long Positions:
Long - you’re buying and holding a stock with the intention for it to increase in value.
Short - you’re borrowing shares from a lender (brokerage, investment firm, individual investors), selling it to someone, and hoping to buy it back at a lower price. Your profit is the difference in the sell and buy back price. I’ll provide a real world example because this concept it a bit more complex:

• Person A is a share lender. They want to lend the share and get paid a small interest rate as compensation.
• Person B asks Person A to lend him that share temporarily. Person B does not pay anything upfront, but he promises to pay Person A in the form of interest over time.
• Person B finds a buyer Person C. Person C wants to buy a stock so it can go up. Person C is “long” on this stock. Person B, however, is short on this stock because he wants the value of the stock to go down.
• Person C pays Person B $10 for the stock. Now, Person C has spent $10, and Person B has gained $10.
• Two hypothetical situation happens now:
  • Scenario 1: Stock value increases to $15. Person C is now up $5 and he sells because he’s making nice gains. Person B needs to buy back that share at $15, but he only gained $10 profit initially. Now he needs to fork up $5 to buy back the share, and then return the share back to the lender + any interest accrued. In this scenario, the “short” lost money, the “long” gained money, and the “lender” made interest money.
  • Scenario 2: Stock value decreases to $5. Person C is now down $5 and he sells to cut losses. Person B needs to buy back that share at $5, but he already has $10 in profit initially. Now he pays $5 for the share, leaving him still with $5 profit, and returns the share back to the lender + any interested accrued. In this scenario, the “short” made money, the “long” gained money, and the “lender” made interest money.
• The above scenarios help to show why “shorts” (typically hedge funds or experienced traders) might want to manipulate the stock price to go down. Hedge funds have an incredible amount of power in the market, which I will explain in a bit, and can often create serious price movements to invoke price action that benefits themselves. Shorts, therefore, have the opposite intention of longs. They want share prices to go down, and in the process, can bankrupt certain companies that rely on the stock market liquidity to stay afloat. In other words, when investors leave a stock because it is dropping in value, the company loses that money that they could have used to pay off debt, grow the business, develop new products, pay for expenses, etc.

Market Manipulation:
Market manipulation is not new to the scene. Investors have long known of the existence of stock market manipulation tactics, and every day, we may observe some levels of manipulation in specific stocks, specific categories or industries of stocks, or the entire market. Market manipulation is defined as any actions performed with the intention of moving a certain stock price in favor of the manipulator. In this case, these are the wealthy “whales” or hedge funds, both of which have enormous capital capable of shifting stock prices at alarming speeds. Keep in mind, not all hedge funds do this and not all hedge funds are “shorts”. Some are “neutral” and act as lenders to make money, some are “growth-based” and invest just like everyday traders with the intention of raising share prices, and others are “short” which are probably perceived to be the sadistic groups of the bunch. Below, I will be discussing how manipulation occurs and on different scales.
Manipulation Tactics on a Spectrum:
Market manipulation can happen in certain stock, sectors, or the entire market. There are probably far more types of manipulative tactics than we know, but I will describe the most basic types and the strategies behind it.
Scenario 1:
Let’s say a hedge fund just opened a short position on stock X. Stock X is rising in value because general investors see it as a potential growth stock. Hedge funds are not too excited about this increased share value, so they can “hedge” or protect themselves, by selling put options. When they sell puts, they are anticipating that the stock will continue to surge, which causes the puts to become worthless at expiration, but on the contrary, they will be collecting the “premium” or money paid upfront by traders that bought the put. At the same time, this hedge fund will slowly “cover”, or buy shares of Stock X, so that the increased value of the shares will offset the short position which is losing money. The manipulation here is by using the sheer amount of capital in hand to bolster the stock, both creating favorable conditions for the puts that they sold and the share that they purchased as cover. If they want to add another level of manipulation to this, they can also purchase call options, which will result in profit if the stock price goes up. In this scenario, hedge funds make money at the expense of put option buyers and other shorts that do not have manipulative power or capital to recreate this same strategy.
Scenario 2:
Let’s say a hedge fund just opened a short position on Stock X. Stock X is rising in value because general investors see it as a potential growth stock. This hedge fund does not want to risk extra capital to cover their short position (by buying shares, selling put options, or buying call options), so they try a different route. Keep in mind that hedge funds are typically heavily invested in many stocks and assets, meaning they have a lot of power in deciding the direction of many stocks that have potential to instill widespread fear across the entire market if it drops. Take for example, if Apple and Google began to hurl downwards, this can create panic in the market where everyday traders might sell their shares at a loss. This in turn might ripple through the market as other investors in other stocks are predicting a downward trajectory across the market since these big name stocks are losing value so rapidly. Conveniently enough, hedge funds own a lot of these big name “FANG” stocks.
If I am a moderately sadistic hedge fund, I can sell off a large holding of shares (in the scale of multi millions or billions) that are in the same sector as Stock X, which would incite fear across the sector, creating panic sell offs. The price will drop sharply across the board, including Stock X, and the short position will produce big profits. Because this hedge fund sold off a large chunk of their shares at a good price, they can now cover their short position (essentially getting rid of it), and then buy up these same stocks that were let go earlier, only this time at a much cheaper price. The hedge fund has now made money not only on the short position, but now they got into the stock at a cheap price in which they can explore other manipulative tactics to bolster the price again. This can be done by encouraging analyst upgrades, publicizing “newly” purchased positions without disclosing the fact that they previously owned it, etc.
Scenario 3:
This one involves technology: algorithm trading (commonly referred to as algo trading). This one is a really intricately designed manipulative tactic that investors really have no way of getting around. Algorithm trading is the process of using high-speed super-computers and a team of traders to constantly monitor market activity and trade when opportunities arise. In this case, the hedge funds do not have to do any direct manipulation of the market, which makes this 100% legal. How this works is by taking advantage of how trading works and the time it takes for a trade to be made. For you general investors, we have mobile apps and web-based trading platforms to trade. When we like a stock, we have to go through the motion of inputting the stock ticker symbol, the amount of shares, the price we are willing to pay, hit submit, and confirm the trade. For hedge funds using algorithm trading, all this is done autonomously, which makes submission of an order several magnitudes quicker. When an order is submitted, it goes through a brokerage (Fidelity, Webull, ETrade, TDA, RH, etc.) and the data is rerouted to a clearing house (intermediate party that verifies and processes the trade). Clearing houses are responsible for making sure your orders are filled, but they take it on a first come first serve basis. So if a stock is moving quickly, hedge funds have a serious edge in getting in cheaper and faster as well as getting out higher and faster.
Algorithm trading is integratable as part of the buying and selling strategies mentioned in the two previous scenarios, which is why they can almost guarantee profit. Algorithm trading also uses a lot of data in their backbone to determine the trades that have a high chance of profitability, and it acts on various factors such as volatility, volume, interest activity, news, etc. In some cases, these algorithms can be set to do some extremely sadistic things. I’ll start by talking about “market orders” vs “limit orders”. Before you make a trade on your brokerage, you will notice an option that says “market order” or “limit order”. Market orders are an agreement that you will purchase the stock or option contract at the best price in the market in the momentary space in time. There is of course a huge risk to that because in that short moment in time, there may not be anyone selling at a good price, and instead, some people might set sell limits at ridiculous prices. For example, some people set a sell limit at $1000 for GME. If you did a market order, and you get really unlucky, you might end up snagging a share for $1000 each, when the actual share value might be $300. However, when you set a “limit order”, you are agreeing to buy a share at a maximum price that you designated.
In the event that a hedge fund siphons a ton of shares of a company, the algorithm can be set to sell these shares at a ridiculous sell limit. Remember, when they buy or sell, it’s processed significantly faster at the clearing houses, so if you’re that one unlucky trader that went for a market order on a stock, you might end up purchasing it at a huge premium set by the hedge funds themselves. Moral of the story: DO NOT PURCHASE AS MARKET ORDER - ALWAYS PURCHASE AT LIMIT ORDER.

I am seeing lots of the same "don't invest what you can't afford to lose", "don't fall for PnDs", "read before you buy anything" - and while these are all important lessons, I feel like there is one that is going unspoken and it's one that is at the very heart of cryptocurrency and that is actually using it.
What I am going to suggest now is in no way investment advice, you don't even need to spend any money for this, but it will get you to see how crypto can be used and the real world effects it can have.
I'm using Nano for this explanation - there may be other coins you could try this out on, if so, please feel free to name them in the comments. But by the end of this, you will have set up a wallet, received crypto and, if you like, sent crypto. These are fundamentals to a concept that is aiming to replace fiat. And you will do this without spending a penny.
First, google Natrium.io and open a wallet there (they don't have desktop but you can do it on your phone). The iOS app is very nice and user-friendly, I can't speak for Android but I imagine it's the same. They won't ask for any personal information. They will give you your seed (DEFINITELY write that down and keep it safe - we are just doing a little experiment here so it's not essential right now but it's best to develop a good habit of keeping all your keys).
Then go to one of the Nano faucets. A faucet is like it sounds. A little tap which slowly drips very small amounts of a crypto into your wallet. Just once mind you, you can't turn them on and let them run $$$ into your pocket. nano-faucet.org is a good one but if you google 'nano faucet' I think I remember a couple of others. All you have to do, is go onto Natrium, press 'Receive' and it will give you your public key. This is an address which you can give to people and they can send Nano to you. The address will look disgusting. You won't think it's worth typing it out. But if you're doing all this on your phone, just copy and paste it. Then, on the faucet website, complete the captcha and paste in your public key that you just copied, and voila - within minutes you will have some Nano in your wallet. It will be a tiny amount but it will be something that you own, is in your control and that you can send to someone else if you so please. As Nano has no fees, you won't ever lose any of that amount to the network, just to those you send it to, who receive 100% of what you sent.
Now you have your wallet and you have your tiny bit of crypto, we get to the most difficult part of the process. Go and find a friend. This could be a family member, your best bud, your postman - basically any human being with a phone. Walk them through this process that you have now mastered.
By this point, you will now be two people with tiny amounts of a crypto in your own wallets that you control. You can then try to send each other some crypto. Just like you did with the faucet, press "Receive" and if you want to be super high tech, you can get the other person to scan your QR code (hello future) and then they put in how much they want to send you. With Nano, the transaction should complete in under 1 second. And voila - you just sent/received your first ever crypto transaction without spending a penny and without any bank or custodian.
Once you have recognised these basic steps, you will be much better prepared to invest in the future. You will understand "not your keys, not your coins", you will want to understand fees paid to networks (where does that money go? well it depends on the coin, so you will have to read into that) and you will realise that crypto is not just an investment, it's something that actually has a use.
For the old heads in here, let me know below if there are any other coins you could do this with just to get a feel for crypto. I'm not a Nano shill, I haven't invested in Nano, I just think it's hugely useful as an instructive tool for crypto in this case. And I certainly wouldn't suggest investing in Nano if you're just entering the space - BTC and ETH are essentials for beginners, but you need to understand how they work before you put your money into them and this process should give you a good outline to the processes involved and the concepts.
This is just your beginning. You will have a long, long journey starting from this point. Enjoy!
P.S. If you do want to continue getting tiny amounts of Nano for free, WeNano is a very nice app for those in big cities to find some Nano. Or luckynano.com can also work like a faucet with very small amounts although it's presented as a casino (no credit cards or anything and you get free bets) so it's not for everyone and do be careful. When the fun stops, stop.

hat’s happening on Wall Street?
Investors have been rushing into the nearly bankrupt strip mall video game retailer GameStop faster than shoppers hoping to score a PlayStation5 at a Black Friday door-crashers sale. Suddenly, the company is valued more than big box tech behemoth Best Buy. Its shares are trading at a volume surpassing even the biggest stock of them all, Apple.
If you think it’s because GameStop suddenly re-invented the video game wheel, the answer is no. In fact, other than the hiring of a new CEO, not much at the company has changed since last year when a share of GameStop stock could be had for as little as $5. But at their peak (as of this writing) on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 28, the company’s shares hit $500 in premarket trading. Cumulatively, GameStop stock has skyrocketed 1,200% in the recent period.
With game enthusiasts embracing streaming subscriptions and turning away from plastic cartridges, many analysts have been predicting GameStop will soon be going the way of Blockbuster—another modern incarnation of video killing the radio star. So if GameStop did little, if anything, to turn around its sagging fortunes, why are its shares in such high demand?
The only thing that changed is that Wall Street powerhouse hedge funds and short-sellers have lost their monopoly on gaming the stock market casino.
The meteoric rise in GameStop shares—and to a lesser extent those of other troubled companies, like Bed Bath & Beyond, Blackberry, movie house AMC, and even candy maker Tootsie Roll—is being driven by the actions of a group of what the Wall Street professionals call dangerous amateurs.
Coordinating with each other on a section of the online platform Reddit called WallStreetBets, a huge number of relatively small-time investors (around 2.2 million of them by the most recent count) have teamed up to take on the big guys in a battle that has all the trappings of a Robin Hood tale.
The “short” in a nutshell
To understand the game plan of the WallStreetBets crowd, it’s necessary to know some of the lingo of Wall Street gambling—especially the concept of the “short.”
A short is when an investor essentially “borrows” a company’s stock from a broker. The investor then takes that borrowed stock and sells it on the market. The hope of the “short seller” is that the value of that company’s stock will drop before they are due to return their borrowed shares, allowing them to re-buy the stock at a cheaper price and return it to the broker—pocketing the difference as a profit.
In essence, they are placing a bet against a company’s future. They believe the company is worth less than the market is valuing it at, and when that reality sets in among others, then they will get to cash in on their foresight.
As an example, a short-seller may borrow a share of Company A and sell it for the current market price of $100. They do so because they believe Company A isn’t really worth $100 per share and eventually the price will drop. If they are right, and the price of Company A shares sink to $60, then the short-seller will re-buy the share at the new price and return it to the broker (called “covering the short”). The $40 difference is their profit.
If they are wrong, however, and Company A’s shares go up, then they will lose out on their bad bet. Let’s say that Company A shares go from $100 to $120. When the short-seller’s stock loan comes due, they have to buy a share at whatever the current price is and return it to the broker. Their loss in this case would be $20. But what if the price of Company A shares go even higher, to $150, $200, or $500?
In a regular stock transaction, when a person actually buys a share (as opposed to borrowing it like a short-seller does), their potential loss is capped at whatever they paid. You can’t lose more than you put in. But for a short-seller, the potential loss is actually endless. When the due date comes for their borrowed shares, they have to pay whatever it takes to cover their short.
Gambling against GameStop
Now, back to the real world and the GameStop situation.
A number of weeks ago, the “amateur” investors on WallStreetBets started focusing their attention on the huge hedge funds with massive short bets against GameStop. They targeted outfits like Melvin Capital and Citron Research that had taken short positions in GameStop and then spent months talking about how bad the company was (an intentional effort to drive down its share price).
The gambling against GameStop had gotten so extreme that there were over 71 million borrowed short shares out there, even though the company has only 69 million shares—short-sellers were “borrowing” stock that didn’t even exist! These Wall Street titans became the villains for the Reddit Robin Hoods. (Appropriately, Robinhood is the name of a popular trading app used by many of the so-called untraditional investors.)
WallStreetBets members fantasized about how great it would be to make these short-sellers scream by driving up the price of GameStop. Some believed that GameStop really had a chance to turn around and was being unfairly punished by the short-sellers; for others, it was simply the joy that would come from sticking it to the hedge funds.
They’d done it before, on a smaller scale, with other shorted companies. If they got together again and acted in unison with their dollars, they could inflict some real pain on Melvin and Citron.
Putting the squeeze on the short sellers
Within days, WallStreetBets (and others who followed in their wake) engineered what’s called a “short squeeze”—an escalation of a company’s share price that forces short-sellers to buy at an inflated value. Panicked traders at Melvin, Citron, and other big short-sellers reacted exactly as predicted: They scrambled to cover their shorts, knowing that the longer they waited, the more they risked losing.
By the middle of this week, the short-sellers were surrendering. Citron’s managing partner Andrew Left admitted the company had to cover its short Tuesday afternoon at “a loss of 100%.” As for Melvin Capital, it was only kept afloat by an injection of $2.75 billion in funds from other asset management firms. Data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners shows that GameStop short-sellers have collectively lost more than $5 billion in the month of January alone.
The masters of finance on Wall Street are, to put it mildly, pissed. This is a crowd that has enjoyed pretty much unrestrained power for decades, dodging the efforts of governments and activists to rein them in. To be outmaneuvered by a bunch of millennials on the internet has them seeing red—both literally and metaphorically.
Traditional stock market analysts and financial commentators are musing about whether the coordinated moves of WallStreetBets are illegal. Many are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to chase down what they’re characterizing as a “pump and dump” scheme. They are crying out for help from the same regulators they themselves spend all their time avoiding and undermining.
These are the guys who brought us the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the Great Recession. They’re the ones who have made billions of dollars off the pandemic in the past year while the rest of the country lost their jobs and homes—or died from coronavirus. Whatever losses they’re experiencing now are certainly well-deserved.
That makes it very tempting to cheer on the WallStreetBets crusaders. Richard Smith, a market behavior analyst at the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, described their role to Markets Insider: “You have these media-driven platforms where the media isn’t controlled by the institutions in the way that it has historically been.” He characterized this as “a sign that the institutions are losing control.”
Heroes or same-old capitalists?
But WallStreetBets is not necessarily a den of folk heroes or investors driven by some social conscience. Some are saying they plan to make charitable donations with some of their winnings, but other forum members are simply bragging about all the money they’ve made from outsmarting the old Wall Street. One of the key ringleaders of the short squeeze effort, someone who goes by the username DeepFuckValue, claims to have turned a $50,000 GameStop investment into $20 million amidst the chaos.
Undoubtedly some of the more talented among the WallStreetBets crowd will be recruited to join the ranks of top firms—rebels eventually co-opted by the system. Others will get too caught up in the euphoria and eventually lose all their money when the bubble bursts. And let’s face it, this is capitalism—the bubble always bursts.
It’s also necessary to remember that the most powerful segments of finance capital usually find a way to shift the price for their gambling onto the rest of society by one means or another (remember the bailouts for the “too big to fail” banks?). It would be delusional to think that Wall Street isn’t making moves to offload its losses and go on the offensive.
The empire of high finance is already striking back. By Wednesday evening, the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit had gone dark, for reasons not yet clear. The WallStreetBets server on Discord was shut down. On Thursday morning, brokers started implementing restrictions on GameStop trades, raising expectations that more action will be taken by the establishment to regain control.
Taking note of the fact that trades in GameStop, AMC, and other shorted stocks were now blocked on the Robinhood platform, one Twitter user observed, appropriately, “The free market is only free until rich people lose money.”
Wall Street’s control over our society won’t be meaningfully challenged by simply replacing one group of gamblers with a different, younger group of gamblers. It wasn’t the robbers like Bonnie and Clyde that beat the banks and fought back against the Great Depression in the 1930s—it was the coalition of labor, African-American, and other people’s movements that won the New Deal and put capitalism on notice.
Now, as then, only organized political struggle by the working class and democratic movements has the potential to upend the power of finance capital for good and allow us to collectively decide our future.
So we can enjoy a laugh at the misfortunes of the hedge funds and short-sellers, but then we have to keep organizing.
Socialist_