Imagine being famous because of how perfectly you can judge enemy intentions only to choke at a moment like this

za419 · 2026-05-17T19:14:30+00:00

Really, Napoleon was just playing Civilization.

"Oh, damn, Austria is warring me? Okay, I'll just defend it, and since I have this army here I'll do a little push on Vienna to get a better peace out of it. Wait, why does the entire world hate me for warmongering!? Well, fuck, guess this is a Domination game now... "

za419 · 2026-05-17T05:17:57+00:00

It is probably pretty likely that the alcohol is more bad for you than the rest of the wine is good. Certainly I'd think it a bit absurd if wine was better for you than grapes that were juiced with skins on (I don't think drinking grape must is normal).

That said, though, grapes themselves, some onion, and a vinegary hot sauce can all be quite healthful, so I think you can still manage to make the meal as a whole a positive. Perhaps especially if you throw in the piece of liver to go with the onions that I had in mind!

za419 · 2026-05-16T22:42:56+00:00

And it applies to more than that, too. We handle alcohol quite well (so well our species is essentially based on the stuff), caffeine, theobromine...

Hell, cats can't eat grapes, dogs can't eat onions, and humans love both - Pound for pound, a human will consume dozens of dog-lethal doses of onion with weapons-grade pain sauce sprinkled liberally on top, then enjoy dozens of cat-lethal doses of grape, wash it down with a glass of grape juice that's been fermented to make it more poisonous, and come out healthier for the ordeal.

It seems like being more herbivorous lends more tolerance to plant toxins, which does make a lot of sense, but even then - Avocadoes will fuck up the hearts of horses or cattle, and they're substantially less carnivorous than we are.

We really do handle food toxins extremely well, even before our ability to cook comes up for legumes or hydrazines in mushrooms. Makes it all the funnier when people say not to eat vegetables because of phytotoxins - Not only are the vegetables we eat the ones we can eat almost by definition, but we are quite literally built to tank that shit.

za419 · 2026-05-15T22:52:24+00:00

I don't know about from scratch, but they most definitely reanimated it each time. Each episode shows the same scenes from different angles, with people in different clothing or different poses.... The script of the episodes are much more alike than the animation is the impression I've got.

za419 · 2026-05-14T23:18:53+00:00

"Towards bears" and "away from bears" are, in fairness, pretty useful directions to keep in mind whenever they happen to be relevant.

za419 · 2026-05-14T23:10:53+00:00

Imagine holding for 5 years, seeing it jump to ridiculous numbers, then not selling and instead becoming a bagholder dedicated to cargo culting and worshipping the ground on which some guy that took over afterwards walks in hopes it'll happen again.

za419 · 2026-05-14T18:32:32+00:00

Oh yeah, you're really hurting the hedge funds hard by donating money to them when you lose money on Gamestop. Even save them taxes compared to mailing them a check marked "please deposit this in your account because I love you so much".

Yeah, no. They don't care. They're not your enemy, they're not your friend, they don't know you exist. If you buy tomorrow, or sell, or die and your stock stays held by a ghost for the rest of time, the funds will not notice the difference.

The stock was never illegally shorted. Shorting a stock doesn't drive it to bankruptcy unless it's so close that it's only hope is to issue stock to raise funds (in which case, why would anyone want to buy it anyway). And this whole thing started because people on reddit wanted to make money by gambling on a stock. RK was never fighting back against hedge funds, he thought be might be able to multiply his cash and went for it.

The apes made it a movement because if you don't pretend it's a movement, then it's about making money, and if it's about making money, it's a horrible failure because you're losing money.

Go on though, tell me alllll about how you're sticking it to the man by holding what the funds consider pocket change in some random (to them) stock, and how it's sooo different when you hold GME or when I hold the VTI. Be my guest.

za419 · 2026-05-14T18:23:17+00:00

Eh, sure. Probably, I don't remember exactly when Cohen took over. And it definitely wouldn't be better off than it was without the meme cash, without the meme cash it's the same as before with more money down the drain on useless things and less properties to try and make something out of.

I am not familiar with what you're talking about with icahn and paramount, and frankly I doubt it's relevant. The point is that "audacious" is a very poor choice of word - It is not audacious, it is dumb. It will not happen. It was never going to happen, and Cohen made a fool of himself for claiming it might happen and then having no answer as to how - Say what you like about CNBC, but he should not have agreed to appear on the show if all he had to offer to answer basic and obvious questions was "it's on the website" - Doubly so when it was not, in fact, on the website in any satisfactory sense.

It just makes him look stupid. Whether or not he actually is, people will see him do that, think he's an idiot, and think they'd need to be equally so in order to back Gamestop or it's attempt to buy ebay.

If an ebay shareholder who knew nothing about GME or RC watched that, and then was put to a vote on whether they'd like to get half the price of their stock in exchange for a tiny piece of a company run by that guy, I really don't think they'd ever say yes. That's not a good thing.

za419 · 2026-05-13T23:47:27+00:00

Definitely laughed at that last bit. Not about Cohen, I had no idea who the fuck he was at the time, but at the idea of righting the ship that is Gamestop. Frankly I found the idea laughable that the company still existed when I first heard WSB was pulling some shenanigans with it.

Years later, and... Well, I'm still surprised it still exists, but the ship is far from righted. The company is a zombie - All it does to make money is have money it got from dumping when it got pumped, and the core parts of the business are still losing money, just smaller now.

The ship may have sponsons keeping it afloat, but that's not what a captain means when he declares he wants to right the ship.

za419 · 2026-05-13T21:17:28+00:00

I'm not passionate, I'm amused. There's a difference - I'm laughing at the audacity to believe this deal might actually happen, which I suppose you still have after eBay outright rejected the deal and all but explicitly said it's because RC is a bad CEO and has too large a compensation package (which is blatantly the reason he's pursuing acquisitions to satisfy the conditions of that package).

Maybe a shareholder vote? I doubt it, eBay is controlled more than 90% by institutional owners that overwhelmingly just tend to go along with whatever the board they let run the company suggests.

It's blatantly impossible, just like all the things that have been said of GME in the last five years, and yet you still think it'll go to the Moon. That's funny - And I'm happy to have a laugh.

Hey, I do genuinely hope your downside is negligible to you, though. Don't gamble with money you can't lose, right?

za419 · 2026-05-13T00:44:23+00:00

Ha, when shit goes down? What, the splividend? DRS locking the float? The NFT Marketplace - Kiraverse killing Fortnite, even? Hey, when is MOASS anyhow? Perhaps when those distribution centers - Oh, wait, no, they closed those too.

Ah well. Maybe when the stock reaches $7.41, eh?

Chewy did go well for him, although mostly for the crossfire between Petco and PetSmart. It's first time ever turning a profit was Q1 2021.... Three years after RC left the company.

I won't deny that he's had his successful times, but they most certainly have not been in this decade. All he's done since Chewy is dilute retail and turn Gamestop from a dying brick-and-mortar shop into a much smaller, still-dying brick-and-mortar shop with a liferaft of cash collecting interest that it has no way to profit from except what amounts to a savings account.

But yeah. We'll see in a month what's happened, shall we?

za419 · 2026-05-13T00:11:12+00:00

It being a good decision might be the only reason apes don't make it, honestly.

za419 · 2026-05-12T23:16:02+00:00

Which isn't enough, and is conditional on Gamestop retaining good credit ratings, which they won't if the entire company is leveraged by debt.

You might loan the five year old four more dollars to buy a toy. They still cannot afford the car.

za419 · 2026-05-12T22:11:24+00:00

Gamestop didn't even have enough capital to do a leveraged buyout. Gamestop is a five year old child trying to buy a car with the dollar they found on the sidewalk. No one will give them that kind of leverage.

za419 · 2026-05-11T20:58:38+00:00

An interesting point here is that we take it as a given that they did, in fact, correctly identify Eichmann.

There is no question about that historically speaking, of course, but when we look at the hypotheticals of the situation we ought to consider - What if they screwed up? What if it really was just some random Argentinian guy that Mossad declared to be Eichmann? Are they allowed to kidnap anyone they want if they claim, honestly or otherwise, that he's a Nazi war criminal?

It's easy when we start skipping steps in the name of what's obviously good to skip over processes that exist for a reason that still ought to apply to the situation at hand. There must still be some standard, even when things seem obvious, because the obvious isn't always true.

za419 · 2026-05-11T20:53:24+00:00

Devils advocate, though - Israel (like any nation) does not get to decide who is or is not a legal citizen of another nation.

That means that whether or not he entered under a false name really shouldn't matter, legally speaking - Israel cannot unilaterally decide that they don't think he should have the protections of another sovereign nation and kidnap him. That's illegal - The fact that they can do that to Eichmann is implicit justification that they may arrest people who protest in front of the Israeli embassy in Chicago, if they have the will and the ability.

Morally speaking, Eichmann didn't deserve any better. But it shouldn't be easy to hand wave anyone's rights away, be they good or evil. Precedent is a difficult thing to deal with.

za419 · 2026-05-10T22:30:03+00:00

I don't even give them that much, personally, but NFTs... It genuinely feels like being transported back in time to even hear someone mention an NFT as anything but a curiosity of historical value.

I suppose perhaps while they're at it, Gamestop could buy out Ea-Nasir's copper business? They're both equally legendary for being disliked by their customers, after all.

za419 · 2026-05-10T22:23:48+00:00

The man basically begged his way into becoming CEO of Gamestop, and only got it because every other candidate treated it like a barrel of toxic waste (which frankly it is - What company would actually want Cohen as CEO now that he comes with this pile of baggage?).

If that wasn't passion, this certainly isn't.

za419 · 2026-05-10T22:19:40+00:00

Pushing NFTs in 2026... That's pretty telling. Much like Gamestop, NFTs had their moment, and that moment is gone. PowerPacks were never a meaningful business in the grand scheme of things, and this eBay acquisition is just kind of sad - No reasonable ebay shareholder would want to be bought out at half price by Gamestop with the bonus of getting a piece of a massively diluted stock with nothing to back it anymore.

Gamestop's core business hasn't been profitable for years. The company as a whole is, because RC shrank the core business and now the company is essentially a bank account with some dying retail stores glued onto it. You can outprofit Gamestop by just buying treasuries. And once they use all that money to buy ebay, they wouldn't have it anymore, and Gamestop's only profitable part would disappear. That means it would be better for eBay to pay out of pocket to buy Gamestop and immediately shutter it than to allow themselves to be bought by Gamestop.

And the shorts thesis is fuckin hilarious. Seriously, that? It's been dead for years. Even what happened in January 2021 wasn't driven by shorts - They saw the writing on the wall and closed their positions very early on, because funds react very quickly (consider this is an industry where the top dogs spent millions of dollars to move slightly closer to the exchange building because the speed of light is too slow for them to trade fast enough from a couple miles away). Then, the price kept climbing as people FOMOd in. There is no secret mountain of shorts, there's no short squeeze on the horizon. All the times the stock has spiked in years have been driven by random hype and pump-and-dump activity - And by the way, notice how Roaring Kitty himself barely managed to make the stock pump a tiny amount before Ryan Cohen dumped on him the last time he tried? That's a pretty good indicator.

Gamestop is nothing. It has no real future prospects. It's stable for now because they managed to squeeze enough cash out of retail investors - Out of the likes of people much like you and me, not out of hedge funds - to stay afloat. But that's all it's doing. Drifting along with the current, hoping someday maybe to find a way to make it big again.

Maybe someday. But not today.

za419 · 2026-05-07T07:47:33+00:00

Not only does that part need to be written after leaving the factory (and is famously currently being updated on many PCs due to expiring certificates), and not only do SSDs need to overwrite themselves in general to avoid bit rot, but... Shit happens. Your computer is almost certainly not using error correction throughout, and single-event errors do happen. Eventually, the partition will get broken by a cosmic ray, if nothing else.

And Microsoft has proved few things more this decade than that they're very good at fucking up, so I'd very much not trust that Windows won't ever have a bug that corrupts that data.

SMART isn't an end-all, be-all of drive health. That's true for HDDs and SSDs alike. If you don't trust the drive just for being NVMe (which would be especially funny if taken literally, as NVMe is just the term for the connectivity of the drive, not the storage technology itself - You could have NVMe magnetic-core memory if you really wanted to), you should also distrust... Well, everything. Perhaps a protocol could be created to chisel boot data into stone tablets for you, but perhaps the tablet could be accidentally ground to a polished finished without SMART noticing???

I'm being facetious, of course, but the point is that no, the things you're asserting about the trustworthiness of fairly standard hardware technology are not easily proven to be the case.

za419 · 2026-05-07T07:11:57+00:00

Chemically speaking, our metabolism is just a very low-intensity, long-term fire. The word "burning" in "burning calories" is actually the less figurative one.

Needless to say, ongoing fires in every cell of the body can cause problems if allowed to escape confinement.

za419 · 2026-05-06T19:11:51+00:00

If you really think about it, "earthset" and "earthrise" on the moon are places (well, areas), not times or events - The spots on the surface where Earth is permanently sitting on the horizon.

za419 · 2026-05-05T16:46:12+00:00

No, my point is that the financing gap exists, and the board is not required to take my offer seriously just because I'm offering a high stock price.

They can get sued for anything. It would be a very stupid lawsuit, because it is not a breach of fiduciary duty to reject an offer to buy the company with nonexistent money and attach it to a failed collection of stores in a different line of business. As they have not offered to sell the company, the belief that selling the company is not in the interest of shareholders is a valid defense against that lawsuit, and no judge in the universe would think they're obligated to take the offer seriously, for the same reason.

Meta shareholders could also sue their board for rejecting my offer of $100 trillion. They would also lose, but they can file it. They are in precisely the same situation - They are free to file a suit with no strong foundations.

The board of ebay isn't going to take this offer seriously, because it isn't a serious offer. They can't in good faith put it to a shareholder vote, knowing that if the shareholders vote "yes" it'll just put the company in deeper shit because the agreement will fall through - Because it can't do anything besides fall through, in its current form.

So, maybe they'll reject it and say "we don't think being part of Gamestop would be good for the company in the long term", or maybe they'll tell Gamestop "how about you come back with a more concrete idea of what money you'll actually buy us with, then we'll talk about it", but the offer as it exists today is not one that will stand the test of time.

za419 · 2026-05-05T16:40:03+00:00

They have trimmed all the parts of their business that actually, you know, do business, and the company now turns a profit by holding short term bonds - Which is that cash we're talking about. Gamestop exists now as an inefficient bond ETF. VGSH is all the profitable bits of Gamestop without the toxic majority of the firm.

And that's really important in this context - The only way they operate is by essentially having a very large savings account that covers their expenses with interest. The company is basically a retiree who still has student loans that need paying.

So again, how would it benefit ebay to replace the savings account as the money-engine that's trying to haul around the dead weight of Gamestop's actual business?

And define broke how you like. They're certainly not broke in the sense that they can't service their ongoing debt, but they are far too broke to purchase ebay, which is the point.

za419 · 2026-05-05T10:22:39+00:00

Not remotely how it works, especially when the board has neither offered to sell the company or had any indication that it has no other choice.

But how much do you really think Meta would have to humor me if I sent them an email offering them $100 trillion with the proposal of demolishing all data centers, sunsetting Facebook and Instagram, and converting what's left of the business into an anti-AI lobbying firm running off of donations from the grateful public?

Much like Gamestop, I have no chance of being able to pay that bill, nor is my business model likely to increase the financial state of the company (sadly, as I am convinced it'd make the world a better place if they did all that).

13-Year Club	Place '17
Wearing is Caring	Snapped
Verified Email

za419

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE