Hah, well, I would be more than happy to be completely wrong!

Yeah but to make any real money on a short position taken prior to listing, the stock would have to drop well below that $17 price. Will that happen? Maybe. But I personally wouldn’t bank on it. My bet is that pre-listing price will be a bit of a floor since so many retail meme stock types got in on that price pre-merger and won’t want to get out.

Shorting before the merger wouldn’t have made any sense: the stock price went from around $17.50 to over $50 within the first week of trading and probably won’t come back to earth for a while. Meanwhile borrowing costs, after that initial spike when the stock was at its highest, were astronomical, so it wasn’t economical to do it right after, either.

The real 4D chess would be to get that lockup waived, short the stock now (borrowing costs have since fallen back to earth), sell your shares, then close out the short after the price drops (sure, you run the risk that the SEC goes after you for stock manipulation, but I doubt Trump cares).

Nope. Unless the lockup is waived or modified by the board, Trump cannot “lend, offer, pledge, hypothecate, encumber, donate, assign, sell, contract to sell … or otherwise transfer or dispose of” his shares (this language is well-tested boilerplate for any lockup agreement). In case it’s not clear, that covers using them to get a leveraged loan.

Far more likely is the board simply waives the lockup which frees him to do whatever he wants, in which case my bet is he just sells off some or all of his stake 'cuz who gives a shit if one of his cult members catches the falling knife.

The board can vote to waive it. That’s… how boards work. They could vote to waive Junior’s and Nunes’ lockups, too, if they wanted to. The only recourse shareholders would have is a lawsuit.

Edit: And if you don’t want to believe me, maybe you’ll believe a professional financial writer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-19/banks-can-get-emissions-off-the-books

Also, Trump’s shares are subject to a lockup agreement, so he’s not allowed to “lend, offer, pledge, hypothecate, encumber, donate, assign, sell, contract to sell … or otherwise transfer or dispose of” his shares for six months, which presumably covers using them as collateral for a loan (or appeals bond). But the agreement is between Trump and DWAC, and DWAC could just waive it. It is not best practices or anything, as a capital markets matter, to waive the lockup an hour after the merger, but I think it is possible. Ordinarily you don’t do it because shareholders will be mad about additional shares flooding the market, but (1) if he just pledges his shares to a bank, they won’t flood the market, and (2) the shareholders are presumably Trump fans and will be happy to help him fund his legal bills. Probably the stock would go up if they gave him a limited waiver for this.

Edit 2: This, by the way, is why folks are so critical of the Tesla board and why Elon’s recent pay package was rescinded by a judge, who determined the board did not act in the best interests of the shareholders by approving that package; rather, they concluded the board was too close to, and too beholden to, Elon to be able to effectively negotiate that package.

Boards are basically the last line of defense when it comes to things like pay packages and so forth, but that doesn’t stop shenanigans from happening, hence shareholder lawsuits, which are basically the final recourse for shareholders to hold boards to account.

People keep saying trump wasn’t prevented from selling for 6 months, and I have no idea why.

So, yes, he’s currently subject to a lockup agreement. But, the board can always waive that agreement, and given the board is made up of Trump acolytes, there’s no reason to take it too seriously (yes, if they did that, it could be subject to a shareholder lawsuit if a sale resulted in a plunge in the share price, based on the claim that the board was failing in its fiduciary duty, but by the time any such trial made its way through the courts, it probably wouldn’t matter).

My Momentum 4s have 60 hours of battery life…

What?

Compiling quality datasets is enormously challenging and labour intensive. OpenAI absolutely knows the provenance of the data they train on as it’s part of their secret sauce. And there’s no damn way their CTO won’t have a broad strokes understanding of the origins of those datasets.

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So let me make sure I understand:

Step 1: DNC highlights the right-wing nutjobs in the GOP as a way to scare the undecides into voting for them. “Look at those nutjobs!” they say. “Aren’t they fucking nutty? Who would vote for someone that nutty? Not you. Because that would be really dumb, right?”

Step 2: GOP primary voters decide “Well shit, those nutjobs? Those are my kinda nutjobs!” and nominate Trump.

Step 3: In the general, all those GOP voters then vote for the nutjob.

And thus I am to conclude: Hillary and the DNC helped create the MAGA brownshirts.

Yeah. That makes sense.

It’s kinda like how, if I tell a toddler not to put paperclips in wall outlets, and then they do it and electrocute themselves, then really it’s my fault because I pointed it out in the first place.

Cool, so Hillary and the DNC were such incredible political masterminds that they single-handedly brainwashed GOP supporters into nominating Trump. And all the voters then picked him because, I assume, the DNC also tricked them into tacking toward fascism through, I guess, sheer force of political will.

Truly amazing.

Or course, it makes sense. Certainly when I think of the DNC and the Dems more broadly, I think of an incredibly effective organization with an all-powerful and unstoppable mind control apparatus demonstrating unparalleled powers to manipulate an unwitting electorate in order to achieve their nefarious goals.

And the GOP and their voters? Obviously simply sheep, following the lead of their Democratic puppet masters.

I’d call it a left-wing conspiracy theory, but if there’s anything I know about the Dems, it’s that they’re such incredible strategic politicians that this can’t be anything but the stone cold truth. Right?

Certainly that explains why, after the 2016 election, all those poor GOP voters woke up, confused and hung over, and realized what they’d done while under the spell of those nefarious Democrats, and why in subsequent years they rejected Trump wholeheartedly and certainly never goose stepped right along behind him.

Never ceases to amaze me how often I see this canard:

both parties share culpability in creating the opening for MAGA and Trump

So Dems, who are never elected to represent those poor, forgotten souls in the rust belt or former coal mining towns, and therefore are not in a position to actually do anything to help them, are somehow culpable for those folks, what, voting against their interests?

Fuck off with this both sides enlightened centrist bullshit. Folks in Virginia and Alabama voted for right wingers who fucked them over, then those people successfully channeled the resulting anger and resentment at the “establishment”.

It’s the political consequences of starve the beast politics.

Yes I’m aware of the security tradeoffs with testing, which is why I’ve started refraining from mentioning it as an option as pedants like to pop out of the woodwork and mention this exact issue every damn time.

Also, testing absolutely gets “security support”, the issue is that security fixes don’t land in testing immediately and so there can be some delay. As per the FAQ:

Security for testing benefits from the security efforts of the entire project for unstable. However, there is a minimum two-day migration delay, and sometimes security fixes can be held up by transitions. The Security Team helps to move along those transitions holding back important security uploads, but this is not always possible and delays may occur.

Thats seriously overstating things. I’ve been running testing or sid for years and years, and I can only remember a handful of times where anything meaningfully broke. And typically its dependency breakages, not actual software breakages.

For the target users of Debian stable? No.

Debian stable is for servers or other applications where security and predictability are paramount. For that application I absolutely do not want a lot package churn. Quite the opposite.

Meanwhile Sid provides a rolling release experience that in practice is every bit as stable as any other rolling release distro.

And if I have something running stable and I really need to pull in the latest of something, I can always mix and match.

What makes Debian unique is that it offers a spectrum of options for different use cases and then lets me choose.

If you don’t want that, fine, don’t use Debian. But for a lot of us, we choose Debian because of how it’s managed, not in spite of it.

So don’t run stable on a desktop? If you want a bleeding edge rolling release, that’s what sid is for.

If somebody wanted to draw animated kiddie porn they could still do that. How far would you go until you ban crayons

It’s genuinely impressive how completely you missed my point.

How about another analogy: US federal law allows people to own individual firearms, but not grenades.

But they’re both things that kill people, right? Why would they be treated differently?

Hint: it’s about scale.

The same is true of pipe bombs. But anyone can make a pipe bomb. Genie is out of the bottle, right? So why are there laws regulating manufacture and ownership of them? Hmm…

And how many times have you made this comment, only to have it pointed out that there is a big fucking difference between a human manually creating fake images via Photoshop at human speed using human skills, versus automating the process so it can be done en masse at the push of a button?

Because that’s a really big fucking difference.

Think: musket versus gatling gun. Yeah, they both shoot bullets, but that’s about where the similarity ends.

Is the genie out of the bottle at this point? Probably.

But to claim this doesn’t represent a massive shift because Photoshop? Sorry but that’s at best naive, and it’s starting to get exhausting seeing this “argument” trotted out repeatedly by AI apologists.

Denialism it is, then! Very well, carry on.

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