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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A P/E ratio that’s high indicates that investors think something is a growth stock. A typical mature but growing tech company has a P/E ratio of 20ish. Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 182.

    Now, there’s a saying “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, but TSLA is poised for a huge collapse. It was already way overvalued even a year ago when Musk was just this right-wing asshole who bought Twitter and ruined it. Everything since then has destroyed his image and made it so nobody wants to buy his cars. He’s pissed off Democrats, and now he’s pissed off MAGA Republicans. And, most importantly, Tesla is clearly no longer a growth stock. Sales are declining year after year.

    If Tesla were a normal, boring car company that was competently run by someone nobody hated, it might have a P/E ratio similar to Toyota: 7. To get there from here, TSLA would have to shed 96% of its value. Keep in mind, that’s not what the price should be. That’s what the price should be if nobody hated the brand and it was a normal well-run car company.

    Somebody is going to make absolute bags of money shorting TSLA. If I were rich I’d do it. But, as I’m not rich, the downside of the market remaining irrational is too big a risk. But, IMO, it’s just a matter of time.



  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlThe tragedy of the commons
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    11 days ago

    The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.

    The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.






  • Apply my rules to both cases, and the media is lying

    And so are you. Those are your rules. You chose them, and so now they apply to you.

    Apply your rules in both cases, and the media isn’t lying, and neither am I

    Apply my rules and we don’t know if the media is lying, but there’s no evidence to suggest that they knew that what they were saying is untrue, so it’s unreasonable to say they’re lying. As for you, who knows.

    Your bias is so obvious

    My bias? You’re the guy who claims the media is lying without any evidence that they knew what they were saying was wrong, and you insist that you can still call that lying. But, when that same standard is applied to you, you want to reject it. You want to have your cake and eat it too, liar.


  • You didn’t present evidence of lying, you presented evidence that what they reported ended up being untrue. That’s part of lying, and I don’t dispute that part. The key part is that they knew that what they were reporting was untrue and they reported it anyway. You’ve presented no evidence to support that.

    So, based on your rules, I can say you’re a liar, because you’ve said some things that are not true, so I’m just going to assume that you know they’re untrue and you’re lying.







  • If there’s no way to corroborate or refute what Israel said, don’t print what Israel said.

    Why? What they said is newsworthy.

    “Israel bombed this building”

    “Why?”

    “Dunno, didn’t ask.”

    Even if you don’t believe the answer, getting an answer is still newsworthy. Everyone should be aware that it’s not necessarily the truth, but it’s newsworthy as the justification they’re using. If it comes out later that the building was an orphanage, you can’t use that to challenge the government’s justification that it was a command and control center if you never got them on the record saying they bombed it because it was a command and control center.




  • I see what you’re saying here: if the media prints lies from a government it’s not the media lying, it’s the government

    If the government manages to fool the media, yeah. If the government says to the media “the truth is X, but we’re going to pretend that it’s Y, so you print Y, ok?” and then the media goes along with it, then you can blame the media. In many cases, the media isn’t able to fact check the things the government tells them. But, relaying what the government is saying is still important. Similarly, even though the media can’t independently fact check the numbers that the Gaza Health Ministry reports, it’s still valuable to have those numbers released too.

    If the media is lazy about their fact checking you can call them lazy, but you can’t call them liars, because lying requires knowing the truth and intentionally saying something untrue.

    Here’s the thing: if a government lies all the fucking time and the media keeps printing what the government claims anyway, then that makes them complicit in spreading the government’s lies.

    If the government says “the truth is X” and then the media says “X is true” then sure, you’re right. But, if the media says “the government said that the truth is X”, then it’s up to readers / viewers to understand that the media isn’t endorsing what the government said as being true, the media is simply telling you what was said.

    The media doesn’t get to wash its hands of the things it prints just because it puts “Israel says” before the headline.

    Why should it need to wash its hands? That is exactly what Israel said. Because Israel has a complete ban on reporters in Gaza, for example, there’s no way to corroborate or refute what Israel said. It’s newsworthy to repeat what Israel said, but you can’t blame the media when someone reads that and assumes that the government is telling the truth. As you said yourself, the government lies all the time, so why would you assume that “the government said X happened” means that “X happened”.


  • The media told all sorts of lies to justify the war in Iraq

    A lie is something they were aware was not true and published it anyhow. What sources do you have that the media was publishing stories it knew weren’t true about Iraq? What examples do you have?

    more recently, the New York Times published a false story about Hamas committing mass rape

    What story are you talking about, and what specific allegations do you think it got wrong?

    if you want to go further back they lied to get us into Vietnam

    You’re saying the media knowingly made up stories because they wanted to trick the US into going to war in Vietnam? What specific examples do you have of that? Again, if this is your claim, it isn’t enough to show that they got some reports wrong. It’s not even enough to show that they printed some things that in hindsight they should have known were wrong. Your bar is to prove that they knew ahead of time that they were publishing things they knew were untrue and did it for the express purpose of trying to get the US into war in Vietnam.