I recently learned that buybacks and short selling historically have not been legal, its only in recent history that they've been standard practice en large (1982 is when buybacks were legalized, I think)
It’s part of Reaganomics. Buybacks weren’t explicitly illegal beforehand though, it just wasn’t clear when they would count as stock price manipulation.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.
If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
At the same time, does your local community center want the unfiltered public to have input to their conversations? Or are they only interested in spreading it to friends/neighbors of people already at the center?
This also reminds me of the Radio Lab episode that tracks bird migration, including one bird (that they were actively tracking) that simply peeled off the group and settled down somewhere else that wasn't part of the historic migration path. Feels like the same idea.
In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.
Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.
In the ‘mote in god’s eye’, the crazy Eddie’s were a bad thing because they inevitably destabilized the system (or were symptoms of the system destabilizing), and inevitably resulted in apocalyptic consequences if they found something of note (and had dozens of times or something). Which I believe was also what ended up happening in the book, wasn’t it?
I also learned about Permutation City from an HN thread years ago. It's my favorite book now, and I immediately ctrl+F'd this list for Permutation City because everyone else on HN should know it exists.
> At the dawn of August 7, we saw large black spheres coming and going with great speed and precipitation before the sun and chattered as if they led a fight. Many of them were fiery red and, soon crumbled and then extinguished.
I have also experienced a strange Aurora phenomenon. My first year living up north I was lucky enough to catch the northern lights. They were gray (not green) but really fun. A kind of camo-patterened pulsing, flickering in and out, with ripples that would move through it.
Eventually they moved from the northern horizon to entirely overhead, and even into the southern horizon. The overall pattern continued: pulses of circles fading in and out like blinking neon light, with waves crashing through and across the entire thing, slowly. Still gray, never green.
Then I noticed that the waves would all "sink" into a single spot in the sky. Directly overhead was a "dark spot" in the borealis, and it moved around slightly and had this wicked looking "interference" pattern around it, like what you'd expect to see with two magnets interfering.
Over and over the waves would ripple from the north and "sink" into this dark spot. The hole itself seemed to pulse as the waves moved around and ultimately into it. Kind of felt like it was a kind of magnetic pole. Not sure. The aurora itself (patterns of blinking, pulsing, shimmering) continued into the southern sky, but the dark hole was right overhead.
I haven't been able to really find anyone else who has experienced this. Just wanted to share.
I have seen something similar. A spectacular display in the mid-90's in February at Big Trout Lake Ontario; I watched it from the lake on the winter road. The entire sky would react to waves of energy, and there was a dark hole - as you described - in the middle of the sky. I have never seen such a dramatic display of aurora, with such strange patterns (vs the typical whisps of light) before or after.
Edit to add that the aurora happens in the upper atmosphere, so its interaction with the magnetic pole would be visible over long distances of the Earth's surface.
You know, I've found Frank Zappa's music to have a very similar property. Namely that there's a deep creative structure that winds through Zappa's music, especially across entire his longer compositions. For example, in "Willie The Pimp", there's a massive guitar solo towards last half of the song, that gets continually teased and played with earlier in the track. There have been other examples where I've caught "teases" to guitar solos on a track early in an album, that doesn't actually show up in full maturity until later inthe album.
I can only imagine that what I recognize as a singular theme is in reality much more broad (in so much as we can even define it), given Zappa's composition ability and musical prowess. There's so much to discover that lies under the surface of result of his creative process. I think Zappa gets a lot of credit because in general his music is more approachable (but still has plenty of weirdness across his almost 100 album discography).
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that Zappa and Captain Beefheart went in together on Zappa's "Willie the Pimp", on the "Hot Rats" album which is one of my favorite albums of all time. Interestingly enough it's the only song on the entire album that features vocals, which is noteworthy on its own. The vocals are provided by none other than Captain Beefheart himself. The vocals are kind of strange and certainly provide a unique component to the track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr256gta2Qw (Willie The Pimp) -- if you listen to that guitar work, there's so much to unpack just in that one track. It's self referential on many levels, and I'm sure I'm missing most of it.
Well, it's fun to notice and appreciate those kinds of things, and to the analytical mind of a rational optimist, that wants to believe everything as carefully planned and premeditated, and released as profound craftsmanship and perfected design, to uncover something like that is probably profoundly enthralling.
There's an alternative reality, known to anyone who has made art for art's sake though, and especially if you've spent years making purposeless art with no consequence in the outcome of whether a work declared as "finished" actually needs to be "good."
When you sit around all day, pouring and extruding your unfiltered stream of consciousness into realized tangible forms that you can pick up and hold, or record and play back, you're left with this huge backlog of scrap left on the cutting room floor. Taken out of context, some of it is artful, and "good enough" to stand on it's own, but doesn't belong in the "finished" piece.
But when you find a couple of rhyming chunks, you can take that leftover flotsam and fold it into a subsequent piece, recycling throwaway outtakes as part of some other whole, to enrich it.
In that sense, those kinds of matching details aren't actually planned. It's just opportunistic reuse of leftovers to enrich and go along with something that was planned.
Example: sometimes you're forced to produce "things," and so due to external expectations you make a bunch of "stuff" but because you weren't motivated, 90% of it is trash. But you don't throw it away, because it still possesses recognizable style. So you throw it in a box and let it collect dust. Then weeks or months or years later, when you need filler, you dig some matching trash out of the dustbin, and cobble together some cruft to patch some holes and gaps, where the daylight is peaking through on your finished piece. Now, that illusory facade enriches your intended work all the more.
This is a technique common in "art" that impresses people who've never had a chance to make a thing for it's own sake, without said thing having to require practical utility or actually "work" in any appreciable way.
It's the art student's corollary to the academic version having to write 1000 words for a grade, and 900 of those words are rambling drivel, or having to publish N research papers a year, so you throw together a backlog of p-value hacks that seem interesting but prove nothing and indulge in pointless, speculative editorialization as science.
At the core of all the work, you either like the sum total of everything, or you don't, and in general, you're picking up what that guy is putting down overall.
But as with all disciplines, in every field, people have to make frankenstein monsters out of filler bunny all the time. Any artist worth their salt is always trying to operate from the space where they can unspool as much of their style as possible, with total freedom and unlimited resources, because they know that even on the days when they aren't hot, some of the junk they make, can still serve as decorative paper mache fodder.
I just signed up. Thank you. I don't even care if it works. I get up to 6/day, and if I can turn even just one of those into a bit of fun, it'll all be worth it.
I've become irrationally irritable because of these calls. I have started subconsciously turning off my ringer, causing me to miss actual important calls. Jolly Roger may be my saving grace.
I have varying degrees of success with it. I do have a few recordings of calls (JR will email you an audio recording of the call after you hang up) that are quite hilarious.
