Gun Free Zone

The Media campaign for LESS vaccinations locations in Florida continues.

The Soft racism of Low Expectations strikes again. Black people cannot obtain a driver’s license to vote and they are apparently tethered to 100 yards from their residences.

I had to return a power washer I rented from my local Publix (Rug Doctor! Did you know they had them?) And I truly never paid attention to the color of who goes there to shop so I decided to see if only Latinos and Whites shopped here and maybe even take a picture if a rare black person was to be found.

According to Miami Dade Elections, 20% of my neighborhood is White, 5% is Other and the rest almost evenly split between Blacks and Latinos with the Cubans holding a lead. So no, the people pictured above are not just visitors happening by but neighbors.

Maybe the problem is not Publix. maybe the problem is decades of bad policies in Democrat-dominated Broward county that has made Black neighborhoods unattractive to investment. Publix is not legally obligated into opening a store where it will generate nothing but loses. Maybe the Democrats will love to pass legislation to force companies to open locales at a loss, but they have not installed Socialism 100% and going by past precedents in other countries, the ultimate result will be all stores shutting down.

Then everybody will have equal access to Publix.

Gun people often bring up New York’s estimated 5% max of compliance with the NYSAFE Act.

The point is this.

They know they will not get 100% compliance.

Remember your Ayn Rand: “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.”

The point is this:

You are your enemy.  They know that even if you try and comply, the rules are so onerous that you probably can’t fully comply.  Did you mail in your $800 insurance check a week late?  Your licence is expired and you are a felon now.

The point is that this is something they can use to hammer any gun owner at any time.

Get on their radar for some reason and they will investigate you and this gives them the ability to stack felonies on you like rocks on Giles Corey, to crush you.

A man in Florida is under investigation for suppressing the civil rights of voters for spreading memes (this will be another post later on).

Now imagine if, on top of that bullshit charge, they have two dozen gun felonies to stack on top of you?

That’s the point, to make each and every one of us will be a felon walking, keeping our heads low not going anything that might attract their attention.

Marvel in the glory of its wisdom.

The best part of the whole Reddit/GameStop kerfuffle has been the memes and internet comments.  This is a collection of my favorite ones.

I have been watching the Reddit/GameStop thing unfold and the way it’s been covered by various media sources, including Conservative pod-casts and talk radio.

The camps have split into:

“Redditors are financial terrorists who are going to destroy the stock market and economy.”

And

“Hedge funds deserve this and more because they are a bunch of fuckers who use the market like a casino and it’s only a problem when a bunch of internet randos beat them at their own game.”

I think the person who annoyed me the most on this was Ben Shapiro, who said (paraphrasing) “if you believe in the need for a stock market, you have to condemn what these Redditors are doing.”

I know what I want to happen here won’t happen, but I can believe that both sides are right and both sides are wrong because both sides are complaining about something that is orthogonal to the real problem.

The absolute, number one, real problem with the stock market is that we have a system in which the value of a stock is mostly if not totally divorced from every other metric of a company’s success.

Tesla was valued more than Ford, even though Tesla only sells 500,000 cars in a year and Ford sells about 6 million.  Tesla wasn’t going to outsell or out-earn Ford.  But because of the way investing works, Tesla’s valuation could be worth far more than everything about the company is actually worth.

This sort of fuckery can lead to problems like Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, who through the culture of venture capitalism, silicon valley, and the cult of the tech CEO, used fraud to pump the sock value of her company to be worth billions while never producing a single viable product.

Then there is the attitude that a company’s main responsibility is to its shareholders.  That leads to fuckery like what Boeing has done (well documented on this blog) which was great for people with Boeing stock in the short term, but literally killed people as cost-cutting in testing caused planes to fly themselves into the ground and spacecraft to fail to reach orbit.

In theory, I could start a local bakery with one storefront, take it public, and if I worked the market right, could make it worth billions in valuation from trading even though all I do is sell cupcakes one at a time to housewives.

What we need to do is regulate the stock market.

Short selling should be banned, it provides no overall economic good.  It allows some people to get rich by hurting companies.  Like betting that an old man with a cane will fall and break a hip.  Short-sellers make money off the suffering of others.

Second, we need to figure out how to more firmly tie a stock’s value to the value of the company.  You can’t have wide dispersions in value.

If the idea is that buying stock is investing in a company, betting that the company will do well, you need that company to actually do well, not just have the value of the shares do well regardless of the company’s performance, or vice versa.

The stock market cannot be a casino.  Redditors proved how much of a broken system it is.  Rather than attack them as financial terrorists, we need to regulate the market.