The gift worked, thanks for sharing

What articles or politicians?

Good journalism requires talent and time, and paying for that costs money.

Canadians have overwhelmingly chosen not to pay for journalism, so we get what we pay for: rushed articles that too often just rephrasing biased source material, or thinly disguised clickbait.

TL;DR: shorting can be an extremely dangerous proposition, tread carefully and warily.

An anecdote about shorting stocks: A close friend of mine heavily shorted RIM in early 2009 when the writing was on the wall about the success of Android and iPhone.

However the stock proceeded to double in the months following, eventually squeezing my friend substantially and generating a very significant loss.

So this person was right about the future value of RIM as a company, and was even right about the reasons — but still lost out big time.

Even in case where the stock prices don’t squeeze you out, the carrying costs can be significant and easily eat all of the profits if you get the timing wrong. Most people should never short a stock.

At the risk of seeming like a jerk, I’ll state the obvious: market prices are set by the intersection of supply and demand.

In theory the fundamental value of a share is the fractional ownership in that company. If the company is successful then shares will have value relating to dividends or if the company is sold, etc.

However in practice the supply and demand of these shares is not required to be rational. People can have irrational preferences for shares, hype men can sell wild fantasies about the future, and so forth.

Back to your your more specific question, the share prices of Tesla have been completely disconnected to the value of the company for quite some time now. This is not opinion, this is plain observation of the valuation of the company relative to its revenues or profits or growth potential.

What is opinion is why that valuation has been irrationally maintained for years. My opinion that Musk has done a successful job in cultivating a cult audience around him of financially-motivated hype men who join him in promoting the prices regardless of their actual value.

Musk and his cult manipulates the media, both mainstream and alternative, with lies and publicity stunts painting a false narrative of future potential. Self driving cars, robotaxis, AI nonsense, and much more.

The regulatory bodies who should be stopping this fraudulent behaviour have responded meekly in the past, and now in Musks home country have been largely dismantled. This further encourages the cultists to continue their cycle of hype, disconnected from reality.

In my opinion, I find it likely many investors are well aware that Tesla is a bubble valuation. However so long as the hype machine continues, Tesla share prices can be a speculative investment as long as you can sell to a “bigger fool” later. No one knows when the bubble will burst, so much like penny stocks or meme coins it can be a gamble worth taking for some.

Back to the article for a second. In no uncertain terms, pension funds or anything of the like should not be gambling their funds on this house of cards.

Th argument for notwithstanding was that it would be used in matters of extreme importance, and in a thoughtful and limited way.

Now it’s being wielded by the right to push policy that feels good to vengeful idiots with no consideration if it would lead to good outcomes. And because Notwithstanding now framed as a left/right matter it will be impossible to get rid of.

So now we’re in a situation where in each election from now until the end of time, we have to convince a clickbait-hungry media and a population distracted by slogans and shiny objects that boring nerdy shit like notwithstanding is something that they must pay attention to.

This fucking sucks.

Carney has taken questions from mainstream media, as well as from overly partisan hostile alternative media.

PP gets a friendlier media, does fewer questions, and still fails to do anything beyond tossing out well-rehearsed empty slogans and stammering out word salad.

Gay marriage may be a good example of your argument, because I’m not sure how they’d be able to accomplish repealing that in law without using section 33.

But while things like anti-terrorism or “tough on crime” were harmful, if section 33 is not employed then we still have charter rights and these things can be challenged and overturned in the court system.

Which still sucks, a lot. But having PP saying that they’d jump to using the big stick of notwithstanding to support a bullshit American policy that failed there is a significant step worse. Because now we know for certain that they will use this stick, and no courts or opposition can stop them if they get power.

This is why I get prickly at the idea of people saying this is no big deal, they always do this. Which is what I inferred from your original comment, apparently falsely. Because this is big and new and will enable much more harm in a way that will be unstoppable.

So we must act with urgency to stop them before it can start. It was already important but now its a crisis — and yet our newsmedia focuses on inane stuff because talking about policies only policy nerds care about doesn’t get clicks and views.

Can you elaborate? I’ll admit I was living abroad during the Harper years, and I’m unfamiliar with any pledges to override our charter rights before. My understanding is that this type of open commitment to take away our rights is entirely new behaviour at the federal level.

The difference between “I don’t like their policy” and “these people will use section 33 to negate our fundamental rights” is a significant difference to me.

That’s fair. I inferred a smug tone from it but text is a hard medium to convey or receive tone.

What I thought I recognized in your comment was an attitude I’ve participated in for at least a decade. Oh, I’m so smart, I’ll make some quip here to show that I’m way ahead of the curve here and you lot are just catching up. Look at me here on the sidelines, I’m so cool unlike you naive suckers trying to make a difference.

But I don’t know that was your attitude. If it helps, consider that I was speaking to my past self and not you.

Well said. With people like you out there helping to stop it, we will dump him and his maga ideology in the trash where it belongs

I believe this is the first instance where PP been open about using his weapon against our fundamental rights.

I mean yes we’ve long suspected it would be this way, and he’s hinted at it before.

But this is no time to be smug. Our rights are under attack, and most Canadians don’t even understand it’s happening. So I challenge you to change the attitude, and try to reach out to people who don’t understand section 33 and explain to them what’s at stake and why they must vote to stop this.

Canadian media is busy telling you the most important issue in politics this week is two low-level LPC staffers making a mistake.

But meanwhile, our fundamental rights are under attack. Ostensibly to enact some American-made crime policy that caused widespread harm there and is broadly understood to be a failure.

This is important, and it affects each and every one of you reading this. Your rights are at stake.

Get out there and vote. If you can’t stomach strategic voting to cross party lines, or even if you dislike the choices available at the local or leadership level — go and vote regardless. When Canadians reject this evil and send PP and his MAGA goons to the dumpster, know that you were an active participant in the rejection.

I disagree, I believe that both have well-intentioned people both amongst supporters and candidates. Many of these feel disenfranchised by the CPC and LPC, and have opposing interests and preferences which would otherwise go unheard.

But FPTP frames the voting process as a zero-sum game. In the current system they are incentivized to either abandon hope in an alternative to these or split the vote. They didn’t create the system to be how it is, and they both would very much prefer the system to be different.

So I reject the casual and dismissive nature of your reply here. May is using a cynical political calculus here to get what she wants — and it feels wrong to blame her for this in isolation when you can find the same types of behaviour from other leaders. Hell, even how Carney removed a carbon pricing policy that he assuredly still knew was the best policy — something I just endorsed in the parent comment — is the same sort of political calculus.

Do I wish that May wouldn’t be disengenous here for short-term political gains? Yes. Do I wish that Singh wouldn’t regurgitate CPC talking points he knows to be false? Again, yes. I hate that they are doing this, but it’s not because they are part of some conspiracy it’s because that’s what I assume they feel is the necessary evil to advance the causes they believe in.

TLDR can we just fucking kill FPTP please for just about anything else?

This feels like an overly simplistic analysis.

The conservatives successfully poisoned public perception of carbon pricing via willful lies, framing the (real) inflationary pressures felt around the world as being a locally Canadian issue and specially blamed on “the carbon tax”. This was aided by Trudeau’s lack of focus and his failing to ensure that the policy was a success, but PP and his legion of brain rotted influencers are the primary culprits.

Without ending the “carbon tax”, it was almost certainly inevitable that the CPC would win this election. It sucks, but it’s extremely difficult to paint a picture otherwise.

Carbon pricing is good policy. More than that, it’s the best “neoliberal” approach to controlling carbon emissions. Carney knows this as well as do, he argues for it quite persuasively in his book.

But it had to go, because letting PP win and sell the county to foreign oil extractors would be multiple orders of magnitude worse. And we will still get good carbon policy implemented by focusing on the industrial polluters with the stick and end consumers with the carrot. This doesn’t have the same market efficiency as carbon pricing, but it can be effective and will hopefully be more resilient against the attacks by the brain-rot peddlers.

I get it. May wants to pile on Carney because he’s winning and because there are scarce few voters who would be swayed from CPC to Green. But it sucks if these misleading messaging efforts take root — if they do, we all lose big.

The strategy of divide and conquer has unfortunately been quite successful throughout history.

Vulnerable groups find comfort in not being the group currently being targeted, and irrationally think their support will prevent them from being targeted in the future.

The burden is on us to keep underlining the point again and again, for all time, to all vulnerable groups: they will turn on you next.

For sure! We all live in these same bubbles to various extents.

I believe that the 51st state threats were a wake up call to many Canadians to the reality of what’s going on. That we couldn’t just coast in our bubbles and hope everything would be okay.

This is what happens when people live in bubbles.

The maple maga don’t interact with any Liberals because their toxicity has pushed them away. They don’t get news or media from any sources that don’t tell them what they want to hear.

In the bubble they have created, they don’t hear many voices opposing their worldview and the few that do get through are shut down cold.

Time will tell if PP will stoke those flames after the election like his American president and hero did.

There is sufficient evidence to decisively conclude that no, it won’t work. It will result it severe crowding of jails based on inconsequential crimes. Period.

We need a story to handle repeat offenders. They aren’t wrong to say that the current approach isn’t working great. But they are massively wrong about the solution, and are again showing the dangers of having an incompetent populist run a major party.

This is bad policy.

There was a nascent calexit movement when I lived there but it had the stink of a Russian psyops campaign. This stifled a lot of interest in the issue of any existed in the first place.

I agree with your analysis 100%