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    SmokeyTheBear
    Didn't see this posted yet
    Today's shooting resides here in Texas
    https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/us/bryan-texas-shooting/index.html
    Police in Bryan, Texas, are searching for a suspect after six people were injured during a shooting at an industrial park on Thursday afternoon, according to Lt. Jason James of the Bryan Police Department.
     
    The victims were taken to a local hospital, but James could not speak to the extent of their injuries in a brief interview with CNN Thursday afternoon. He could not say whether all the victims had suffered gunshot wounds.
     
    RayDog
    After 32 months of research and writing I finished my new book Goodbye Quarks: The Onium Theory. In the onium theory I extend the relativistic positronium solution of Feynman and Sternglass to all particles and resonances such that all of them can be shown to be made of only electrons, protons, and their antiparticles. This theory accounts for the decay products, unlike the quark model. And it explains the masses, above and beyond the masses of the component electrons, protons, and neutrons as relativistic mass.
    I also use basic quantum field theory to examine the structure and properties of electrons and protons to show that they have the same basic structure and should be thought of as two different charge-matter variations of the same basic type of particle. So my claim is that there is only one particle.
    I started this as a test to see if such a model could be done and the results were even better than I imagined. The precise match of most of the masses makes me confident that the basic theory is correct even though it still needs work in some areas. The Bohr-Sommerfeld solutions on which it is based are acknowledged to be overly simplified, while still frequently within 0.5% of the correct mass.
    For example rho and omega mesons are made of 4 pion group resonances which is why their masses are approximately equal to the combined masses of two pions and a kaon. Compare that to the irrational formulas used by the quark model for the neutral rho and omega.
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0897JYYLG/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ray+fleming+goodbye+quarks&qid=1590625411&sr=8-1
     
    Pancho
    I got pulled over by a narcotics officer in Lafayette, LA last night as I was driving back to Houston from reffing a basketball game.  The officer (insert bro name here) said I drove on the middle lane lines at least 3ft on both my left and right and that's why he pulled me over.  Now, I can legit believe this because I was definitely on my phone trying to pull up at podcast at that point and was halfway paying attention. 
    He asked to see my license, and of course I already have it on the visor to just easily pull out and make it not look like I'm reaching for something.  He goes back to his car for a good 5 minutes then comes back to ask me to step out of the vehicle.  He starts asking me where I was going and where was I coming from--the usual.  Then he immediately asks do I have any drugs or narcotics in the car.  
    Me: "No sir."
    Narcotics Bro: "You sure?"
    Me: "Yes, I'm sure sir."
    He does the above but asks me about any potential guns in the car or any large sums of cash. 
    Me: "No sir."
    Narcotics Bro: "You sure about that?"
    Me: "Yes sir, no guns, knives, or any weapons. I don't carry cash--cards only."
    At this point, I could tell Narcotics Bro was getting a little edgy because he just knew he caught me in something.  He goes back to his car to do something with my license again (I presume) and this takes a while.  He then comes back to me, and I could tell he thought I was a dumbass. He asks about suitcases in the car (how many), if anyone other than myself packed my bags, or if I had traveled with anyone else on my trip at any point.  The answer was clearly no to all of those questions.
    Narcotics Bro: "Yeah, so your story doesn't quite add up, so I'm going to need to search your vehicle.  Do you mind if I do that?"
    Me: "I don't consent to that, so no you can't search my car."
    Narcotics Bro:  "Is there a reason why you don't want me to search your car?"
    Me: "No, no reason but you don't have a warrant to do that, so no.  And actually I'm getting a little scared here."
    Narcotics Bro: "Why, because you know you have some weed or pills in there?"
    Me: "Nah, I'm scared because I'm Black and you're a White officer and we both know how these situations typically end up."
    Narcotics Bro:  "Dude, I understand.  My body cam is right here, and I have a Black Wife!"
    Me: 
    He goes back to his car again for forever while I'm counting semis going by, and he comes back to tell me since I don't agree to a search then the K9 unit will have to be called.  I say gleefully "okay" because I know I don't have jack shit in my car.  I'm in a rental (shoutout Avis) with Georgia plates so I think this didn't help.  He asks to see the agreement and I give it to him.  He looks it over for a few minutes then says "hey, how much did you pay for this rental" and I'm thinking bro, you have the agreement in your fucking hand.  But nonetheless, I blurt out the exact amount.  He looks on the agreement, sees I'm right, and I can see he's getting frustrated.  He later asks why I don't take my own car, which I can assume is just because he's trying to catch me in something to which I response "because it's brand new and I don't want to put the miles on it."
    K9 Asian bro comes, and Cujo is barking like crazy.  He talks with Narcotics Bro for a bit then the search begins.  I see K9 bros face and it looks like "you called me out here for this waste of time shit" type faces.  I'm smiling like a mofo because Narcotics is about to look like a fool.  While Cujo is circling the car, I start to make small talk about the weather, Lafayette eateries, the traffic, and just other bullshit because I know he now knows he's just wasted both of ours time.  3 circles for Cujo, no dice, and back to the unit he goes.  Asian K9 officer with the look of "waste of time" on his face walking back.
    He then says he's just gonna let me go with a warning and that it sounds like I was just tired, something I told him when he first stopped me.  He's had my license the entire time but before he gives it back, he holds it up one last time, shines his flashlight on it and just twists the license in his hand--this goes on for 30 seconds.  I'm sitting here thinking that if my license was fake, you would have seen that 25 minutes ago when you did the exact same thing. He hands it back then suggests I go to the Exxon on the next exit and get a red bull or some bangs (wtf???) to drink so I can wake up a little. 
    Long story short--I'm definitely not traumatized by this situation, but I'm still a little irked that my complete, 100% honest story to him gets a response of basically "I think you're lying so I need to search your car."  I'm damn near 40--I ain't got time to be hauling shitty ass weed across state lines. 
     
    Just wanted to get this off my chest.  It still feels like I dreamt this as I can't believe it happened.  Not sure what to think really. 
    immamac
    I got this question in another community I'm part of and think I wrote a pretty decent answer I wanted to share here:
    It's a great question to start asking within your organization and it begins with "why would I containerize anything?" - docker has become synonymous (for better or worse) with Containerization. Databases in containers have their advantages and disadvantages, one of the best things about databases in containers is that you stop thinking about the database as the application itself and start thinking of it more as an appliance. Failure recovery, portability, ease of configuration, all of the value that you receive from a container are applicable to a database, but the important wrinkle to consider boils down to - Databases care a lot more about their running state (in memory workload, their persisted data, and their awareness of other members in the database cluster or deployment.
    When you mix the 2 it starts to really feel a lot like oil and water, and that's where something like an orchestration platform comes in. How can we unlock what the database is really good at, and what the containers are really good at and make them work together harmoniously? 
    If you haven't answered this question, then containers are likely "too early" for your database deployment. If you have answered this question then you will likely start down the path of cloud native and mass containerization and portability.
    That's a long winded answer to say, databases in containers are not an unlocker of performance, an unlocker of portability or an unlocker of convenience, but when leveraged together you can begin doing things that are not possible in VM or bare metal deployments.this is a great Panel discussion that we had at Percona Live Online earlier in the year where some of the biggest names in the business give their opinion on this exact topic! 
     
    52-80
    Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the road to degeneracy.  Without having to reinvent the wheel, and then writing a book about reinventing the wheel, i'll just sprinkle some starter yeast and, like a beautiful acid trip, we'll see where it  takes us....
    Why options trading
    Leverage.  You can control a lot more stock for $. Flexibility.  You can play any sentiment - bullish, bearish, neutral - and you can pick and choose the risk-reward!  Instead of just choosing a safe vs risky stock, for any given stock, you can choose how much you want to lever its movement. Engagement.  Options have an element of time expiration in their construction, which obliges you to stay in (somewhat) active and engaged in the market. What are options
    These are contracts that grants the contract holder the right (but not the obligation) to buy or sell 100 units of stock at an agreed price, before a certain date. It has these elements: Strike price, Expiration date Call option - contract holder can buy ABC stock from contract seller.  option buyer "calls" the shares away from sellers' account Put option - contract holder can sell ABC stock to contract seller.  option buyer "puts" the shares in sellers' account. Options are tradeable instruments like units of stocks.  For our practical purposes, we don't really worry about the above (yet).  We buy when cheap and sell when high.  Or sell when high and buy when cheap. How do you price options?  (i.e. what is cheap?)
    If you're a nerd, you'd invoke the Black-Scholes equation.  If, like me, you failed 9th grade trig, you can think of it in more simple abstract terms: options premium = Intrinsic Value + Extrinsic Value = (Strike$-Stock$)+(Volatility*Time) Take Apple, which is 135$ right now.  How much would you pay to have the right to purchase shares of Apple for $130/share at anytime....
    before the end of the week? At least $5/share, because this agreement already has $5 of intrinsic value (135-130), and youre paying for the chance Apple might run up higher.  This contract is at 5.25 right now before the end of the month? More than the above, because there is more time value (the extrinsic) in the contract.  This contract is at 7.45 right now. How do I profit from this information?
    The cro-magnum approach is if you think AAPL goes up, you buy the call options for leverage, and if it does go up, you can sell it for higher profit % than trading the shares, using same cash.  (sometimes).  It requires the right conditions to be profitable.  I trade this way this sometimes. The real approach is to exploit changes in extrinsic value, buying when low, and selling when high.  This is based on the fact that expected future volatility is almost always higher than actual realized volatility, meaning options often cost more than they're mathematically worth.  So I sell an option, then later buy it back when it becomes cheaper or worthless.  I trade this way all of the time.  Think of it as selling overpriced insurance. As stated above there is a million ways to trade options, which is the beauty of it, but overwhelmingly i sell overpriced options, and sometimes pounce on buying underpriced options. Where do I trade options?
    Basically any broker will allow it.  But you first have to request permission to trade options.  They're typically bracketed into different levels of approvals which grants you more exotic strategies and ways to bankrupt yourself.  All it takes  is a quick questionnaire where you lie and tell them you have an undergrad from Booth and an MBA from Wharton.
    For my money Tastyworks is a very clean options-centric platform for active trading, but all the other guys should be good as well.
    Eastwood
    I'm not a financial advisor. This is not financial advise. I don't work in finance. I do not have a degree in finance. Actually, I have a BA and I'm bad at math past Cal I. I won't apologize for the length because this post is me spiking the football and other than banter about the moves GME makes in the future, this is the last time I ever dig into the fundamentals of the GME trade.
    What we saw today was covering either due to what is called a gamma squeeze or a short squeeze. Maybe a mix of both. We won't really know until later, possibly at the end of close Wednesday when brokerages like TD update their short interest. A gamma squeeze occurs as the price moves up, crossing the thresholds of strike prices of calls that will soon be expiring. Market Makers use the Delta of an option to determine how many shares of a stock they should purchase in preparation of possibly covering the calls when they are exercised, either by the buyer of the call or upon expiring in the money. As the share price goes up, combined with the days getting closer to expiry, up goes the Delta, up goes the amount of shares the MMs buy. Last Friday, every call on the board for GME was in the money at expiry. I'll repeat: EVERY CALL ON THE BOARD WAS ITM AT EXPIRY. I don't know if that's ever happened in the history of the market. That means that if every call was exercised, 11.7 million shares would need to be transferred over to the new owners today and tomorrow. Now, as the Delta on a lot of the lower strikes were already at 1 and the shares already (hopefully for the call seller) purchased, it shouldn't be a big deal. However, the big pop happened ON Friday, not before. That caused a mad scramble in the after hours Friday, today, and possibly tomorrow for those who are gambling on the price decreasing further before they fill those calls. So, that's a gamma squeeze. Price creeps up, MMs who sell calls end up buying shares to cover, causing the price to climb higher, and then creating essentially a feedback loop spiking the price when combined with buying from retail or pops on positive news.
    What is happening, and may continue to happen, is the result of hedge funds and possibly Bank of America rampantly shorting GME over the course of a year hoping that it goes zero and they then get to pocket everything and give nothing back. The short float on December 31st was 140% and the institutional ownership was 117%. But how is such a thing possible? They borrowed shares to either 1.) sell, never intending to buy them back and return them because they were hell bent on bankrupting GME, or 2.) lent out those already borrowed shares that they never intended to give back anyway to collect the premium, creating a borrowed share of a borrowed share. They would also buy dips incrementally, amassing large positions, sell calls and buy puts with a quick expiry, then dump all of the shares they accumulated at once while simultaneously shorting to tank the price and pocket the premiums on the options they bought and sold. Then, when that wasn't enough, they sold naked shorts. They sold shares they didn't even have or even exist. They injected "synthetic shares" into the market. Synthetic, fugazi, fogazi. It's a wazi, it's a woozi. They're fairy dust. They don't exist. They're not fucking real.

    But the people and institutional investors they sold them to bought the right to own the shares. And those banks and hedge funds are obligated to deliver them. But now there aren't enough shares to go around. There's an infinite demand for shares, but a finite supply. In a total share recall event, the lenders of the shorted shares could recall every share on borrow and still be 21 MILLION shares short of demand. The banks and hedge funds that created that SHOULD be on the hook. It SHOULD be illegal. Think of how depressed the price was because of it. Think of the loss of market cap, which led to lowered credit ratings, which led to higher interest rates and less borrowing power, and the layoffs and store closures that followed. Awful. The price should go to infinity because the demand the banks and hedge funds created will become infinity.
    Boomers can bitch and moan about RH and college kids dumping their stimmy into GME all they want, but the reality is that a bunch of boomer bankers and hedge funds created a situation that should be legally, economically, and financially impossible. Boomers want to call what retail investors are doing "market manipulation." However, anyone who dug into the situation enough saw the writing on the wall. Honest to goodness due diligence combined with simple supply/demand economics combined with paying attention to the new market trend of retail investors told anyone interested all they needed to know.
    This was me back in September:
    The price hadn't even hit $10, yet, when I said that. The house of cards had already been built. A fan had been placed in front of it. And everyone told me that I was crazy for thinking the house of cards would fall over. It wasn't a secret. It was in plain fucking sight. And we are finding out it is everywhere. Wall Street and old guys in banking and finance can harumph all they want about how a bunch of dumb wage earners are gaming their system to make a buck, but I think the reality is that the curtain has started getting pulled back on Old Man Oz. Take me, for example. I've given a detailed breakdown and have proof in this very thread that I had produced this investment thesis MONTHS before it was mainstream and materialized. I gave my credentials above. Want to know how long I've been actively investing? Since March. Same as all the Robinhood punks. All it takes for a large chunk of the population to be competent in anything is 1. Time 2. Education/training, and 3. Financial resources. In March, there was the perfect storm of 1. COVID lockdowns, 2. The internet and educational resources on the various trading platforms, and 3. Stimulus - The ultimate Other People's Money. Millions of $3k hedge funds popped up all over the nation and had the time, education, and money to be just dangerous enough. I traded in a paper account on Think Or Swim for 30 days and was then off to the races. I developed a momentum trading strategy where I combined candlestick patterns, moving average patterns, the RSI, and the Elliot Wave. Not only that, I also voraciously consumed anything I could get my hands on about market history, valuations, and trends. I bought and sold stocks, bought options, and sold covered calls and generated a 10% return over the course of about a month. Then I stumbled on GME, halted all active trading, liquidated any outstanding options, sat on my KO, XOM, and PFE (which was my worst trade) shares and positioned myself into GME. My return is now over 1000%. Either I'm some kind of wonder boy who picked all this up quickly because I'm a high functioning autistic person...

    Or maybe this shit just ain't as hard as Wall Street wants us to think it is. And maybe Wall Street was so habitually comfortable with how little people knew about their industry in the past that they didn't even bother concealing their moves because they didn't think retail investors would know how to play the other side. Well, the secret's out. This new batch of retail investors spent the last decade learning how to min/max various economic systems in video games. They are accustomed to dumping hours of time learning how to maximize returns on digital assets. They went from watching hours of YouTube videos on how to mine diamonds and make a Fortune 3 pick axe in Minecraft to watching hours of how to turn a couple grand into 5 figures. In some cases, 6 or 7 figures.
    As I stated earlier, I sold half of my position in GME today, but I still firmly believe in the trade I executed. I am now concerned about two things, one being specific to GME. I think the invisible hand of the free market is about to get absolutely doomfisted by either the government or big banks. I think a lot of institutions out there are shook. When GME hit $150 and other short squeezes were popping, a huge market sell-off occurred. I think funds were liquidating to cover their losses because margin calls were going out. In GME alone today, short sellers lost $1.6 billion according to Business Insider. Melvin Capital, supposedly the biggest short seller of GME out there, is down a whopping 30% for 2021, so far. They manage billions. We learned in 2008 that these banks and funds actually interweave into a structural support for the entire financial system. If a multi-billion dollar part of that support structure fails, it increases the strain on the others, and then another fails, and then we have a cascade failure. I think GME and the big shorts come together and negotiate a share purchase of newly issued shares under the condition that they are immediately transferred to the rightful owners to get the short float below 100%. This is actually extremely bullish for GME. They erase their remaining debt, buy out of all of their bad leases, and increase their cash long enough for the turn around. That's why I only sold half of my position. I'm long GME. In Ryan Cohen I trust. But I also think the government steps in and does something to try to fix the rest of the market. As history has shown us, this doesn't mean punishing the banks who created the situation in the first place. No, they're going to increase the regulations on the retail investors. That could also have grave, unintended consequences when retail cashes out all at once.
    So, I feel really good about today, but there may be grave consequences in future. I'll end with the cringiest thing possible: be a retail trader who uses a scene from The Big Short in one of his posts.
     
    immamac
    According to VMWare's official press release found here:
    https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/2020/vmware-statement-litigation-rajiv-ramaswami.html
    Seems like he was a naughty boy and was talking to Nutanix without the blessing of the VMWare team. Looks like this is the nuclear option if we are to believe what VMWare has said publicly about reaching out to both Nutanix and Ramaswami directly.
    What do you think about this? Is this another way to kill competitive practices by the big brother? Is this something that is shady? 
    I'm not even sure what the punitive measures would be in the favor of VMWare, there is no way that Nutanix is going to fire him, so maybe a fine? Maybe forced information sharing during those 2 months?
    All I've got to say is WOW
    Texas Jeff
    I thought it might be helpful to have a separate topic related to the vaccine.  If this is too much duplication, mods please delete this thread.  I thought it would be good to talk about who can get the vaccine, where they can get it, what side effects people are seeing, and in general what is going on with distribution.
    The CDC has published vaccine distribution guidelines, and if you care, they are worth reading.  They are dividing the timeline into:
    Phase 1 - Potentially limited supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses available Phase 2 - Large number of vaccine doses available Phase 3 - Sufficient supply of vaccine doses for entire population Who you are will determine if you are eligible for a vaccine in the various phases.
    Phase 1 is divided into a Phase 1a and a Phase 1b:
    Phase 1a - Mostly healthcare workers Phase 1b - Other essential workers, people with higher risks, people over 65 If you are eligible to get the vaccine and they have in in stock and you want to get it, it is important to go get it.  Both of the first two vaccines can spoil, so if a dose is sitting there and you aren't there to get it, they might have to throw it away.
    Both vaccines require two shots.  It is important to go get that second shot.
    Who fits in phase 1b and who has to wait until phase 2 might be a sticking point.  The "people in higher risks" category includes a lot of folks, maybe more than you would think might be in that category.  Hopefully we can quickly get to phase 2 so that we don't spend too long arguing about who is or is not in Phase 1b.
    Anyway, I'm interested in everyone's experience with the vaccine and especially getting the word out for those that can go get it, so that every dose ends up in an arm rather than in the trash.
     
     


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