Hasnain says:

Answering my own question from earlier, of course there’s now a Matt Levine article on it and now I understand this well along with a lot more stuff.

“Here is a YOLO story, a story of utter nihilism. You know this story. This story is perhaps best told with a series of rocket emojis, but let’s try words instead. The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don’t know, they’re gamers, or because it’s a little comical to pump the stock of a chain of mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because a lot of professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it’d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying GameStop and they figured they’d join in the fun. Or all of those things in different combinations. Take one person who’s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like “lol gaming” or “let’s mess with the shorts,” and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves”

Hasnain says:

Pretty important reminder.

“We hope this post will remind those in the security research community that they are targets to government-backed attackers and should remain vigilant when engaging with individuals they have not previously interacted with.”

Hasnain says:

“If you’re struggling right now to get a vaccine appointment for yourself or your parents, the frustration and unfairness you’re feeling, that’s what millions of Americans experience everyday — and have been experiencing for years — when it comes to navigating our healthcare system. You might have felt it yourself, or felt some corner of it. Regardless: remember this feeling of helplessness. Keep it close. Know that no matter how much tinkering and funding the Biden administration directs into the system won’t actually address the root of the problem. If you hate this, if you’ve hated all of this, if you authentically never want anything like this past year to happen again, start thinking now about the systems and beliefs that allowed it to get this bad in the first place. Right now, we need fixes. But for our future, we need foundational change.”

Hasnain says:

““When the situation does change—and especially if the change is anomalous, high-impact, and rapid, allowing little time for adaptation—such a system will be very fragile, since the conditions to which it has been adapted no longer prevail," the authors wrote.”

Hasnain says:

“A vision of the future, perhaps, in a post-peak world: smaller populations crowding ever more tightly into urban centres. And outside, beyond the city limits, the wild animals prowling.”

Hasnain says:

“The post-Brexit world is so tough for many that the government’s own trade specialists are advising afflicted British entrepreneurs to relocate some of their operations out of the UK and to the EU. This has to be one of the greater absurdities of Brexit. British companies are being told by the British government that the way to survive is to lay off British workers and transfer their jobs to folk across the Channel.”

Hasnain says:

This was such an entertaining read, so well written.

Also people please make your Venmo transactions private.

“My Venmo membership is one of the most conveniently creepy aspects of my digital life. My profile is set to private, but to my absolute delight, most of you have a public Venmo profile. And I love watching what you do there.”

Hasnain says:

This just gets more and more infuriating the longer you go on reading.

Just continues to document the insane amount of racism that still exists in 2021.

“As the fight intensified, Cornish, whose youngest child graduated in 2018, began to think differently about Carroll’s official motto, stamped on T-shirts and yard signs across Southlake.

“Protect the Tradition.”

She started to wonder: What was the tradition her neighbors were fighting to protect?”

Hasnain says:

What did I just read

Hasnain says:

“Women now comprise nearly 60 percent of enrollment in universities and colleges and men just over 40 percent, the research center reports. Fifty years ago, the gender proportions were reversed.”