I mean especially in hindsight it absolutely was dumb, I can’t argue against that. And it was certainly a mistake to bet so much without having cover.

At the time I agreed with this person that their analysis of RIM as a dead company walking was correct. In fact I was likely partly responsible for their outlook (though not their reckless position).

As you say —the national interests and hope in RIM’s success kept the price at irrational levels. Much like I argued here that Tesla is staggeringly overvalued today… which is why I made the comparison in the context of someone wanting to short Tesla today. It doesn’t matter if you’re right, for shorts it also matters when you’re right.

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.

Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan accused the Commission of trying to “handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards

We all see where this is going, right? Anti-competitive behaviour now being framed as “USA #1” patriotism and actively defended by MAGA via tariffs and trade policy.

People outside the US need to stop using American platforms.

The liberals have released a costed platform and it contains no cuts to health care. This is publicly available.

Carney has spoken many times about the importance of the public health care system and their platform documented highlight this in many places.

Further, this press release misrepresents the role of a board chairperson, calling it “Carney’s company” which is wildly inaccurate. If you’re interested, Wikipedia has a good summary of the role of a board of directors. In no shape or form does it imply the sort of direct involvement in pursuing some privatization agenda as stated in this press release.

Finally, while not outright misinformation this article wildly overstates the importance of this Australian healthcare company to the behemoth that is Brookfield Asset Management. This company was acquired by Brookfield years before Carney joined, and based on the share price at time of acquisition is likely less than 1% of Brookfields holdings.

FFS can the NDP please quit it with the misinformation campaign please?

They can state their policies without lying. This is fucking gross.

I would have said the same thing until I saw this new meme format.

I’m not gonna pretend that the billions squandered and the environmental damage was worth the meme, but those are sunk costs so at least we get this out of it?

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.

“That sucks”

Sure but in the other hand a bunch of fucking assholes get a laugh about their funny prank. “That sucks” that it affects real human beings and makes it more difficult for them to exercise their democratic rights

I do not underhanded how people here are so jaded that somehow I’m the bad guy. Absolutely disgusted with this crowd

I have a firsthand report of someone in this riding who is having difficulty helping seniors with mobility issues be able to vote.

I’m extremely fucking pissed at all the assholes who think “ha ha this is funny it doesn’t affect me”

It’s fucking gross. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

You know what’s a “bad look”? Protesting in a such a way that makes it hard for Canadians to exercise their democratic rights.

I’m not the one being bothered by this. It’s seniors and people with disabilities who struggle with a ballot that is well over a metre long. It’s poll workers who are affected by the struggle to accommodate the process of voting and tabulating the results.

It is causing issues. I know this from firsthand reports of personal friends who are volunteering in the affected riding. I’m happy to wear this “bad look” because it’s not me being affected.

This prank makes it hard for poll workers to do their job, and difficult for voters to exercise their democratic rights. Especially those with accessibility issues. I’m not saying this hypothetically, this is confirmed by someone I know volunteering in that riding.

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of ditching FPTP. But this is not acceptable.

The nuance I’d add is that while free markets are efficient, serving the public good is more important than the purest efficiency.

As an example, an unrestricted free market incentivizes the development of monopolies. This can be efficient and in the extremely long term these monopolies may fall to disruptive new entrants — but we humans live in the present and take little solace in the idea that the monopolist will someday get too bloated and fall. We just want to afford groceries!

So using competition bureau powers, we can restrict those markets. This may subtract from some extreme market efficiency but that’s an efficiency only the monopolist benefits from in a useful time frame.

The same principles are true in many other areas of the economy.

It’s impossible to maintain so many competing “top priorities”

Trying to do too much and failing the execution was Trudeaus downfall, and the next PM will have even more to deal with as top priorities.

Pulling in climate issues to new trade partnerships and new housing policies is a way to keep progress towards climate goals while also keeping focused on practical issues we need to solve in the short term.

The debate organizers failed Canadians with this half-baked format.

Zero fact checking. Zero effort to stop people talking over each other. Zero allowance for Carney to response to the unceasing bald face lies hurled by all three others.

Just a complete and utter waste of time. No one wants this garbage, this is why so many Canadians don’t bother to tune in. In no way would anyone seeing this be better informed than when they went in.

100% yes.

Maybe a competent manager of the status quo is the best we can hope for out of electoral politics for now, but sooner or later we’re going to need someone with big new ideas.

Well said. 100% agree.

These policies have abjectly failed with extremely harmful consequences.

Rent control is a very useful short-term bandage, to prevent a blip in the market from pricing people out of their homes.

What it isn’t, is a long-term solution inside a market system. After decades of rent control, developers have become largely disinterested in pursuing new rental units as it strictly limits the financial upside for them.

People who have been in these units get benefits, but with these benefits come serious drawbacks. Because rent control allows them to live beyond their means (relative to market prices), people in rent controlled units are stuck. They cannot find a comparable home if they want to move for a better job, to go to school or training elsewhere, to get out a bad domestic partnership situation, to find a different sized home because of life stage changes.

So yes I get that it feels good, and it absolutely helps in the short term. But it’s urgent that market prices come down as well. And while Carney is working on the market solution for this, the NDP or some other emergent group has ample room to come up with a comprehensive socialist alternative for this as well.

Capitalists do not have a monopoly on economic policies. Marx was an economist (amongst other things), for crying out loud. They can, they should, have a well-considered policy platform. For the love of gourd, NDP, don’t let a banker who works at a hedge fund have a better socialist policy on housing. It’s worse than embarrassing, it’s a goddamn travesty.

The challenge for the prairies is that we need to undo the brain rot that has told the people in those provinces their only future is in servicing American oil extractors.

There is a story for these provinces. The Norwegian or Saudi model of having the oil extraction being state-owned — and then using the profits to enrich the population — has been tremendously successful.

Alberta and Saskatchewan control these rights in their provinces and the centre and left should be screaming this from the hilltops. The oil and minerals are non-renewable and they should focus on getting value to enrich their own populations, not rush to produce at a discount in order to enrich American shareholders.

Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part.

What I see from the NDP for example are extremely poorly considered centre-left policies that don’t go far enough but yet at the same time are ignorant of the economics they want to continue working within.

Take for example their proposal for national rent control. This is a disastrously ignorant policy proposal inside the context of a market economy as it will instruct the markets to halt any future construction of rental units.

Whereas I believe what they need to be doing is either what Carney is proposing, or giving up on the idea of markets entirely and using socialist tools to directly build the homes that the market has failed to build.

But I’ll take your advice to heart and listen if someone comes up with an alternative I’ve not considered.