blake kathryn
One Nice Bug Per Day
YOU ARE THE REASON
wallacepolsom
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
we're not kids anymore.
Three Goblin Art
occasionally subtle
Sade Olutola
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Andulka
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes
tannertan36
No title available
AnasAbdin
@theartofmadeline
Love Begins
Janaina Medeiros
Mike Driver
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@koysdo
Thinking about when I asked my mom why humans keep having children when we spend the majority of our lives working—is life just supposed to be work? Is that the point? Are we learning something? Why did you have children? Why is human life so precious when it’s mostly suffering? Why do we keep doing this? And she just stared at me blankly for a long time then said I don’t know I don’t think about things like that I would never ask those questions. Oh ok
don't be mean to yourself that's you
Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory
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I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.
I’m 30 and I’m struggling. Please tell me it’s get better?
I'm afraid life is too uncertain to guarantee such a thing. Throughout our time on Earth the hand of fate deals us many blows, most of which are beyond our control. But, in my personal life, I've found that therapy, doctoring, learning, self reflection, and applying new knowledge to your behavior can absolutely improve the things you can control. I recommend reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to gain some peace about accepting what's within our power to change and accepting what is not.
In a more general sense: 30 is not old. 30 is very young. Only children think 30 is old. Circumstances permitting, your body will not break down, you will not lose all your energy, you will not get dumber. Your 30s are, as a physical experience, very much like your 20s except you've got more experience to help guide you. You will struggle horribly, but that's the human condition. I'm entering the last year of my 30s tomorrow and overall they were much, much better than my 20s. I learned to get rid of a lot of self inflicted pain and got the help I needed. It's up to you, but it's possible.
Well, it was really the brainchild of a lot of soul-searching. I was part of a think tank, and we came up with a line of cosmetics that really address the trials, the tribulations, and the challenges of the modern woman.
Katya Zamolodchikova as Linda Elizabeth Marie Braintree in Very Important People Season 3 Episode 12
So many roads, so many detours. So many choices, so many mistakes.
SEX AND THE CITY
4.11 | "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda"
I had to leave my new job 4 hours early today. I was so tired I wasn't sure I was gonna be able to drive home later and was getting paranoid and weird. I said I didn't feel good and left. Which I have to remember is normal. And I have to give myself some slack. Considering I had to call 911 on myself after my first day Thursday because I thought I was dying during a panic attack and still went to work the next morning. And I was in the ER Sunday night until too late because the EMTs missed something potentially life threatening on my EKG. Went to work Monday morning with too little sleep. Couldn't fall asleep last night and I'm pretty sure I was having heart palpitations when I did, because I was dreaming about strange sensations inside my body. In the dream I was pregnant and the baby was dead inside me, and the sensations were the baby and I had to just accept that it was dead. I think I've been a pretty good sport about my health for my first week of work. Had to take off a little early today. I'm killing it at the job btw. Strong, very strong first impression. They think I have a cold or something.
I've been coming back to this question over and over lately: What does it mean to win? I have a private office and make more money than ever. I'm talented at my job. I've been feeling like a big fish in a little pond at this office. I see what they have for systems and I can see the overhaul that's needed. It excites me. Genuinely. I am going to make much needed order from this mess. What does it mean to succeed professionally when you are incurably mentally ill, in a world where it has to be a secret? Where I'm on the back of a firetruck with a barf bag and showing up freshly showered the next morning, 20 minutes early. Where I'm on a stretcher in an ER hallway confessing to violent delusional thoughts and pointing to my EKG printout to a doctor, swearing I have no history of violence, going home, showing up a half hour early the next morning. Is that success? What does it mean to win?
