#high finance

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

Huh? Doofus, we just gave you two credit cards. Get out there and buy a couple of cars.

[torpublishinggroup]

ICYMI—Max Gladstone revealed the cover of Dead Country, book one of his new Craft Wars trilogy, a series which will determine the fate of the fast-dealing world of ambitious lawyer-necromancers and deposed deities that so many fans have fallen in love with! 

😎 Check it out 😎

Discover the destiny of the Craft in Dead Country, the beginning of the end of Max Gladstone's beloved fantasy epic.

BOOK ONE OF THE CRAFT WARS TRILOGY

Since her village chased her out with pitchforks, Tara Abernathy has resurrected gods, pulled down monsters, averted wars, and saved a city, twice. She thought she'd left her dusty little hometown forever. But that was before her father died.

As she makes her way home to bury him, she finds a girl, as powerful and vulnerable and lost as she once was. Saving her from raiders, twisted by a remnant of the God Wars, who haunt the area, Tara changes the course of the world.

Max Gladstone's world of the Craft is a fantasy setting like no other. When Craftspeople rose up to kill the gods, they built corporate Concerns from their corpses and ushered in a world of rapacious capital. Those who work the Craft wield laws like knives and weave chains from starlight and soulstuff. Dead Country is the first book in the Craft Wars Trilogy, a tight sequence of novels that will bring the sprawling saga of the Craft to its end, and the perfect entry point for this incomparable world.

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Also Available by Max Gladstone

The Craft Sequence

Three Parts Dead

Two Serpents Rise

Full Fathom Five

Last First Snow

Four Roads Cross

The Ruin of Angels

Interactive Novels

Deathless: The City’s Thirst

Choice of the Deathless

Standalone Novels

Last Exit

Empress of Forever

This is How You Lose the Time War (with Amal El-Mohtar)

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From High Finance, Archie Annual #22 (1971).

[seat-safety-switch]

In case you’re not familiar with the language of Wall Street, a “blue chip” stock is that from a company that isn’t a total piece of shit. To me, a blue chip is what I find on the floor of my garage after I’ve parked a blue car for over five seconds, whereupon it begins to rapidly disintegrate out of finally being shown kindness for once in the last two decades. What I mean by all this is that I’m hardly on the top of the recruiting list for the big investment firms.

Still, global high finance did have a certain appeal to me. I think if you were to ask me then, I would say that the appeal is “a lot of fucking money.” That would probably also be the case if you were to ask me now. There’s just something about being able to rapidly accumulate enough money to literally drown your old boss in that stirs the soul, and perhaps that made my coworkers at the big i-bank (that’s trader for “investment bank,”) a little overzealous.

They had bought this great big company. One of the young guys screwed up during the due-diligence (that’s trader for “paying attention,”) and thought it was just another rolling vortex of infinite money, a speculator’s paradise, only to realize once the deal was sealed that it actually made things. Like companies from the previous century did. We were never really sure, on the floor, what exactly this giant company made: newspapers, transmissions, insulin. It didn’t matter. They got right to work stripping it for parts, which I have a personal opposition to.

You see, I’m sort of an animist by nature. I think that human-made objects can, under a certain circumstance, develop something akin to a soul. Haven’t you had a junky car that has a kind of personality? Everyone has, even if they’re the Carl Sagan of cold scientific fact. So, too, did this company - and reducing it to individual components meant that each component was just a bunch of shitty offices stuffed with newly-cranky people who didn’t want to change their commutes to work. Everything fell apart, and the investment turned out to be worthless. They just threw all the bits of the company up for auction, and let it go.

Anyway, it turns out buying a huge megacorporation is much easier than finding a 1968 Beetle with no rust on the frame. And, with the inflation in classic cars, about the same amount of money. If you want a newspaper or transmission or something, come by the plant. First guy who tells me what it used to make can help me fix the big machines, because it turns out the employees still wanted to be paid even after I rescued their company from the Fortune 500 equivalent of the Pick ‘n’ Pull. That’s trader for “those ungrateful assholes.”

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From High Finance, Archie Annual #22 (1971).

[annionebutme]

I miss coupons. Like, good ones. Not the barely anything off on overpriced bs ones we have nowadays.

[internutter]

Challenge #04133-K115: Lawsuits From Ignorance

A strongly male-dominated deregger group sues the woman who has so much time she could practically buy their entire solar system, and that's even after paying her taxes and giving to charity. The "crime" they claim she's committing? She's a woman who's making more money than they are.

https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02593-g036-safe-as -- Anon Guest

Engineer Dean read the message for the third time, juggling her latest foster child on her hip. She read it out loud in a singsong voice because the tone was all that mattered when reading with a pre-verbal child in the immediate area.

"I am demanded to appear in the greater fiscal court of the fiduciary empire of Mashandar... that's Greater Deregulation Upper North-Northeast... I've been found guilty in absentia of immoral living and a corrupting lifestyle. I'm a disruptive influence on the mental wellbeing on the youth of their polity. I must, according to them, immediately hand myself into the custody of an appropriate male and let him take over the position of CEO of Buddysuits Inc. If I don't, they'll come and legally claim me for matrimonial reclamation."

She spent a moment looking up the legal standing these dereggers had. Since it was slim to none, Dean relaxed a little and filed a notice with Station Security regarding a threat to her freedoms.

[Check the source for the rest of the story]

[mythsteps]

high finance…low finance I hope you're not seeing red. myth steps blog