Does Europe Have a Financial Nuclear Option? | Patrick Boyle
spoiler, as time chugs along, the more ppl/things will disappoint especially if we place our trust on it to keep us afloat—it is not even much of a prediction to see the rapid rise & fall, like a heart monitor.. cost of things are supposed to jump like an economy undergoing hyper-inflation, that is the warning; aka a whole day's wage for your meal for the day, hand to mouth & the resulting violence from frustrations boiling over. That is unless you place your hope in JESUS.
New York City Ballet via | Sugar Plum Fairy | via staticsnowfall 𝄞♫♪RE: Elon Musk Admits DOGE Was a Failure! | Patrick Boyle #JRE
JRE: #2404 Elon Musk [51:57 - 2:04:33]
This is absolutely wild, not sure how he stayed this calm & sane.
Nice objective summary of the last year, still the best new channel recommendation.
Glimpsing Gelsey, a look at ballerina Gelsey Kirkland | Pam Boehme Simon
Gelsey Kirkland, former principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, as the sugarplum fairy in George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” choreo. by Balanchine, video c. 1972(?) Gelsey Kirkland is an American prima ballerina. She received early ballet training at the School of American Ballet. Kirkland joined the New York City Ballet in 1968 at age 15, at the invitation of George Balanchine. She was promoted to soloist in 1969, and principal in 1972.
Born: December 29, 1952 (age 72 years), Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US
Spouse: Michael Chernov (m. 1997), Michael Chernov
The Infinite Money Glitch is Broken! | Patrick Boyle
For years, firms like MicroStrategy turned buying Bitcoin into a corporate cheat code—raising billions, pumping token prices, and fueling meme-driven hype. But the magic loop has snapped. In this video, we break down why the “infinite money glitch” stopped working, how leveraged ETFs magnified losses, and why even Michael Saylor is now hoarding dollars. From gamma trades to meme economics, this is the story of how hype capitalism hit a wall.
Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Convictions: Wire fraud (2 counts);
Criminal penalty: 25 years in prison
[6:44] Look, no one loved the crypto boom more than me, i loved the ppl: SBF & Caroline the wood nymph provided endless entertainment; there was art, the games & of course the MUSIC! Who could forget the MUSIC????! A lot has changed over the last few years however, the ppl are now politicians—one is even a FIFA Laureate, and SBF went from being the most generous billionaire to a guy who can't even afford to buy himself a pardon. Presidential pardons in 2025 became the new NFT's, if you are big in crypto, you'll have a collection of them framed on your wall.
[10:21] One of these leveraged Strategy ETF's: MSTP was only launched in June & is down almost 85%. If you invested in these, you should probably keep quiet about it so that a court doesn't order Britney Spears' dad to look after your money for you.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that investors in these three leveraged ETF's have lost about $1.5B in assets since early October.
[13:26] It turns out that the "infinite money glitch' only works if you are a hollow vessel. If you are empty inside, you can be filled with dreams; if you sell used copies of FIFA 2019 for $4, you are just a retailer with a strangely volatile balance sheet.
Strategy however has a strategy, sort of.. last weekend Michael Saylor posted a stock price chart covered in orange dots which highlight when the company bought its bitcoins—with a teasing question: What if we start adding green dots? The implication was that he might buy dollars. [14:15]
A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier recorded on a blockchain that is used to certify ownership and authenticity of a digital or physical asset. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are fungible (interchangeable), each NFT is unique and cannot be replicated or substituted.
Crypto hoarders veer from farce to tragedy
Dec 1 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Karl Marx observed that historical events tend to appear first as tragedy, then again as farce. Cryptocurrency hoarders may well reverse the formulation. Michael Saylor, chairman of coin-stacker Strategy (MSTR.O), opens new tab, qualifies as a world-historic personage in the digital realm, sparking a $137 billion trend, opens new tab of companies buying up bitcoin, ether and the like. He funded his first run by selling bonds that convert into equity. His second relies on preferred equity, which in turn requires boring old greenbacks to cover dividends, and mainstream investors who are more apt to pull the plug.
The bitcoin-hoarding trade seemed ridiculous from the start. After all, investors can buy cryptocurrency themselves. Yet the market valued $50 billion Strategy at over a 200% premium to the value of its holdings in January. This oddity gave motion to a breakneck financial mechanism. Shares could be issued without wildly diluting equity holders’ ostensible claim on the company’s bitcoin. Since the stock magnified the moves of the ever-volatile currency, convertible notes were attractive to hedge funds, which profit from the trade the more prices gyrate.
Inevitably, this strength on the way up became a weakness on the way down. As bitcoin fell by a third from its October peak, Strategy shares halved. About 80% of so-called digital asset treasury companies were trading below their net asset value recently, according to Altuva Group. Strategy’s valuation as a multiple, opens new tab of its holdings has halved since January.
You can't win, you're walking money bags in the eyes of the average joe when stock prices are up, and you're crying & biting your nails when prices fluctuate. Not fun =(
[23:32] Apps are optimized not to make users lives easier, rather to increase user engagement & cause them to lollygag the day away on the app . . making them so angry they can't function & become obsessed with replying to defend their position or scrolling thru comments looking for others who agree with their POV—this is also how ppl can appear to suddenly be "for the ppl" in order to win elections, with the hlep of Google Analytics (GA4) to identify user behavior anomalies & points of friction/abandonment using metrics like Engagement Rate, Conversions, and Event tracking—talking heads can easily train overnight to appear like they are champions for causes bothering you. These data points reveal where users struggle or lose interest, which are the actual "trigger points" which can flare up users' sense of connection to you.
How to Steal 7 Million Million Dollars | Volksgeist
[35:29] In n 2018, the mask finally slipped when it was suddenly revealed that a little known data firm in England had quietly harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users & turned it into a psychological weapon.
CH10: The Great Shift
All those dumb games people used to play on Facebook 10 years ago, quizzes about what kind of bread you are, Farmville. In reality, people's data was being logged and psychological profiles were being created. They figured out who you were, what you liked, what you hated, and most of all, how to make you click.
They figured out how to appeal to the paranoid boomers, the anxious college kids, the disenfranchised, and the frantic at the same time.
And they took this data & they sold it to people who wanted to win elections.
Donald Trump's 2016 election, the Brexit referendum, huge events like that were partially made possible because of this new type of ad targeting & data scraping. And this confirmed beyond any doubt what had previously been a conspiracy. That social media platforms weren't just tools or fun websites, but they were actually surveillance machines that could record our every move, thought, and statement and sell that data to anyone looking to manipulate the public.
And I think this was the moment where that dream of connecting the world, bringing the future to life. All that started to crack as tech billionaires suddenly looked less like quirky geniuses trying to innovate the future and more like robber barons of the information age. Quietly running surveillance machines in the background, no matter what the greater cost might be to society, even if it turned out to be society itself.
It was also around this time that Amazon became notorious for sweat shoplike conditions in the massive warehouses they were rapidly building around America. In 2013, it was revealed Amazon warehouse workers were often forced to work in extreme heat over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer where instead of running the AC, managers arranged for paramedics and ambulances to park outside to treat anyone who fell ill while packing boxes.
A "neo-feudal landlord" refers to powerful entities, like large tech corporations or investment firms, that exert control similar to medieval lords, extracting "rent" (data, fees, profits) from individuals who are dependent on their platforms or property, creating new forms of economic serfdom where a small elite controls essential services and wealth concentrates, often with unequal power and reduced social mobility. Think of Uber drivers reliant on the app, Amazon users, or renters facing massive corporate landlords—they're bound to systems where the owner benefits disproportionately, much like a feudal lord profiting from serfs tied to the land.
In the mid-2010s, Larry Ellison from Oracle would also drew attention for buying 98% of the sixth largest island in Hawaii, becoming essentially a neo-feudal landlord with reports that lifelong residents were forced out of their own communities not long after. Oracle CEO and billionaire Larry Ellison has just made a rather large investment or purchase, he's just bought the island of Lanai, which is the sixth largest island in Hawaii for reportedly $500 million to $600 million.
Yes, Oracle founder Larry Ellison bought 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi in 2012 for a reported $300M—acquiring most of its land, resorts, golf courses, and infrastructure from Castle & Cooke to develop it as a luxury destination, though he also owns the other 2% and aims for sustainable living, focusing on resorts, clean energy, and local projects).
Peter Thiel, who had founded PayPal in the early 2000s, began using the tech behind PayPal's fraud detection algorithms for widespread surveillance for policing & military use, creating systems that could track millions of Americans without their knowledge.
More than ever, social media had begun to make us crazy. In 2021, a whistleblower from Facebook would leak massive amounts of Facebook's own internal research in
which they would admit that they knew that hateful, divisive, polarizing content gets the most engagement for their platform. They knew their own system exploited the human brain's attraction to divisiveness, and they knew their algorithms would learn to keep feeding people more and more of it.
They had turned widespread social alienation, paranoia, and increased extremism into a business model.
