When “short squeeze” meets “HODL” and “number go up”

This is a short piece that I posted on Google+ in 2012. Now that Google+ is shutting down, I’m re-posting it so I don’t lose it. The numbers are based around things that were topical at the time of the post; in particular the Curiosity rover had landed on Mars in August of that year, and some people were complaining that it was “too expensive”.

Update: I found out today that Junot Díaz has a history of misogynistic bullying and sexual harassment of students and fans [Twitter thread]. At the time I wrote this essay, I knew nothing about him except his New Yorker piece. I’m sorry. I should have stayed focused on my own experiences. Please disregard everything I say here that defends or justifies him in any way. The behavior described in the Twitter thread is not acceptable, and his past is no excuse.

The Meaning of Mass Effect: A Cursory Look at the Themes of the Mass Effect Trilogy

It’s been six years since the final installment of the Mass Effect trilogy first touched the public sphere. It’s fitting, then, that now of all times I feel the need to talk about it.

Or, the philosophical implications of Gnosticism, and what I did to them when I found them.

The cultural gentrification of San Francisco is unyielding

Diversity is more than just race and gender.

The field invites a lot of bad science.

♪ Who wants to linearly regress forever? ♪♪

Yonatan Zunger just finished a chilling, but very important, tweetstorm about what Nazis actually believe — and how they’ve been able to get away with expressing their views very openly in the US, because the US as a society decided to throw that information down the memory hole after 1945 and rehabilitate Nazis as ideology-free comic book villains.