#its been a bunch of aoc ones lately

[three-bunnies-in-a-trenchcoat]

Yeah I should've expected that

[scarlethallow160]

gerudo townnn

did a bunch of exploring/side stuff and now finally continuing with le story and riju’s new design is so cute i love her haircut!

i will say now that im close to having all of the companion characters avatars, it still makes me sad that teba basically got replaced 😭 like thematically it makes sense, and its not like tulin came out of nowhere, and i love him he is my son, but i dont think teba even had any spoken voicelines in totk?? idk it just make me kinda sad cuz he was the one to help link in botw and now we can use everyone else’s abilities but teba just. not there 😔 sidon is my fav but teba and riju are tied for second

and i feel bad cuz i like yunobo! he’s cute! but overall the gorons just do not appeal to me very much design-wise and goron city isnt nearly as interesting as the other regions (i feel like its music doesnt help either) imo and im sure thats a boring take but character design is a big thing for me so i just dont feel as attached to him 😭😭😭

been running around with tulin’s and sidon’s avatars tho they are my (link’s) son and husband and then i will have my daughter riju

also as other ppl have said it also makes me sad that like. all traces of the champions are kinda gone or they’re not rly mentioned. i mean mipha has that court named after her now, i think riju only mentions urbosa in her diary, daruk’s carving is there, but as much as i dont care for revali its like he’s utterly nonexistent? cuz i think the others were tied to the champions by blood except for revali and teba. they could have at least kept the divine beasts around :(

kinda makes me want to play aoc now. i’ve been seeing clips on tiktok lately and want to see more of the champions as well as the current companions (i didnt bother with it before cuz its non-canon and im not a huge fan of timefuckery stuff like that—like adult sidon meeting his baby self—but……i want to see more of those characters)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets

A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#wallstreetbets

In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

Obviously, right? On the one hand, you have the guarantee of a pension (maybe even inflation-indexed); on the other, you have a bunch of bets, that, if they go wrong, leave you literally homeless and starving.

When gamblers remortgage the family home and cash in the kids' college funds to play the tables, we consider them to have a mental illness, a pathological condition that harms them and the people around them.

Giving up a defined benefits pension in favor of a 401k is just the same kind of bet - staking all the money that will support you when you exit the workforce on the movement of stocks and bonds.

Who would do that voluntarily?

Pretty much no one. But the transition from defined benefits to 401k was not voluntary. Finance ghouls like Ethan Lipsig wrote memos to major employers like Hughes Aircraft showing them how they could ditch their pension obligations by moving workers to 401ks.

In the 80s, Reagan created a bunch of legal tools that allowed employers to coerce their workforces into giving up the security of a pension and force them into gambling their salaries on the prayer of a win in the markets.

This was insanely, amazingly great for the finance sector, in three ways:

1. It made companies more profitable. Guaranteeing that the workers whose labor made your company viable wouldn't spend their dotage starving and homeless is expensive.

Helping fund wagers on shares is much cheaper. The finance sector represented the major shareholders of the companies that transitioned to 401ks. The savings were transferred to these shareholders and the finance sector got commissions.

What's more, this temporary inflation of share prices disguised what was going on with the pension switcheroo: workers' defined benefits pensions were liquidated and turned into stocks, just as stocks were going up because their pensions had been liquidated!

Their legs had been amputated out from under them, but so subtly that they didn't yet feel the pain - and now their bosses cooked their legs and snuck them into their dinner, and everyone marveled at how full they felt after that hearty, meaty meal.

2. 401ks brought a lot of suckers to the table. The market was - and is - dominated by "sophisticated investors," AKA predators, who knew all the ways to fleece the rubes who had no idea how any of this worked.

The predatory nature of finance only increased over time. Hedge funds, for example, exist to find unethical practices that are legal (thanks to loopholes in the rules) and exploit them until they are illegal.

3. 401ks created a political force outside the finance sector that would lobby on its behalf. Transforming America into a nation of stockholders meant that workers had to choose between supporting rules that protected their jobs and rules that protected their retirement.

For your pension account to grow, you had to support policies that permitted finance ghouls to offshore your job, or misclassify you as a contractor, or eliminate the safety rules that prevented you from being maimed, or take away your right to sue for compensation.

Every time there's a particularly ghastly bankruptcy driven by PE or hedge funds - Toys R Us, Sears, etc - it emerges that at least some of that money is coming out of a union pension fund.

That's marketization - turning the once obscure, boring business of market-based capital allocation into a matter of import to everyday people.

Marketization begat financialization.

While marketization is primarily about capital allocation (who gets what money), financialization is about bets. Sometimes those bets are about things - businesses, houses, coal and timber - but things are limited. Mostly the financial market consists of bets on other bets.

Bets are infinite. Every time you make a bet, you create inventory for a market in a bet on the outcome of your bet. And that's inventory for a new market: bets on the outcomes of bets on the outcomes of bets.

It's called Wall Street Bets for a reason.

Bets need referees, someone who decides who the winner is. In sports, it's a major scandal if a referee is caught wagering on one of the teams in a match. In the financial markets, it's the norm - referees that lay wagers on the outcome of the contest they're overseeing.

Let's take stock:

Workers are forced to play the casino, and if their bets fail, they spend their old ages homeless and starving;

The vast majority of casino games are wholly abstract - bets on bets on bets - and require layers of refs;

the refs are all crooked.

Every couple of years, we have a massive, systemic financial crisis, and every time that happens, the finance sector lobbies for a no-strings-attached bailout, abetted by suckers who hate the finance sector but fear starving in their old age.

We're about to be engulfed in the second-largest crisis of our lifetime - the reckoning from trillions in capital market gains propped up by the Trump administration's policy of buying all corporate debt as a covid stimulus.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

(the largest crisis of our lifetimes is a few years off, as the climate emergency piles losses on losses, stranding tens of trillions in assets, from fossil fuels to obsolete gas-stations to literally underwater coastal real-estate to whole towns incinerated by wildfires)

That's where we're at: a crooked casino that we've trusted our futures too, a crisis on the horizon, and a bunch meme-stock "players" who have thrown the normal weirdness of the market into stark relief through a spectacular stunt.

A lot of people are angry at Robinhood, the stock-trading platform at the center of all this. Robinhood froze trading on meme stocks, and has only allowed it to come back in a useless, performative trickle that is seemingly calculated to prevent more meme-stock gamesmanship.

Is Robinhood just another crooked ref? Yes…and no. The meme stock run upset the stable cheaters' equilibrium whereby cheating never escalated to the point where the game just collapsed.

For example, the total short position on Gamestop exceeds its total stock issuance.

Translation: there were more Gamestop shares promised between bettors than exist. When the game stops, all those promises come due, and they literally can't be paid off because there aren't enough tokens in circulation to settle all the debts.

Robinhood halted trading in part because the big fish upstream of Robinhood also halted trading, because they have even more at risk than Robinhood does if the game collapses - they the refs for MANY players, all the same size as Robinhood or larger.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop

But remember, the refs are cheating. And they are both downstream and upstream from other games in which the refs are also cheating.

And the games, as a whole, encompass our economy, including the solvency of the "real economy" (the people who make masks, deliver groceries and drive ambulances), and whether you spend your old age homeless and starving.

So the people who say, "Don't blame Robinhood, they didn't halt trading to help billionaires, they halted trading to prevent the game from collapsing are right."

But they're not the only ones who are right.

Also, there's the people who say that meme stocks aren't making money for little guys at the expense of the big guys. They're right too.

First, because these stocks will all need to be converted to cash, and that means selling them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/the-gamestop-bubble-is-going-to-hurt-a-lot-of-ordinary-investors/

When the selloff starts, the price will plunge, because even if the stock was undervalued before, it's certainly overvalued now. Every bubble produces wealth for its early bettors who sell out to later players who lose everything when they can't find a sucker later on.

From Beanie Babies to subprime, bubbles burst and leave suckers holding the bag. If you just heard about meme stocks last week, you're too late to make money off of them.

There's another version of the "this isn't little guys, it's big whales" that's *also* true: the main beneficiary of the meme stock runs is giant funds who magnified and the bets from r/wallstreetbets and got out smart and fast.

https://twitter.com/zatapatique/status/1354904995901136896

So given all this, what can we make of calls (from parties as varied as AOC and Ted Cruz) to investigate Robinhood and other retail brokerages to see whether they're honest refs, or in the tank for billionaires?

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith calls this a "fatuous uproar," saying that the Senate has more important things to do during the racing-out-of-control pandemic than to investigate a literal penny-ante grift.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/the-fatuous-uproar-about-robinhood-and-gamestop.html

Do we really care who the winner is in "a beauty contest between Cinderella’s ugly sisters" ("clueless new gen day traders versus clumsy shorts")?

Smith is right too.

A speculator-v-speculator contest that falls apart when the crooked ref halts play to prevent collapse - who cares who "wins?"

But here's how they can all be right - the "who cares" and the "goliath v goliath" and the "bubble" and the "Robinhood is a plutes' honeypot."

*If* there's hearings, and *if* those hearings expose the absurdity and corruption of the system, *then* there is a chance to build the political will to make real, systemic changes when the crisis comes.

And there's a real crisis coming: two, in fact. The covid junk bond financial crisis, which is due very soon, and the climate crisis stranded asset emergencies, which will unroll with increased tempo and intensity for decades to come.

The half-century cycle of "addressing" finance crises by increasing financialization MUST stop.

If the meme stock spectacle gets us to pay attention to hearings that reveal the irredeemable rot of the system, then it's a unique chance to spread *real* "financial literacy."

And that literacy is the necessary (but insufficient) precursor to taking action when the time comes - and the time is certainly coming soon.

[immigrationnewsdigest]

"Yesterday was Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention," and some things really are better in this all-online format, like Rhode Island's calamari-centric roll call vote, Trevor Noah said on Wednesday's Daily Show. The night also had "speeches from Jill Biden, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, and a quick appearance from AOC" that "a bunch of media outlets who should know better" ingenuously tried to paint as a Biden snub.

"The night's big moment was when Joe Biden officially became the Democratic nominee — and for reasons I don't understand, the DNC also made it the weirdest moment," Noah said. "What the hell was that? The music, the basement library, the cheap party decorations — I thought the Democrats had millions of dollars for this. Why did it feel like the grand opening of a used Kia dealership? Like, did they blow all their money on the calamari?"

"It looked like they swung by the party supply store an hour before and were, like, 'What can we get for $6?" James Corden agreed at The Late Late Show. He was curious why Rhode Island had "a character from Mortal Kombat holding" it's roll-call calamari, but he did find young Joe Biden quite "strapping" in the photo montages.

"There have been some memorable moments," including "the guy from Rhode Island apparently holding a plate of calamari hostage?" Seth Meyers said on Late Night. The DNC also featured "some of the party's most talented rising stars, so Fox News was desperate to counter-program it," as is Trump.

"While the Democrats have been laying out a case that Trump is grossly unfit for office, Trump has been focused on his top priority: Proving that he is grossly unfit for office," Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. Trump embraced the adulation from the "insane right-wing conspiracy group called QAnon," and "also got mad at Goodyear, the tire people," calling for a boycott over its MAGA hat policy. "Goodyear is headquartered in Ohio, which is a 2020 swing state, and they employ roughly 63,000 people," he noted, so "go ahead, boycott one of the biggest employers in a swing state, and don't forget to boycott Iowa corn, Wisconsin cheese, and Florida meth gators."

The Goodyear blimp took the fight to Trump at The Late Show.

"Trump supporters were, like, 'That's it, I'm getting rid of my blimp! Cancel the Blimpers for Trump rally!'" Jimmy Fallon said at The Tonight Show. And "I actually feel bad for Biden — the guy's been in public office for 50 years, he finally wins the Democratic nomination, and then has to celebrate in the back of an abandoned library." He also really leaned into the calamari. Watch below. Peter Weber

[klanced]

Why if you started shipping sheith you changed drastically to klance and being anti shipping? The opinion not the fandom made you change ships and be hostile to other shippers?

Okay, so.

I only shipped Shth for like… a month? Month and a half? Back in June - early July of 2016, and that was mainly because the fandom was new and I was too excited abt Voltron (also I was only 17 at the time) to put on my critical thinking hat n like. Look at the characters lmao.

In June 2016, I was preoccupied with establishing myself as a major blog in the fandom. To become a BNF, you need popular posts, and the most popular kind of posts are shippy ones. I could write a long boring analysis abt the commodity that is shipping in fandom but basically, ships are easy to access (in that, it’s easy to like a ship, to recognize it, to become emotionally invested in it, etc - all of which increases your chance of interacting with the post). And if you’re a multishipper, that allows you to expand your net to a greater audience across a sea of multiple ships. Etc. So that’s the main reason why I shipped Shth, lmao. I had a passing interest in it, but I wasn’t that emotionally attached/invested in it; there’s a reason I’m Katie Klanced, ya feel.

Additionally, I chose to drop Shth long before the first convention happened and World War Age Discourse started. I became mutuals, and then friends, w a bunch of my fellow aoc (Asians Of Color) and they seriously influenced how I perceive Voltrn and its fandom. They pointed out to me how “yaoi-esque” a lot of Shth content was, or how fetishistic the content was. And that was really eye-opening for me, because it made me viscerally aware of my heritage/identity in a way I hadn’t been before, but that’s a whole different tangent lmao.

Anyway, after they pointed out how sexualized a lot of content was, especially when it came to race/ethnicity (and this goes beyond Shth like, the shit I’ve seen about Lance… lmao…), my viewpoint on Shth was forever changed and I quietly dropped it. This was late June I believe, when Shth was still widely accepted, which is why I was quiet about my discontent. And then that first convention happened, the first tentative ages were dropped, people were like oh SHIT, and I was like “oh okay, looks like the tide is turning” and that’s when I became more vocally opposed to Shth, deleted my posts abt it, etc.

And That’s What You Missed On Early Katie Klanced.

[oliverpdaniel]

Advent of Code 2020: A (very timely and not late at all) Reflection on Days 15-25

...Um. Oops?

Honestly, everything has been happening so much lately, I'm not super frustrated that it's been a clean month between finishing these puzzles and commenting on them. During these weeks, along with finally finishing my first-ever Advent of Code (as did my roommate! Well done, buddy.), I also wrapped up my second semester in quarantine, including a few brutal final projects and exams. After a nail-biting few weeks of awaiting grades, I finally had the confidence to withdraw for the second semester, and to begin hunting for work. (If you're reading this and I'm not hired yet, hire me!)

Anyway, the obvious downside to the sheer magnitude of the delay is that most of these puzzles aren't super fresh in my head, and thus my commentaries may not be as detailed as I would like. Hey - if I ever get such a massive executive-dysfunction-killing buzz as I did over the winter break to finally clean and redecorate my room, maybe I'll revisit these too.

Day 15: Now we're seeing some REAL slowness! The primary data structure for both parts here was the dictionary, mapping "seen" (spoken) numbers to the last turn on which they were spoken. That being said, I don't know what I was thinking in Part 1, with code like this:

Code ``` for k in seen.keys(): seen[k] += 1 ```

As soon as I saw the spicy thirty million in Part 2, I knew my naive solution wouldn't even touch it. [1] I had to do my least favourite thing - off-by-one debugging, but I ultimately came up with a relatively clever insight:

Spoilers Storing not just the last turn on which a number was spoken, but the last *two* numbers (if they exist). Doing this allows for a three-case scenario, for some current number `curr`: 1. `seen[curr]` is empty or doesn't exist. This is the base case of a new number; output 0, as stated in the problem. 2. `seen[curr]` has 1 value. It's only been seen once, so we can calculate the number of turns since it was last seen. 3. `seen[curr]` has 2 values. This number has been seen twice, so we can simply subtract the first- and second-most recent turn numbers to get the gap between them!

This problem took a bit of fiddling, but runs okay. Python really shows its ugly side here, as even a fairly efficient solution like this one, using efficient data structures, takes quite a while on Part 2.

Day 16: Boy oh boy. I spent far too long on this one, and perhaps if there are any to revisit for a future post, it's this one. My solution for this one features no less than:

regex;

closure functions;

constraint satisfaction;

functions that return tuples of variable length; and

walrus operators.

I consider this problem a 'sweat' for future years; I learned a lot about what makes constraint-satisfaction engines tick, and how it's important to assign constraints to the smallest possible element of a search space (here a column, rather than an entire permutation of columns). I think there's a much more concise and semantic way of outlining this problem, that lets the solver do much more of the work than I did.

Day 17: Not much to say here; it's a cellular automaton with extra for loops. I'll share two cute things that I'm proud of:

Spoilers 1. I experimented with various thresholds for the size of the 'infinite' space, making specifically sure not to to index checks, so that I could have the smallest possible subspace to check over. I ended up settling on a value of `20` units in each direction from: 2. the origin I specified, which is simply `LIMIT // 2 - H // 2` (where `H` is just the dimension of the input grid).

My roommate complained that it took him a long time to parse and understand the problem; I'll confess that I barely read it. I guess that's the advantage of experience, in that I saw "Conway" and "space" and knew immediately what needed to be done.

I didn't do anything special for Part 2; it's just my Part 1 code, copied and pasted, with an extra for loop here and a variable there. sum(sum(sum(sum())))s for everyone!

Day 18: I think that, out of all 49 unique problems in this year's Advent of Code, I'm most proud of my solution to this one. It's (relatively) fast; the code is pretty easy to read and works for both parts (and more! [2]); and I came up with a solution before knowing the name for what I had built. (Update: it's a shift-reduce parser. Hooray for stacks!) One especially cute thing, that incidentally ended up defining my approach to a lot of the later problems, was

Spoilers creating a lookup table between a certain input symbol, here math operators, and an internal function, here the builtin `int` math functors. This allowed for a dead-simple evaluator function, for when the top of the stack was ready to be converted from an expression to a workable number. Also, I had the bright idea to recursively evaluate bracketed expressions, in such a way that an expression like `(((1 + 2)))` would quickly reduce down to `1 + 2` before the rest of the parser got to it.

Day 19: Aaaaaaaaargh! Herein begin the Two Days of Terror - the two hardest problems. Lucky I had returned from my partner's by now, as I think they would have been quite upset with how much I was ignoring them to code. After solving Part 1 in the morning I finally finished Part 2 at around 7pm, having forgotten to otherwise eat or attack my household responsibilities, and only after my roommate sat down with me and pair-programmed for a while. This one stung the most, because... I'm a linguist, for crying out loud! No generative grammar problem, especially ones over a finite search space like this, should be causing me such grief.

Day 20: I am still emotionally recovering from this problem. My roommate somehow managed to get both parts to run instantly, using the most cursed CSP setup I've ever seen. I still need to study his code better to understand just how he did it. Also, his usage of scientific Python packages finally shows its rewards, as convolution over a matrix is a friggin' builtin function. Grr.

Day 21: I consider this day an apology for the previous Days of Terror. Some fun, but not terribly difficult, set-fu. My relative inexperience with set theory shows its stripes here; I'm sure there are much more semantically sound ways of accomplishing what I tried to do here (e.g., manually removing an allergen from each ingredient's list of hypotheses once it was confirmed to go with a certain ingredient).

Day 22: Spicy spicy numbers! It would have served me much better to read the instructions before starting, as then I would have known that

Spoilers in Part 2, players don't take their entire deck with them. Since, y'know, that would just cause an infinite race to the bottom.

Day 23: Even spicier numbers! If you're going to be cute like me and establish 9 as a constant, make sure that you don't use it in Part 2 when constructing the initial circle, or you'll wonder why 9,999,990 of the cups aren't attached to anything.

Day 24: I couldn't sleep, so I solved this problem at 3 in the morning. Not going to lie, a little disappointing for a penultimate problem, especially Part 2. Part 1 required at least a modicum of cleverness to develop a meaningful coordinate system, but then Part 2 just felt like a relative rehash of the Conway Cubes problem. 3 cellular automaton problems out of 25 is a little bit much, considering how formulaic they can be.

Day 25: As true evidence of how much I learned over this Advent of Code, I was able to finish Day 25 on the couch without even bothering my partner. Utilizing what I had learned about pow made defining the transform (i.e., repeated multiplication and mod) incredibly easy. Though, I did get a little bit lucky, due to a small oversight in problem setting...

Spoilers Rather than having to generate and test a whole bunch of different pairs of loop sizes for the card and the door, it turns out that if you `zip` together two streams of all such valid loop sizes for the card and door, respectively, the correct size for both (i.e, the solution) appears at the same time; for me, just the second such pair of sizes.

Day 25 Part 2, as always, was a delight and a pleasure. If you've never clicked that final button before, crack open a text editor and start solving challenges until you can. It's deeply satisfying.

I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the entire AoC team, setters, testers, and maintainers alike, for all that they do. A daily stream of bite-sized (or, sometimes, sea-monster-sized) challenges is just what I need to keep me going, and my skills sharp, over the dreary holiday season. Especially in a year like this, it was just what I needed to keep me moving, motivated, and thinking about code. I can't wait for next year's challenges and, hopefully, I'll convince the roomies to do it with me again.

Sorry about the little delay, and the relative lack of detail. But, the enemy of perfect is good enough. If you're reading these at some point in the distal future, I hope you've enjoyed watching my journey through these problems, and maybe learned a little bit about what it means to think like a programmer. Thanks for tuning in!

[1]: I tried it anyway; it obviously didn't work. And, once my roommate turned me onto tqdm, I was able to see just how long before the Heat Death of the Universe for it to run. It was about 3 days. Lol.

[2]: The way I constructed the code, it would be extremely easy to add in the remaining integer operations.

[usgag]

Markets should be pricing in would-be Biden win already — they’re not

The conventional Wall Street C-suite wisdom is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be moving to the White House next year, and that President Trump is trailing so badly in the polls that he simply won’t be able to overcome the pandemic and the recession it has created.

Funny — that’s not what another important part of Wall Street called the stock market is telling us.

It should come as no surprise that Wall Street CEOs are predicting — some clamoring, even — for a Trump defeat. This crowd never warmed up to Trump’s brand of populism and trade nationalism, particularly against China, which it sees as a business partner no matter how many times it gets ripped off.

More recently, amid the social unrest, Wall Streeters have been busy out-woke-ing each other with town halls and anodyne, politically correct commentary while implicitly (sometimes explicitly) slamming Trump’s leadership. As if the country is desperate for a bunch of very rich white dudes to suddenly preach about equality.

Executives see progressive change in Washington coming in November and they want to ­appease the Jacobins before the proverbial beheadings start.

But for all their years studying stocks, these execs appear to have no clue what stocks tell us about presidential elections. Contrary to their belief (and most polls), the markets are telling us the election is far from over — and that Trump may still win it.

And if he loses, Trump could keep it close enough that the GOP could hold the Senate and blunt the progressive economic agenda Biden-Harris will impose on the country.

POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Investment research firm Strategas explained the uncanny ability of the benchmark S&P 500 index to predict presidential elections in a recent note to clients that I was able to get my hands on. The S&P is a better predictor “than the polls and the pundits,” according to the note. “If the S&P 500 is higher in the three months before the election [which began Aug. 3], the incumbent party has won, and if stocks are lower in the three-month period, the opposition party has won.”

The note, which cites sequential as opposed to year-over-year gains and losses, added: “This has been true in every presidential election since 1984 and 87 percent of the time since 1928.”

I know it’s early, but since Aug. 3 the S&P is up 2.4 percent and has nearly erased all of its pandemic-induced losses.

OK, I know what you’re saying: The COVID pandemic changes everything and we haven’t experienced anything like this since the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920.

And while Trump didn’t create the virus, his handling of it, particularly in terms of messaging (remember how it was supposed to disappear in the summer?), was uneven at best. That will cost him plenty of votes. As for the markets, they’re up because of the Fed (zero-percent interest rates), so where else do you put your money?

Maybe they’re also up because Biden, not Bernie Sanders, is the Dem nominee, and he chose a former prosecutor, Kamala Harris, as his running mate over Elizabeth Warren, who has vowed to break up all the banks and the big tech companies.

Still, while Biden isn’t an avowed socialist, his policies are becoming pretty left wing. He’s promised an avalanche of new taxes on individuals and business, lots of regulations and spending plans on a “Green New Deal.” He’s also promised socialists like AOC and Sanders a seat at the policy table.

All of which means if Biden is really set to win (and the Dems set to take the Senate), markets should be pricing this in by now. They’re not.

The stock market in the short term is not the best gauge into the future of the US economy, and the pandemic recession may or may not have bottomed out.

But the stock market does reflect sentiment among smart investors who have skin in the game, and at least for now, those investors are saying there’s a good chance that a doomsday scenario of a Dem sweep in the fall won’t happen.

TikTok: We’re fair and balanced

No one will ever mistake TikTok for a vast, right-wing conspiracy. But it would be wise for the wildly popular short-form video app to let people know — particularly that really important guy in the White House — that it is also friendly to conservative voices.

Sources tell Fox Business’s Lydia Moynihan that the company has recently completed what has been described as an “internal sweep” of its users and found a significant number of conservative voices posting short videos.

Indeed, a simple check of the platform shows plenty of people posting satire that mocks woke culture.

Why does this matter? President Trump has now given the company 90 days to find a US buyer or face a US ban because he believes TikTok’s Beijing-based parent, ByteDance, shares sensitive user data with the Chinese government for surveillance purposes.

Some people inside TikTok also believe Trump is miffed by satirists on the platform who have reached cult-hero status during the pandemic by mocking the president (see comedian Sarah Cooper, whose lip-syncing Trump impersonations on the app have gone viral, landing her spots on late-night TV).

With time running out on completing a deal (talks are ongoing for a Microsoft purchase), TikTok is trying to spread the word it’s not out to get Trump.

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