If you can think of such tiny details. Then, surely, you can also answer the larger idea, no? What are these weapons, more in general? What are they used for normally, what are they designed to do?
And does the normal explanation perhaps make a lot more sense than pointing at the tiny details that fits a conspiracy theory?
There are probably thousands of scifi books where the moon has some forms of helium 3 mining. Considering Google pirated and used them all for training it makes sense that it puts it in present tense.
Blackrock doesn't 'own' Tesla, or any company really. They hold and manage stocks for their customers. If you own an iShares ETF or mutual fund, you own the companies, not Blackrock.
I just don't think this is a practical argument. You have zero control, influence, or access to the businesses BlackRock controls. By contrast Larry Fink has the power, which he has regularly exploited, to reshape entire economies at the snap of his fingers, let alone just one of the many businesses under their control.
Which is exactly what investors pay Fink and the BlackRock team to do. Most people don't have time to analyze and choose things to invest in, so they offload that responsibility to BlackRock in exchange for some fees. The system is working as intended.
To me, the bigger issue is whether BlackRock just gets paid a fee to manage the portfolio composition, or whether they can also exercise voting rights on shares in their ETF.
It's funny to me if it's true that people buying $1000+ phones would all be buying those low-end white-label chargers. They are somewhat notorious for being unreliable, and even dangerous.
Edit: Yes, there's decent, branded, 3rd party chargers too. Just commenting on the really cheap ones.
Anecdotally, people I know who aren't tech people and who have expensive phones almost always have cheap chargers and off-brand charging cables. The general public seem to perceive that the phone is the valuable thing, a charger or cable is a commodity so they're all the same and work equally well/poorly.
Clearly this is misguided, but I think if I tried to explain how to shop for a good and reliable USB charger to my mom, dad, brother, or sister that they'd each roll their eyes at me.
Of note, the last time I bought a new multi-port USB charger (a few years ago now), it was very difficult to find one which was reasonably priced and which carried the UL (or equivalent) mark in the USA. Another previous multi-port charger I had bought made by Anker had claimed "getting UL approval" in the product description and showed the mark in the pictures on Amazon, but once delivered the physical charger did not have any safety marks present on it. The Anker charger failed after a year and Anker sent me a replacement under warranty, the replacement also did not carry any safety mark.
The Anker iPhone accessories like cables, chargers, and charging pads are MUCH higher quality than Apple’s. Their cables are so much better than Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage. You wonder why Apple would damage their “high quality” brand image with their terrible accessories.
How many of your Anker chargers carry a UL or other safety approval mark on them?
All of Apple's do.
Having a UL mark is not an indication that a product is 100% safe to use, but it at least shows that the manufacturer cares enough about making a safe product to do the paperwork and have a 3rd party like UL review their design and manufacturing to ensure the product is as safe as can be.
Effectively no one, unless you're an engineer who has part of their job be UL compliance or until you as a consumer have to talk to an insurance company about why your house burned down.
>Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage
We must be using them very differently then.
I still have charger cables for my original iPod (2007) which I use regularly that are not broken or frayed.
Also from older phones - which is one of the reasons I was happy that they stopped shipping all the chargers and headphones as I still already had them from previous purchases.
Cableitis is unfortunately a wasteful by-product of our current electronics culture.
For some people, a $1000+ phone comes with bragging rights. The charger? Not so much.
I'd wager that's one reason some people buy the expensive phone and the cheap charger. The other is simply that most people can't tell the difference between chargers - they both charge, right?
I suspect it’s a mix, but if you stay off the absolute bottom of the barrel, there are plenty of third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.
Anecdote of one: wife bought an iPhone 13 mini yesterday at an Apple store and turned down all the hard sells on accessories and AppleCare.
> third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.
Have you checked those chargers against the UL certification database to confirm that the people who check the "won't catch on fire" part of the "works great" is actually true?
I do not cross-reference the UL database on each of my online shopping trips. I trust that the middle-priced brands (Amazon, Anker and the like) are not selling crap.
I still mostly use the charger that came with my HTC Legend. It has been under the bed and its usbA port has seen at least three types of cables over the last decade (12 years even I think).
Ok worthless claim then. I did buy 4 usbA-lightning cables to put in several places (iPhone 12 mini is my first iPhone) though. But not from Apple.
I also have a non-Apple MagSafe charger in the car. The only thing I hardly ever use is the included usbC-lightning cable ironically. They could have earned some more money on me.
"In seeking to answer this question, staff observed that during some discrete periods, GME had sharp price increases concurrently with known major short sellers covering their short positions after incurring significant losses. During these times, short sellers covering their positions likely contributed to increases in GME’s price. For example, staff observed that particularly during the earlier rise from January 22 to 27 the price of GME rose as the short interest decreased. Staff also observed discrete periods of sharp price increases during which accounts held by firms known to the staff to be covering short interest in GME were actively buying large volumes of GME shares, in some cases accounting for very significant portions of the net buying pressure during a period. Figure 6 shows that buy volume in GME, including buy volume from participants identified as having large short positions, increased significantly beginning around January 22 and remained high for several days, corresponding to the beginning of the most dramatic phase of the run-up in GME’s price."
Meaning shorts covering causing a small increase in price and then retail FOMOd in.
See also the graph on the next page that show short interest dropping from over 100% to around 20%.
I'd like to add to this the following scenario for explaining why short interest can be high even if the original shorters have closed their positions.
1. Lots of people are short.
2. Price goes up significantly, shorters get margin calls.
3. Price goes up a lot due to buying pressure from shorters closing their positions. (ie, the squeeze itself)
4. Price is now extremely high and fairly disconnected from fundamentals.
5. People notice the price is very high compared to earnings and open new short positions.
After step 5, there can be a ton of shorters in the stock yet there is not a very big chance of a new squeeze since the price at which the new short positions were opened is so high. Imagine how much the price of GME would need to rise to squeeze out the shorters who opened their position in the 300-400 USD price range.
