Originally published at: AOC learns how Robinhood makes its money | Boing Boing
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The billionaire welfare crowd is crying an awful lot these days. They need to pull themselves up by those boot straps they are always talking about.
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If they’d just stop buying lattes and avocado toast, and learn how to code, everything would be fine.
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They did, and now we have HFT.
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AOC’s going to be taking a good hard look at Citadel. Lots of sleaze to uncover there.
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That was very informative. Thank you for posting it!
[geek metaphor warning] Citadel is the evil emperor Palpatine promoting both sides of the war in order to eliminate competition and gain power.
[random blathers] There is no hope for anything like a properly competitive market (capitalist ideal) given the microsecond trading market. The supply of available “short fiber” is already locked in the hands of the Palpatines. There ought to be a proper ‘gambling commission’ regulating the stock market (but there won’t be). And there ought to be a small transaction fee on every transaction; possibly going to a national effort to ease the homeless population (but there won’t be).
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But how can they afford boot straps if we make them pay their fair share in taxes… /s
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The rich bled the poor, then the working class and now are turning on each other. I’m going to enjoy this.
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That was a great stream. It was cool to hear two people having a discussion.
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Speaking of Robinhood, this now-deleted page from their website’s “Help” section is a real journey, and not in a good way.
(Oh good, OneBox pulled the big whopper for me.)
Socialism is different from capitalism, in which individual property rights determine ownership. Under capitalism, each person is entitled to the wealth they create from their land, labor, equipment, and entrepreneurship.
Buddy, you just described socialism.
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Yup.
There is a lot of confusion about what socialism is, and usually the “downsides” people claim will occur under “socialism” already exist in our capitalist society.
It’s best to do one’s own research on the subject… 
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So in short, a site called Robinhood (which by its name would seem to be about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor) is actually helping the rich get richer by telling them what trades their users are making. Meaning whether you make money on Robinhood or not, you are helping Citadel make money just by using it.
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Given that they think capitalism is workers getting the value of their labour we must assume that the Sherrif of Nottingham app exists in upside down land.
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I’m impressed at how crisp and clear AOC’s voice is-- is it from her bluetooth headset? I’m assuming she didn’t bother to set up a separate mic.
Wait, what? Why does an app that’s not about politics have a screed like that in their help section?? This is as if Uber had an anti-bicycle manifesto in their FAQs. Or Postmates had polemics against home cooking on their About page.
And that Nazis Were Socialists thing, do they really believe that or is it just a way to con the stupid? Surely nobody able to write a coherent sentence would believe such blindingly obvious BS.
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She’s a professional, of course she uses a separate mic. You can actually see it in the video. My guess is it’s a Yeti Blue or similar USB mic for podcasting and streaming.
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The amount of times that BS has been put on the BBS has taught me that there are no end to the people who believe it.
They believe that because the word is in their name then it is true, just like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and the Holy Roman Empire. I guess we should expect that in a time when the Republican Party seems to be filled with monarchists.
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Can confirm. It’s a real annoyance for me, too. Because it’s so obviously not true. It comes from people not having a good working definition of terms like Marxism, socialism, communism, fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, etc. For them, they are all stand ins for “bad” and “unfree” but the root of that is all from Marx, who they’ve never read or if they have, they have not read critically in the sense of truly trying to understand his point.
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