How I grew @prov_pizza 3650% over the last month.

This is me trying to build in public like @thisiskp_ and being transparent like @jackbutcher.

A visual thread. 👇🍕

1/ The secret towards getting these gains? Start from zero.

The stats after 4 weeks:

0 —> 77.4K Impressions
0 —> 6,130 Profile visits
0 —> 490 Likes
2 —> 73 Followers, sorry for the bait ;)

Here are some of my key learnings. 👇

2/ @jamierusso taught me to remix the content of others.

With only 9 followers I added some pizza sauce to Jamie’s content.

It got me over 4K impressions on a single tweet.

3/ The key to a good remix: add value.

With @prov_pizza I tried to add:

- Another perspective.
- Humor.
- Pizza. This usually does the trick ;

4/ Remixes were a pitfall too.

I was tempted to remix anything from anyone I found interesting, because it seemed to work.

@foundbryan taught me to stick to my niche.

So #infosec #jobs thread.
In the last 12 months, I've been involved with 60+ interviews for various SOC, IR etc roles. This has come from about 120+ CV/Resume submissions.
To start, a caveat though - this is all IMHO. Hiring is an amazingly individual event.

First CV length. The common wisdom is that it has to be under 2 pages and very tailored to the role. I disagree. A CV should be concise but it also needs to provide enough information to make the hiring manager want to speak to you. If there is an HR screen, it needs to contain

a tonne of possibly random keywords. If a job advert asks for 10 different skills, and you can fit this in to 1-2 pages, chances are the person reading it will find it missing detail and think it is unconvincing. If it's your first job a 1 page CV is ok but the more you've done

the longer your CV gets. I don't have a perfect answer but I'd say don't fret about it. A large part of the hiring process is automated and even the people who read it will read it online scrolling through to get to the bits they are interested in. Long CVs rarely put people off.

Sidenote: if they do, they are likely to be difficult to work with so you might be OK with them rejecting you after all.

THREAD on Robinhood/Reddit/GME: CONGRESS is calling for action, but no one has clearly articulated what they actually want.

We could look back on this as the biggest “Pump & Dump” in history... with the little guys carrying all the water & then getting it dumped on their heads.

It started with a SMART discovery, Melvin Capital (hedge fund) broke the cardinal rule of short selling. They took on way too big of a short position given the size of their fund, how heavily shorted the stock already was and the amount of shares outstanding.

Technically, they were RIPE to get squeezed, but there was virtually no case for anyone following fundamentals (earnings, growth etc...) to want to buy this sleepy, brick and mortar video game retailer.
Short selling is absolutely legal and adds to efficiency of the market.

More often than not, the short seller gets hurt & not the company. But there are many who believe it’s harmful to American businesses and short sellers to use media and unsavory practices to put struggling companies in further distress.

This week will definitely bring back the debate on banning short selling. This is a huge win for Elon Musk who has been battling & defeating short sellers for years and wants the practice irradicated.
He’s been unsuccessfully trying to get lawmakers to focus on this for a while.

The largest wealth transfer in history.

Time for a thread 👇👇👇

Today’s mix of monetary and fiscal policies are having a very different economic impact then we saw post the GFC.

Back then, deflationary forces were exacerbated by a brutal wealth loss problem.

Especially the lower classes.

They lost over 84% of their net worth from '07-'11.

This time we are seeing the complete opposite.

Lower classes just increased their wealth at the highest annual amount in the history of the data.

In fact, the bottom 50% net worth not only increased but is now 77% higher than it was at the peak of the housing bubble.

If we zoom out, this is what the prior chart looks like going back to the 90s.

I've noticed a kind of tribal individualist that's common online. They move in mobs, make nearly identical objections, claim not be a group or believe in groups, and are extremely hostile to the identities of others.

They've also been REALLY BAD for online scientific discourse.

Many people believe in individualism so strongly that they seem incapable of perceiving anything to do with groups. They don't understand sociology as a category of knowledge or social problems as anything more than a collection of the unique challenges of individuals.

Many individualists don't believe in sociology. They see it as a false science. Since groups don't exist for them, only individuals, they don't think sociological can exist either. After all, how can one scientifically study groups when groups aren't real?

Many individualists don't understand public health. Inherent in the idea of public health is the idea that you personally might have to sacrifice for the well-being of others. That doesn't sit well with them so they reject public health as a false ideal.

Since many individualists claim not to be part of groups, they often substitute group identity with pledges of allegiance to ideas. They might say "I believe in logic and reason". They will say this even when they've long since abandoned logic and reason.

THREAD

Can we talk a little bit about what Cal McNair is about to do to the NFL, and the leverage owners have had over players for roughly 100 years?

I would be FASCINATED to know what the NFL league office and other owners are thinking about the Watson/Texans standoff

Every 8-10 years, the owners and players negotiate multi-billion dollar CBA agreements, where the owners are trying (and succeeding) to maintain leverage over players through the salary cap, franchise tag, penalties over holdouts, etc. etc.

if a 25 year old QB forces his way out of an NFL team, it's a Crossing the Rubicon moment. It's never happened before in NFL history, and it would be almost solely due to Cal McNair's inability to properly run an NFL franchise

if the Texans trade Deshaun Watson, it sets a major precedent. I don't expect it to happen often, but if it happens once, it will happen again with another young QB

The Texans already screwed the rest of the NFL by allowing Bill O'Brien to make the incredibly impulsive Laremy Tunsil trade, getting hammered in the contract negotiation, and completely re-setting the market for left tackles in the league, which other teams now have to deal with

Quite you say? I’ll give you quite. I don’t do cheesy music. When I’m pounding the sand burning off the tequila and the virus I’m listening to Mr Motivator by IDLES...here’s what I hear

Repeat after me
I am I
And I intend to go go go
Like Conor McGregor with a samurai sword and roller blades Like a hedge funder declaring he’s morally and intellectually bankrupt on his sunny Caribbean island
How d’you like them clichés???

Now turning to end of week stuff. Don’t stop the game and don’t protect #hedgefundelite. Buying crappy co.s and bidding them to preposterous valuations is almost DaDaism and the kind of nihilism you find around fin de siècles or at least in The Joker movie.

But more’s going on. These stocks ain’t random. They all conform to patterns of absurdity that i professionally engaged in. I posted examples on my insta account this week. And shorting Nokia - Mr douche bag Hedgie - to buy Ericsson is just lame i.m.o

gamestock is like someone studied the Netflix transformation from vendor of videos from a vending m/c to global digital platform and went hmm...I could spin that? The fable of the dumb jocksters is cute...but maybe disingenuous

Imagine going about your life, when a virus develops into a pandemic. Suddenly the rulers of your country are like "We're going to let the virus infect us, don't listen to the outside world".

Most people in your country are like "Awesome!", and ridicule you if trying to opt out

You hear about all these stuff like chronic health issues the virus causes, in different research papers available on the internet. It appears to be a serious problem, likely to ruin many lives. You do however never hear it mentioned in the debate in your country.

On the news you hear people with fancy titles, downplaying the virus, and ridiculing other countries for trying to stop it.

The resistance is futile, they say. We are all going to get infected in the end anyways.

You see the schools in other countries closing down, but in your own country they remain open. Parents are not allowed to keep their children at home. If they do, they are punished by the government, shunned as bad parents by those who think the herd immunity strategy is awesome.

You later find out that the people leading the response to the pandemic, reasons around how it is beneficial to keep schools open in e-mails with each other. They reflect on the benefits of open schools, for children getting infected, thus contributing to the herd immunity.

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://t.co/xWzre4r0Yj

1/

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.

2/

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.

3/

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.

4/

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.

5/

The White supremacists who attacked the Capitol on 1/6 claimed they were defending America from the coming destruction of an antiracist politics. This fearmongering piece argues antiracist demands at schools “would destroy the institutions themselves.”

White supremacist violence is tacitly being fomented by pieces like this one. McWhorter urged people to “resist destructive demands” and press “for the very survival of the institution,” and praised a professor who said the demands would lead to a “’civil war on campus.’” 2/9

And, as usual when writing on antiracism, McWhorter is arguing against himself. He misrepresented the position of campus activists and argued against his own misrepresentations. 3/9

He misrepresented these activists as believing their institutions are entirely racist, have never made antiracist changes, and need “to be blown up.” Then he points to the reforms these schools have made. 4/9

In fact, these activists would almost certainly acknowledge the existence of past reforms. But the issue is these institutions still have widespread and pervasive inequities and injustices which of course McWhorter fails to mention. 5/9

1/ The #Bitcoin bear case has two two components:

The macro, and the miners.

THREAD 👇

2/ On the macro side, if the dollar reverses its major downtrend and/or real rates turn positive, that will hurt $BTC considerably.

I don't expect either to happen in 2021, but have to pay attention to these.

3/ On the miners side, one has to consider the miners' cycle.

It works like this 👇

4/ Miners' hashrate (the aggregated bitcoin computing capacity) is directly tied to mining difficulty, which is the main variable in the bitcoin cost of production

=> the more capacity installed, the higher the difficulty, and the higher the cost.

5/ In a bull-run, miners' hashrate lags price, so as price takes off and moves higher, miners' profitability explodes (as price goes up but production costs don't as much).

These are the happy times.

Incoming rant.

I'm pressing the "tweet" button as I type, and I'm typing as I think, so there's every possibility that this will drift into tangents and/or nowhere. Of course, that's true pretty much every time I start threading.

I know diddly-squat about physiology.

Friends and family who *do* know anything about physiology regularly mock my (apparently bizarre) theories of how bodies work.

I am not a trustworthy narrator when it comes to things like How Vaccines Work.

I know diddly-squat about epidemiology.

Unlike physiology, where I am firmly in the domain of Messrs. Dunning and Kruger, I've read enough about the subject to understand how little I know.

This is a complicated subject, where obvious truths are seldom either obvious or true.

I also know diddly-squat about public health policy.

Public *transportation* policy is way more in my wheelhouse. But this at least lets me make some useful analogies.

…I mentioned digressions? Yeah, I just started to write a very long digression about public transportation paradoxes, and it was taking away from the point I wanted to make.

For edification and in leading by the Holy Spirit, I would like to share with the body of Christ the reason why I use a King James Bible, as opposed to the newer modern versions. Please know, I myself was adamantly opposed to switching from an ESV for years, being actually..

saved through an NIV bible. I believed the issue was a small one and that it did not matter. I am not here to convince anyone that the love of God in Christ unto salvation is only found in a certain bible, for we know that a man is justified by the grace of God through faith..

apart from any works. Yet, I am led to share some findings (which others already have shared). The newer bible versions have apparently corrupted the word of God, by eliminating words and whole verses. This appears to be the enemy's game plan since most people use the modern..

versions. I am going to list book, chapter, verse (if any one wants to compare the KJV to the modern versions) with a brief description of the differences. In many cases there are whole passages that have been eliminated from the modern versions. Some of you have already done....

their own work here, esp @SolaScriptura99 and also @JoshuaVats to whom I am thankful. They have more extensive findings than mine I am sure. What is evident, is there has been a purposeful hiding of important words/terms in these newer versions such as 'blood', 'heaven',...

Hey everyone self-employed in the United States, and particularly authors! If you did not get first draw PPP loans, you are still eligible to get a first draw PPP loan right now.

What you need if you file a Schedule C:
(*) Your 2019 tax returns
(*) Enough spoons to file paperwork now and again in a couple of months
(*) A good-faith belief that COVID impacted your business

There are a lot of places you can go.

BlueVine is one of

If you DID get a first round of PPP, and you had ONE QUARTER in 2020 where you made 25% less than the corresponding quarter in 2019, you can apply for a second round of PPP.

This requires that you keep good records. At a minimum, hopefully you had all your income deposited into a bank account that you use JUST for your business.

1/

Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'll help you understand Geometric Expectations.

2/

Imagine we have an investment opportunity.

If the investment goes well, we get to double our money.

But if it goes badly, we'll end up losing three fourths of it.

There's a 50/50 chance of either outcome.

The question: is this a good bet or not?

3/

A simple way to approach this question is to calculate the bet's "expectation".

For every $1 we bet, there are 2 possibilities:

1. The lucky case, where we double our money and end up with $2, and

2. The unlucky case, where we lose (3/4)'th to end up with just $0.25.

4/

Each of these outcomes is equally likely.

So, on *average*, every $1 we put in turns into ($2 + $0.25)/2 = $1.125.

This is a *positive* 12.5% return.

Such bets are called *positive expectation* bets. On average, we expect to *make* (rather than *lose*) money on them.

5/

Suppose we could take many turns betting at these odds.

In any one turn, we could of course lose money.

But because our bet has positive expectation, *over time* we expect to make money.