Oh Captain My Captain

Star Trek Discovery season 3 was mediocre. It was nowhere near as good as its proponents would have me believe and nowhere near as bad as the youtube commenteriat told me. It did ask an interesting question: If you were a Starfleet captain what would you say to give the go-ahead to a bold plan? There have been various iconic examples over the years. "Warp 9 Mr. Sulu", "Engage!" "Make it so".

I don't mind my entertainment breaking the fourth wall. Deadpool turning to camera and narrating is great. In Archer one of the characters "hears" the tense soundtrack and says "don't worry it's not diegetic". In discussing iconic lines for the new captain Discovery sort of damaged and spoiled the wall without daring to actually break it – it was terrible.

I discussed various possibilities that I could use in the captains chair: "Hold on to your hats", "Buckle up", "He we go!". The one that seemed to fit my personality best (proper and slightly ineffectual) was "shall we?" with a palm up hand forward gesture.

A couple of weeks later I needed a lift to the garage to drop off a broken down car. With no irony and without remembering the conversation about Star Trek I said "shall we?" to invite my friend to leave the house and unlock his car.

Richard "punch it Chewie" B

MOT

 Last week I had my sports car MOT'd. While my car is a "luxurious" version with a cabin heater and a fan, it can't use that to demist the windscreen (because the windscreen is well in front of the rear edge of the scuttle). On the way to the MOT station it was cold and wet so I used the heated windscreen. It was partially effective but also smelled like an electrical fire. I don't know if the MOT station ran the heated screen - I don't think they need to test it, but when I drove home it was completely ineffective and the car stank of burning plastic.

I ended up fixing one of the electrical circuits straight after my car has passed its MOT. The crimp on a spade connector had developed on ohm or two of resistance and was stealing half the power (and heating effect) from the windscreen.

Richard "after the event" B

Stop Thief!

 Last week I was accused of theft and then tax fraud. When I serviced my sports car I bought some genuine Ford parts. It was difficult because I'm not a garage, because we're in lockdown and because something went wrong with the payment. I managed to order the parts and pay over the phone and then collect them from outside the depot.

A couple of weeks later the manager of the parts supply place was chasing me relentlessly on the phone, and when I talked to him he accused me (none too politely) of having not paid for the parts. Apparently his banking system had flagged up the purchase as suspicious and he was in trouble. I found my credit card receipt and convinced him that I had actually paid and he eventually found my payment on his system. It turns out that they had only charged me for the parts and had forgotten to add on the VAT. This discovery didn't really fix anything because his accounts still didn't line up and the transaction was still suspicious. It was 100% their fault, but I eventually had to pay the colossal £5.60 discrepancy that had triggered the whole investigation. It was a waste of everyone's time.

Richard "I din do nuffin" B

Short Squeeze

 Every other video on youtube at the moment seems to be explaining the "short squeeze" or "short covering rally" that's happening to GameStop shares.

Imagine it was last April and I didn't have any loo roll. I could have borrowed 4 rolls from one of my well provisioned friends and promised to give him back 5 rolls in May. As it happens It would have been no problem to buy him his 5 rolls in May. Now imagine someone with a better knowledge of paper goods made the same deal and borrowed 4 rolls in April to give back 5 rolls in May. He could have sold them at the height of the panic for, say, £20 and bought the 5 rolls in May for less than £2. He would keep the £18 difference. This is called short selling.

A load of big hedge funds have large short positions on GameStop. The good weirdos of reddit noticed this and all started buying stock and promising to keep hold of it. When it was time for the hedge funds to give back the stock that they'd borrowed there wasn't any for sale and the price skyrocketed.

There are two misinformed comments that I keep seeing:

Firstly – "They were shorting more than 100% of the stock. It shouldn't be allowed". Nonsense! And if you ever find out how few pound coins there are in bank vaults compared with how many pounds people think they have in their accounts you'll lose your mind. Imagine that Ace Plant Hire rent a mini-digger to Bagshot Garden Machinery for 6 months. Bagshot Garden Machinery rent the mini-digger to Charlie for a long weekend. While it's in Charlie's garden both Bagshot Garden Machinery and Ace Plant Hire are owed a mini-digger but there's only one mini-digger to pay them both back with. It's the exact same situation.

Secondly "Short selling is immoral. It shouldn't be allowed". Nonsense! It allows people with good information to force capital to move to more productive enterprises and pays them for their trouble. If a short seller is right, then they destroy the value locked up in some over-valued enterprise and their assets get redeployed to something better. It means we don't have to wait for the buggy-whip factory to slowly go bust before we can tear it down and put up a factory that makes something people actually want (like electric cars or a smug sense of self-satisfaction). We are all (on aggregate) better off as a result.

Richard "to the moon" B

Confused

 The human brain is a huge pattern matching machine that also modifies itself. We are adapted to learn and we find ourselves drawn to sources of new information. This means that we can find situations or stories compelling when we don't fully understand what we're experiencing. As a tiny example look at how many stories start in the middle of the action and we don't find out what's really going on until later, or how many catchy songs have difficult to understand words.

I used to drive to guitar lessons on a Saturday morning and I would listen to the radio on the way home. I used to love it if I heard the proposed answers to the "agony aunt" feature without having heard the original problem. "Go round there with a bottle of wine and say you're not sorry". The magic and the mystery disappeared as soon as the presenter reiterated the problem for the late-comers like me.

I now work from home and out of my bedroom/office window I'm watching another soap opera that I don't understand. The people who's house backs on to mine often spend a lot of time staring out of their upstairs window into their back garden. They also sometime throw a bunch of keys from the window to someone in the garden, and they enter or leave the house through the back garden. My best guess is that it's something to do with keeping isolated in lockdown and that part of the household doesn't go downstairs or use the front door, but I can't really work it out.

Richard "I can't wait for the big reveal" B