The lion kingdom has sometimes wondered how stock brokers execute trades as fast as they do & seem to always magically satisfy the limit orders, unless the limit price is way off. The reason is probably because they don't trade real shares. They aggregate a bunch of trades from a bunch of customers, with each trader getting the most optimum price possible for imaginary shares. Some time later, the aggregated trade is executed with the real shares at the true price. I f customers buy a stock, the broker takes whatever the bid was during the limit order but doesn't really buy the stock at once. They aggregate many buys, sometimes taking more or less money from each customer. Then, the broker buys a large chunk of physical shares at whatever true price the stock is later. If the true price falls, the broker makes money. If the true price rises, the customers make money. Usually, some customers bid too high & some bid too low, with the broker executing somewhere in
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The lion kingdom's regret of the day is not sticking to the plan, manely staying heavily weighted in stocks for the last 20 years & tapering off only in old age. Analysts 20 years ago recommended 60/40 in youth & 20/80 in old age. The original plan would have yielded home ownership, a real piano, a machine shop, less commuting, & much greater productivity. The problem was software lions have short careers compared to the audience of the 60/40 portfolio so they had to plan to taper sooner. They make most of their money before age 35, then face the prospect of not being employable after 35 & having to lock in their gains sooner. A software lion facing a stock market crash probably won't see a recovery before he needs the money . This short career, combined with what analysts called unprecedented volatility caused the analyst messages to change. The message fluctuated between getting out of stonks completely & being all in, so like most animals, lions go
The lion kingdom still remembers when it had maybe 6 months or a year of cash. If lions became unemployed, they figured they'd go back to school & borrow more student loans. The cash would disappear instantly, because lions in those days were burning well above their means, $1000/month on rent just to have a job. That was considered a lot of money. Guys who burned $1300/month on rent were MIT graduates with lots of job security. Debt might have caused lions to be more frugal. Just knowing there was always a monthly payment coming created a virtual burden which wouldn't have been there if the money was paid up front.
The lion kingdom started wondering if we all live forever in our frame of reference, why don't we ever see anyone else living forever? Maybe the older we get, the longer everyone else appears to live, but surely Jehovah Biden has seen people living longer than the rest of us, in his frame of reference. The Jehovah Biden we see from our frame of reference only sees what we see.
The last member of generation X to see Batman Returns was a lion. After surviving through it, there was nothing visually appealing in it, not even Cat Heroine. Danny Devito did what he could with a terrible story, but the makeup hid it all. Cat Heroine was attractive in the commercials, 30 years ago, but her tattered costume took more attention in old age. 1992 was the age of the boring lead man, a kind of rebellion against the wackos of the 70's the way millennials are a conformist rebellion against the counter culture of generation X. After seeing so many animal villains, lions only wonder why there has never been a lion villain. After garfield, heathcliff, star blazers, & transformers became movies in the early 2000's, the afternoon cartoon craze never made it to a thundercats movie.
Sometimes, lions miss the long runs they took in the city on Friday nights. It was terribly inefficient to commute to the city, but there were some better moments. For some reason, a 16 mile romp through the city on June 5, 2015 has continued to flash back. It was the lion kingdom's 1st run to hunter's point, followed by many sketchy miles looking for a bathroom. The GPS log can be played back in Goog Earth, revealing the exact time of every location, including taking a dump at 9pm & returning to the office at 10:30pm.
Finally figured out how to export the mac's root filesystem over NFS. The trick is to search for "export mac over nfs" otherwise it won't give any useful results. The procedure is setting /etc/exports to / -network 10.0.0.0 -mask 255.255.0.0 -maproot=x Then sudo nfsd restart Lions had downloaded movies on the mac for years, since there are no downloaders for Linux, then scped them to Linux for years. The next milestone is repartitioning the currently inaccessable 135 gigs. 
Finally tried Davinci Resolve on Linux, if only to feel like it's 1999 again, when killer apps were being ported to Linux like crazy. The effects & file formats are manely disabled in the free version. It only imports JPEG movies with PCM audio. Lions slowly abandoned hardware effects while Resolve does 100% of its effects in hardware & won't function without the latest NVidia driver. There's a certain prestige in programming video routines for hardware, kind of like the 1st time lions migrated a program from Windows to UNIX. Effects which ground along in software were instant on hardware, but lions just don't use video editors for effects & don't always have a computer with supported hardware. Hardware support migrated from OpenGL to CUDA a few decades ago & lions never ported all the work they did in OpenGL to CUDA. There was a kind of relief to finally have a fully featured multiband compressor, a year after lions struggled to find examples
It's understandable that 3D modeling wasn't taught in school 30 years ago, but nowadays it's all but essential to know how to make functional CAD models in a confuser & print them out on a 3D printer. By the end of lion public school, classrooms had Apple IIgs's, crippled to 2.8Mhz. They couldn't teach anything close to functional CAD modelling for our generation. Today, CAD modelling requires a trivial amount of computing power. It's an example of how old age can make you obsolete. Another basic skill of today that was impossible to teach our generation was creating original music in garageband. 80's music had synthesized sound, but getting good enough quality was expensive & relatively complicated to produce. Consumers had simple sound cards, but the mane limitation might have been a lack of software. Today, people create simple beat tracks for their videos & apply basic music theory relatively easily. Creating videos was definitely not ta
The lion kingdom sometimes wonders what would have happened if Trump actually won. Well, there would still be mobs. They would be smashing the department stores & government buildings instead of just the government buildings. We would never have known just how attached to power he really was. We were all told about Bill taking the furniture from the white house, H-Rod & the russian conspiracy, Gore & the dangling chads, but none of the protests from those past politicians were as vocal as Mr T. Economically, there wouldn't have been another economic stimulus package. It definitely wouldn't sail through like it's going to or be as large. In the old system of fractional reserve banking, the only winner of an economic stimulus package was the wealthy bondholder. In the modern system of fiat money, the only winner of an economic stimulus package is the wealthy stockholder. The explosion in asset prices after every economic stimulus package is the modern for
The democratic party has spoken. 1st Russia 1917 then China 1949, then US 2021. The next communist revolution won't be won with bullets but electrons. If the Chinese or Russian revolutions happened today, they would probably look the same, a sudden banishment of their leaders from all communication mediums. The difference is this one wasn't based on a massive outcry from the public for economic reform. Even the media wasn't focused on the economy, but a small number of people in high places got an opening & took it, managed to pull off a revolution which will result in massive economic changes, student loan forgiveness, wealth taxes, universal basic income. All that will happen because of some crisis that no-one will remember. It makes lions wonder if all the communist revolutions originally started with some crisis no-one remembers, only to end up with the economic systems they became famous for becoming entrenched by opportunity.
Lions thought it would be fun to be among the protesters & get pictures in areas we weren't allowed to photograph during the tour, but then... They'll go over all the air travel records, credit card records, security cams, phone records of everyone in the city & track down everyone in the building. What happened to the looters in 2020 remanes unclear. The media said some of them were tracked down, but there was never any public outreach using camera footage. Messing around with a federal building is a different story than robbing a Victoria Secret.
Today's Biden inspired thought: no-one has an accurate memory of their past. We only have a memory of a past that resulted in us being alive in the current time. Say you made a video of yourself being diagnosed with cancer in the past that condemns you to death some time in the future. Actually, the only way to know if the video is accurate is by comparing it to your memory of the diagnosis, whose accuracy itself is guaranteed to be flawed. What will really happen in the future is loss of all memory that either a video or a diagnosis was ever made & you going on living. The cruel side effect of the multiverse is that we see everyone around us eventually die but never experience death in our own frame of reference. If you kill yourself, everyone else will see you die but you'll wake up the next day with no memory of ever killing yourself & probably facing the same problems. Elon inspired thought: everyone who has ever lived has experienced an exponential growth i
Life of pi was sort of bearable, only because we already know he survives. He's completely incompetent & does everything possible to kill himself, but it doesn't matter because the beginning of the movie showed him still alive. For entertainment, that just leaves visuals & some spiritual journey. Every night, the ocean glows in the dark. Glowing plants were a big deal in 2012. It was also influenced by the 3D craze of the time. Then he runs into a carnivorous island. Seem to recall a story about a carnivorous island in another movie. It was actually set in the 1980's, as shown by the tape recorder in the final scene. The 1980's in India looked absolutely ancient.
Had a nightmare about ghost hunting. We were in a large living room in some abandoned house at night. All the lights were off. Unlike normal ghost hunting where nothing happens & it's up to the announcer to make it exciting, something actually did happen. We started chanting & asking if grandpa's spirit was causing the strange sightings. Went looking for a longer USB cable to get better video, but couldn't find the expensive one. Just found a short one. Then, we had to go into the basement. It was called a timber cellar, after some old age terminology. Was surprised the ghost was actually causing things to happen in rapid succession, since ghosts in reality always acted slowly, using natural processes.
In screenwriter terms, Tom Hanks is prolific. Lions only say that after seeing many self proclaimed screenwriters never get past writing treatments & outlines. Among feature films, he wrote "That thing you do" & "Greyhound" which were both snappy & checked all the boxes, but light on novelty. The mane novelty in Greyhound was the scenes of wolfpack submarines surfacing, with their unique conning tower art. Tom Hanks in WWII uniform we've all seen before. Neither does he do anything besides bark orders & change shoes. There's not much to it besides battle after battle. Reviewing the greatest submarine movie ever made, Das Boot, the lion kingdom noted how much more absolutely ancient the time of 1941 looked when depicted during the absolutely ancient time of 1981. It was shot in the real uboat pens of La Rochelle. The uboat pens were in a concrete building, in the middle of a much larger port. It was very inconspicuous from the air,
With vaccine production in hindsight, a virus pandemic 30 years ago would have been much more devastating. We could have accelerated the creation of remote work & remote classes using dialup modems, but we didn't have RNA vaccines or any semblance of engineering a viral vector for human use. Genome sequencing was much slower & more expensive. Without a vaccine, we would have had rolling lockdowns for years. The economy would have truly been crippled, setting back progress enough that maybe we'd still be watching low definition TV on VHS & carrying around CD players now.