this thread is for posting matt levine quotes in

[Rylinks]

From my selfish perspective I would *love* to read an SEC complaint that is like “the defendant emailed Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine to ask ‘if I know my company is going to be acquired, can I buy call options in our closest competitor,’ and then went out and bought those call options,” but from your perspective you don’t want to be the defendant in that complaint.

[Ashenai]

i did think ryan cohen might do something cool but instead he did nfts and posted memes

those kind of qualified as Cool Things back in 2021

[Khaos]

at no point were nft's anything but dumb

[Skeletor]

i did think ryan cohen might do something cool but instead he did nfts and posted memes

those kind of qualified as Cool Things back in 2021

wrong

[Skeletor]

"No more teachers dirty looks" -- Matt Levine, probably

[Rylinks]

Goldman Sachs Group notably did this in 2020, arguing that its trading business was countercyclical, and that in a stressful scenario it would simply make a ton of money trading derivatives; the Fed was not amused.

[Jeb Bush 2012]

Intellectual property lawyers, as one example, frequently concern themselves with discerning the colour of bits and then pronouncing whether a program operating on those bits is behaving legally. (Computer scientists, on the other hand, believe that answering whether a program will behave legally is formally undecidable.)

Spoiler!

until there’s another thread im deeming this an appropriate place for quotes from the matt levine expanded universe

[Jeb Bush 2012]

Not … I mean, I don’t want to encourage you to do crimes. But conditional on you doing crimes, I do want to encourage you to do clever, interesting crimes.)

[Blissful]

thank you matt levine, for granting your blessing to my crimes

[Rylinks]

"no." (money stuff march 6 2023)

[Jeb Bush 2012]

Well, I am vastly more skilled at slot machines than these people, in that I have never lost $300,000, or even $300, playing slot machines. I should livestream myself not losing $300,000 a year at slot machines. Just like walk by a row of slots with a videographer and turn confidingly to the camera and whisper “my winning strategy here is to keep walking.” It’s correct! And not more boring than watching me play slots.

[Rylinks]

no one is good at slot machines,[3]

[3] Ahahaha like half of my readers are going to email me their systems for beating slot machines, and they'll work, because this is that sort of newsletter. I am doing this intentionally; you’re going to tell me how to make a fortune on slots and I’m going to do it and retire. And not livestream it.

[Ashenai]

I literally watched a dude play slot machines on Kick (twitch alternative) like a week ago. It was okay!

[Khaos]

the gacha is spreading to other parts of your brain smh

[Rylinks]

no one is good at slot machines,[3]

no slot machines are exciting,[5]

[5] No one is going to email me to contradict this one.

[Ashenai]

the gacha is spreading to other parts of your brain smh

not bad, I rolled a 4-star Khaos reply

[pterrus]

Arti, make it so every post has a 1/1000 chance of being covered in bubbles tia

[Doug]

In keeping with the glitch theme

[Rylinks]

"no." (money stuff october 25 2022)

[Rylinks]

don't take your legal advice from stringer bell either. sometimes it turns out to be helpful to have copious contemporaneous notes of a criminal conspiracy.

[Ashenai]

It was incredibly easy to beat Musk in court, says Musk, in court. Elon Musk does not abide by his contracts, and so you have to sue him to get him to keep his contracts, but when you sue him you will win, says Elon Musk, in a court case in which he is trying to get out of a contract.

[Crunchums]

[Rylinks]

Apple was like “it would be good to have good UX” and Goldman was like “yes but it would be slightly inconvenient for us.” And then Apple was like “it would be cool to have extremely clean design of our credit card — what about no number on the card? What about no card at all?” and Goldman was like “h​mm yes but isn’t that bad UX?” Both sides had something to learn from each other.

[Skeletor]

the apple card fuckin' sucks

[Ashenai]

Modern finance created the problem (Bitcoin mining) and the solution (paying people not to mine Bitcoin); the overall result is that nothing happens and yet people get paid. Just a miracle of financial engineering.

[Ashenai]

We might as reasonably dispute, whether it is the upper or under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production.

(an Alfred Marshall quote not a Matt Levine one, but I liked it and forums anarchy)

[Ashenai]

My knowledge of Stoner Cats comes from like five minutes of Googling, and if you tell me “actually they eat THC-infused catnip” that’s fine, that’s fine.

[Ashenai]

Dorsey is taking Musk’s credit risk on this put, and “Musk’s credit risk” means not just his ability to pay but, much more importantly, his willingness to pay. Elon Musk has vast quantities of money but even vaster quantities of unwillingness to pay.

[Ashenai]

Yeah look if you help run a crypto company that goes bankrupt and loses $8 billion of customer money, you don’t really want “https://www.offshorecompany.com/trusts/bahamas-asset-protection/” in your search history.

[Rylinks]

Sports gambling in the US was once mostly illegal; not a lot of people did it, and insider trading was either tolerated (gambling was illegal anyway, go ahead and use inside information!) or, like, not tolerated, but by the mob, so there was not a robust body of written regulation.