Could just add it to their demands for opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Also we need to fund a proxy army in Mexico.

He was an incredibly prolific poster. Unfortunately I found him to be rather abrasive, I don't recall any particular interaction but I do get an "oh yeah, that guy. Glad he's not been around much lately" sense when I see that name.

As I recall he was heading somewhere else, but the US revoked his passport while he happened to be catching a connecting flight in Russia and so he ended up taking refuge there instead.

The S&P Dow Jones Index Committee explicitly rejected proposals to fast-track SpaceX.

The Russel 1000 and NASDAQ 100 did have "fast-track" rules for large IPOs like this. However, they have an additional guardrail that I think you overlooked here. When SpaceX went public only about 4% of the company's total shares were released to the public (the public "float"). The remaining 95%+ of the shares belonging to Elon Musk, early venture capitalists, and long-time employees are legally locked down and can't be sold for 90 to 180 days after the IPO. Index funds are weighted based on free float (only the shares actively trading), the amount of stock the fast-tracking index funds are actually forced to buy right now is very small, representing a fraction of 1% of most portfolios.

So no, this really didn't fleece 401ks and other conservative investment funds. They have rules in place specifically to prevent this sort of thing and outside forces can't "force" them to break those rules. Musk and other early shareholders were unable to dump their stocks during that initial IPO price spike and pension funds weren't buying the stocks up in significant quantities.

Index funds don't update their investment balance instantly, in part specifically to avoid this kind of problem. Most major indices require a stock to trade publicly for a minimum period (often 3 to 6 months) before they'll include them, and they rebalance on a fixed schedule - usually quarterly or semi-annually. A stock must wait for the next official rebalancing date to be added.

The things that might have been bit are Active Mutual Funds and Sector ETFs. These funds are focused much more tightly on specific sectors of the market and often buy "immediately" to ensure that they don't miss out on up-and-comers. FOMO can bite these more easily. But for that very reason they're not something that conservative investors like public pensions would invest heavily in, they're explicitly meant for the more gamble-oriented stuff. If you explicitly take a risk with your money then you should expect to lose it sometimes.

I hung on to my first dog several weeks longer than I should have. I know it's rough, but hopefully in the long run you'll feel that you did the right thing by him letting him go at the right time.

IMO the best way to approach life is to try to maximize the number of good days in it and minimize the number of bad days. I'm sure in those 12 years you gave him plenty of great days.

In the lower right photo I can hear him yelling "wheee!"

My current expectation is even weirder, actually. I think the most likely outcome at the moment is for Trump to "switch sides" and start supporting Iran against Israel. Not in the sense of literally bombing Israel, but in the sense of bullying Israel to give concessions to Iran.

Trump's philosophy on life is very simple: there are winners and there are losers. Right now Iran is a winner. He got suckered by a loser into siding with them against a winner, and now he's mad. I could see him wanting to be on the winning side and punishing the ones who made him look like a loser.

As I say, very weird timeline.

It's such a weird timeline where I can say "at least Trump surrendered when it became clear his stupid war was lost."

The discussion on the dispute seems pretty strongly tilted in the "keep" direction.

Going to be interesting to see the United States put Wikipedia under export control as a munition.

This isn't about stopping AI music, it's about controlling it. The big copyright cartels like the RIAA would love to continue controlling it and now people are cheering them on.