Rocky

A man invested his family's $53,000 in savings into a dying video game company that was thought to be ending Later, in the basement of his home, he turned that investment into $48 MILLION. Keith Gill was a 34 year old financial analyst at a Boston insurance firm in 2019. He was just your average 9-5 worker with an average salary, but his conviction was something else. He believed GameStop, a mall video game retailer trading at $5 a share, was one of the most undervalued companies in America, even though it was struggling with the rise of the digital age. Wall Street disagreed. Hedge funds had shorted the stock so much that more shares were shorted than what actually existed. Everyone was certain GameStop was going to zero. But not Gill. Gill invested $53,000 of his family's savings and started posting his analysis online under the name DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube. Nobody took him seriously. He kept posting anyway, week after week, with nothing but spreadsheets and his own strong conviction. In January of 2021 retail traders on Reddit's WallStreetBets discovered his posts. Retail started buying and the stock went from $5 to $483 in three weeks time. A 9,600% gain. Wall Street's Hedge Funds that shorted the stock lost BILLIONS. One firm alone lost over $6 BILLION and had to be bailed out by the other hedge funds. On January 27, 2021, Gill's $53,000 investment was worth $48 MILLION. He lost $13 MILLION in a single day when the stock started going down. He held anyway, without a second thought. Robinhood restricted buying of GameStop without warning. Retail traders were angry. Congress then had summoned Gill to testify. He showed up in his Roaring Kitty headband and said three words that became the most quoted phrase in finance that year, "I like the stock." - Keith Gill His employer fired him and paid a hefty $4 MILLION fine for failing to supervise his trading. He went quiet for three years. Then in May 2024 he posted a single image on X. GameStop surged 50% the next morning before he said a single word. By June 2024 his position was worth $289 MILLION. A Hollywood film called Dumb Money was made about the event, with Paul Dano. Gill has never spoken publicly about it. Roaring Kitty will forevr be a name that is recognized in the finance world, and his legacy will not stop.

Finance called IT because a customer owed us $240,000 and nobody could find them. Customer name: TEST CUSTOMER DO NOT USE. I recognized it immediately. I created that account two years ago to test our billing software. It had a fake address. A fake phone number. The contact email was [email protected]. Apparently Sales found the account last quarter and used it to demonstrate our new quoting system. Someone accidentally converted the demonstration quote into a real order. That triggered an invoice. The invoice went unpaid. Our collections software sent seven payment reminders to [email protected]. Nobody responded. Finance escalated the account to a debt collection agency. The agency spent three weeks trying to locate TEST CUSTOMER DO NOT USE. They reported the company had no registered address, no employees, and no known assets. Finance classified the account as high-risk. Yesterday Legal asked me for the customer's original contract. I explained there was no customer. They asked whether we could prove that. I said I personally invented the company. Legal said that wasn't sufficient documentation. Apparently writing "DO NOT USE" in the customer name doesn't legally establish that the customer doesn't exist. We're now paying $8,000 for an external auditor to determine whether a company I made up owes us $240,000. Finance has asked me not to delete the account until the investigation concludes. It's our third-largest customer this quarter.

Starship Flight 14 launches in ~30 mins teapaw.org/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMP…

Yes

who wants one?

⚡️The debt has already won. No future Congress is going to reverse the trajectory through discipline. No electorate will vote for the scale of sacrifice required. No administration will voluntarily trigger the recession, asset collapse, entitlement cuts, tax shock, and political revolt needed to restore a genuinely hard fiscal path. The system will preserve continuity. That means the currency will absorb the damage. The national debt is a claim on future production. When claims grow faster than the productive base, the gap has to close somewhere. It closes through inflation, repression, taxation, reduced public capacity, lower real returns, slower private investment, and periodic monetary rescue. The number itself is almost secondary now. The real signal is that the United States has crossed from using debt as a tool into depending on debt as a condition of social order. Government spending holds together retirement systems, healthcare, defense, state budgets, research, infrastructure, household transfers, corporate revenues, and entire regional economies. Remove the borrowing and large sections of the country discover that what looked like private prosperity was partially public leverage. That is why the machine cannot stop. The debt is embedded inside income. Income is embedded inside asset prices. Asset prices are embedded inside pensions, collateral, banks, housing, consumption, and political legitimacy. Any serious attempt to shrink the debt burden violently would detonate the structure built around it. So policy will choose erosion over rupture. The state will keep paying every nominal promise. The unit in which those promises are paid will weaken over time. That is the real default. No courtroom declaration. No missed Treasury payment. No cinematic collapse. A long transfer from savers, wage earners, and fixed-income holders toward debtors, asset owners, and institutions closest to money creation. The public will be told that inflation is temporary, manageable, external, or necessary. The deeper reality is that inflation becomes part of the solvency mechanism. The Federal Reserve will resist this until resistance threatens the system. Then the definition of responsibility will change. Stability will come to mean keeping markets functioning. Market functioning will require liquidity. Liquidity will protect Treasury financing. Treasury financing will protect the political order. That loop is already visible. The most important consequence is moral. Once debt becomes structurally permanent, honest pricing disappears. Capital no longer flows only toward the most productive use. It flows toward whatever benefits from policy support, liquidity, guarantees, regulation, and proximity to the sovereign balance sheet. The economy becomes less capitalist in the classical sense and more managerial. Returns become increasingly political. Risk becomes increasingly socialized. Losses become negotiable for institutions and terminal for individuals. That corrodes legitimacy because people can feel the asymmetry even when they cannot name the mechanism.