Sweet

You are not required to tell anyone they aren’t the gender they claim if you don’t want. However you are overlooking, and haven’t acknowledged, that many within the trans movements want to force us to affirm that a trans-person’s gender is what they claim. You also don’t have to care either but there are reasons to care mentioned above. This includes hormone blockers for nine year olds, hormones and surgery for teens, being taught to children in schools behind parents backs, people losing their job for not getting with gender theory - there are other reasons too: - Fallon Fox was a male who transitioned to a woman and entered woman’s MMA beating the shit out of them. - Isla Bryson was a male who raped two women and was convicted. He became trans, claimed he was a female, and was sent to a female prison (yes really). Great that you don’t care about these issues, but why are you frustrated that many of us do care? The issues are real even if you prefer to not care about them. It’s not really a Conservative vs Liberal issue here in the UK. It’s one of the rare issues with much common cause.

There are a range of reasons to care. Being able to speak the truth is reason enough. Some people have lost their jobs for not believing what you believe - that gender and sex are not fluid. In the UK Maya Forstater was discriminated against and lost her job because she was gender-critical. She took a case against her employer and won. That is important, we are talking about serious discrimination here. It's far beyond some fella dressing up as a girl in drag. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but you haven't been paying attention, probably because you don't care.

Assuming you’ve not made an error by agreeing Parsad that gender and sex are not fluid, you have outed yourself as being opposed to much of the transgender movements beliefs - because they in fact do believe it is fluid. To claim they are mentally ill is frowned upon too. The medical definition of ‘gender identity disorder’ was changed so it was less stigmatising and the result is the transgender movement don’t want it considered an illness at all. When you say they are ‘not just mentally ill’ you're offending much of the trans movement because they don't believe it's an illness at all. From this belief that it is perfectly normal that you can be born in the wrong body, that your brain can be a different gender, follows that it is perfectly normal to ‘change’ your sex through hormones and surgery. And if you change you sex it can be insisted that male-female trans are really women, that must use the female bathrooms and facilities, that must compete against women in sports and other sex based competitions, and to say otherwise is discrimination. If you don’t want to date, fuck and pair up with a trans-woman it’s discrimination because she is a real woman: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42652947.amp In the UK there is a push for gender self ID, which means that if a male says they are a female, the law would mean that for the purposes of passports, driving licenses etc they are the sex and gender of their choosing. With that they inherit female rights or men rights. You might ask ‘so what’ - to which I’d ask ‘doesn’t truth matter anymore’? Doesn’t the impact on the majority of women matter? It’s really not about treating people well, it’s way beyond that. The movement has transitioned (to borrow the phrase) from wanting broader acceptance of transgender people to demanding that society and everyone else accept they are the sex and gender they say they are. That a transwoman IS a woman and if you disagree you are transphobic - meaning that according to many transgender advocates you rkbabang are a transphobe (I'm not joking). If you don’t know all of this you haven’t been paying attention. Its not just Conservatives pushing back against this, it’s many many Liberal too, like Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, and JK Rowling... heck even many gay people.

Trouble is though dwy is that in the UK at least, treatment at the Tavistock gender clinic was very often affirming and uncritical. I'll not rehash the story, but you can read about it here: ‘A contentious place’: the inside story of Tavistock’s NHS gender identity clinic | Transgender | The Guardian At root of the trans issue is that its not scientifically accurate to say you can be born in the wrong body, or you can change your sex. This matters, for example, medical care is tailor around biological sex. I want it kept away from my own children.

dwy, I cannot speak to everyone, but I think you are far off the mark if you think it is not liking gay people. A growing number of homosexual have issues with the transgender movement. They argue that the transgender movement pushes people to question if they are actually gay but instead born in the wrong body. They consider it damaging to their rights as homosexuals and medically damaging for many young homosexuals. For example: LGB Alliance (@AllianceLGB) / Twitter In the UK the Tavistock gender clinic was investigated and ordered to close down by the Government. Puberty blockers were given to children from aged 9 years old, and the treatment given to them was ruled to have failed to consider alternative issues, such as a high correlation with autism: NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic - BBC News I'm sure part of the rise of trans people is social acceptance, but there is no way the meteoric rise in the number identifying as trans is down just to social acceptance. It's now trendy and a way to get attention - even some trans people think this. Bill Maher recently did a skit on the transgender movement and questioned some of the trends and interventions: New Rule: Along for the Pride | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - YouTube

In the past ten or so years we have started teaching about trans in schools, sought to get gender recognition laws passed to allow anyone to ‘change their sex’ if they wanted, want men competing in woman’s sport, give puberty blockers to children under the age of 10 (UK), surgery and cross hormones for teens, passed laws that compels speech pronoun use, and other laws which means parents must affirm their child’s gender. @Parsad @dwy000 do you consider pushing back against that as targeting a particular group?

I think Europeans are probably ok on natty gas front. They are going into another winter with very high storage, so probably OK until next year. By then they may have additional storage built, LNG terminals etc.

@KPO I don’t see the discount on the CF that I would have hoped for - just a cursory glance at price. Fertiliser companies probably benefit from low prices I would think. @blakehampton Chesapeake energy was a badly run company that only recently came out of bankruptcy. Looking at price again, I’m not sure that the really low prices are reflected in the share price. It might simply be that nobody believes these low gas prices is likely to last, therefore no compelling opportunity.

Maybe the UK used to permit high skill immigration, and restrict low skill immigration, but definitely not recently.

Anyone looked at natural gas as a potential play? I’m probably not going to take any position but I have been looking at it. Reasons: - It’s at close to rock bottom prices with the excess storage and milder than normal weather - mostly in Europe. - It will take time for the the storage to normalise, but natural gas is in demand and that is likely to increase as we transition to cleaner energy. The trouble is how to actually make a play for this. Those products that try to tracks the futures are crap IMO. Many of the companies that produce gas are also oil companies so it’s hard to get a pure natural gas play. I remember at the bottom of covid you could pick up LEAPS on oil companies with premiums that were incredibly low - silly actually - and I wonder if such opportunities exist right now.

Lots of other countries have widespread gun ownership, but something about mass shootings, and murder rates in the USA that is sort of unique to Western countries. Plenty of other countries with much higher murder rates than the US, but normally countries run by gangs. I understand the pro-gun side, why should responsible owners give up their guns. But I also think that if they are to keep their guns some sensible restrictions are going to be necessary. Nobody with priors for serious crimes, or someone with certain types of mental illness, should ever own a gun. There is bound to be some laws that a large majority can get behind.

Scumbag. Plenty of them everywhere.

I see what you mean. So rather than a recession, just a period of sideways GDP both up and down. I think that’s possible and I fear it could on for many years.

I don’t understand the Nintendo thing either. For me that’s an avoid.

Q3 of 22, Q4 of 22, and likely Q1 of 23 have positive growth. I don’t think we should be trying to redefine what a recession to fit particular arguments.

It’s been considered a Russian disinformation org for a very long time, and I’ve ignored it for a very long time now.

I agree John. I had the opportunity to buy Visa and MasterCard in 2014, I was exposed to a guy who was as betting heavily on options on both companies going into earnings. They just kept going up and his bets kept coming off. I was fascinated by the companies, but back then my excuse for not owning them was because they looked expensive and I was waiting for a pull back. I had only been investing a few years so high PE companies scared me back then. One of my biggest mistakes was not buying MA when I had free cash to do so. The benefit of hindsight. I need to be more open to these companies and position size accordingly. I’m missing out too often.

Apple Pay. I use it almost exclusively now. If Apple had their own card I’d see it as a risk to both MA and Visa. I posted a topic in this a while ago: https://thecobf.com/forum/topic/19573-can-the-visa-and-mastercard-moat-be-bridged/#comment-480798 I don’t see how Apple doesn’t go after this segment of business eventually.

Agree but I see disruption coming potentially. I’ve always had a reason not to buy these companies and it’s always been a mistake. Probably no different this time.

I don’t think it’s possible to understand the traders. I’ve seen commentary that the futures market has increased oil price volatility recently rather than reducing it. Huge swaths of the market is just speculation and evidence for that view is large swings in prices despite little to no change in fundamentals. That’s also appears to be why the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank seemed to be correlated with oil prices, risk off means traders reducing their exposure.

Recently they started saying ‘could be difficult’ never stipulated before. I don’t think them buying right now would cause a large increase in price, currently oversupplied, and basically many future months are within their range. I’ll not be surprised if they never buy more, I think both parties were of the view the SPR was too big.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was obvious they were never going to provide oil a bid, especially because of the extraordinary measures they took to reduce price.

London prices are insane, so insane that I don’t think it’s sensible to buy a house there. Most would have a much higher quality of life moving away. It’s NYC level.

Yeh, I straight up disagree with that take. I don’t think I have anything useful to add that basically hasn’t been covered. I don’t see a duped or gormless Powell that you do.

Complacency I think is the best reason for banks not managing their interest rate risk well. There are some examples of managers of JPM and IB managing that risk very well. Part of this is messaging too, these banks got complacent because low rates is what they were used to. The Fed should have been warning against such complacency but telegraphing they rates will inevitably rise at some point.