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How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
📷

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷

The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷

Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷

Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
​

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
📷

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷

The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷

Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷

Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher

The media is one of the Five Eyes (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four) of the state, or should we say the predatory capitalist elite and their corporate legal entities veiling their legal persons; and feudalism is alive and well expressed in more colour than ever - advertising and marketing, consolidation of power (purchasing of smaller corporations, producing monstrous shady entities like Tencent), incredibly hawkish startups like Fiverr, UbeLyft, Cameo where the company in question barely even does anything; the right wing "think tanks" that sing the hymn of freemarket fundamentalism, the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama absurdly won (Nobel Prize - mentioned in that Living Color song), the odd yet uncontested way that some TV shows put in more right wing guests than left (BBCQT inviting establishment stooges like Kate Andrews (IEA / Adam Smith Institute) and Isabel Oakeshott), the open neofeudal style by which bosses can fire staff and make up a reason without it necessarily being taken to court (the UK govt played with removing funding for wrongful dismissal cases), the initial turning down of the proposed uk law to make homes fit for human habitation (now finally here for 2020); the general trend of corporations shoving all the risk on the consumer and leaning as much as possible on socialized support thanks to the calculating thinkers working for corporations; the fact that truly left-leaning (not liberal) narrative is never referenced on space-age TV, the likes of which span hundreds of potential channels continuously each day; the fact that we are over 50 years into space-age technology and yet everything beyond computer hardware is firmly chokeheld by private interests seeking to impose an alien power over others for personal gain; the fact that everyone is affected by the way that the popular crowd is drawn to celebrity influence (neofeudalism by any other name, and the cult of personality); the fact that jobs are gated by even subtle presumptive aspects like your accent in what we call in the UK the "glass ceiling"; the irresponsible flooding and underinvesting of the job market by governments that can only see as far as their kickback pay packet; the extent to which music and video game media can be financially elevated without legal restraint (unlike gambling which is at least in the formal/technical sense regulated); the attitudes from product pushers being that they should be immune to criticism or shake it off at every turn, under the river of praise from MBTI Sensing-Perceiving types (artwork and memes and mythos mind a la suspense of disbelief rather than logos thought a la conscious self-awareness and critical evaluation) and by "online reputation management"; the open overt acceptance of power being held over everyone by corporate overlords in the movie industry, video game industry and so on - are we to include then the academic and scientific establishments, and the education institution?; the way that the rich siphoning up wealth from the poor divested communities in greater and greater speed ("money is a means to get wealth - not the wealth itself" —Akala) inherently and invariably means they are accruing more power to embarrass the poor when they encounter them and encumber them systemically and indirectly and take on more sex acts with greater choice by selection (the free market); the fact that the powerful go psychologically and sociologically unchallenged by the common people each day; the fact that figures like this "Jeff Bezos makes 2219 dollars in one second which is double what the average person makes in one week. In one minute Mr. Bezos makes 2219x60=133140 dollars. In one hour Mr. Bezos makes 133140x60=7998400 dollars)." go unconsidered and unchecked and unresearched by most; the fact that there are no interactive programming tools to trace, map and prove the linkage between wealth disparity and all social ills; the lack of people like Jaque Fresco in our world (If memory serves right he had a sit down with the power elite, who would have promptly denied him anything truly leftist in vision); the implicit neofeudal psychological programming that IS advertising; the borrowing and corrupting of natural world semantic meanings for selfish neofeudal aims and means; the direct pipeline from education to military and the mandatory military service which still exists in some countries; the fact that returning a product inherently throws the customer (slave) into suspicion by the seller (master - legal power holder); the very idea of a court system ran by the state and not a jury of 3rd party independent people; the lack of a "fairness and welfare supervisor" in every workplace and the presence of "compliance officer"s; the very "free market" in free market fundamentalism which inevitably and invariably defers to which/whoever market force has the most power (today - money - working capital); the fact that being poor and working in a low pay job literally makes you poorer as you work (in real terms); the predatory and inexcusable nature of gambling; the predatory and inexcusable principle of landlords making money off other poorer humans (it should be the state which intervenes if the state is truly a good state, which we can surmise every government is implicitly claiming of itself by holding power); the lack of naming and shaming of social ills like the Nestle CEO who said water access shouldn't be a human right (God I fucking hate Snopes); the trends of people trying to make money off other people via various scams and the likes of BlackHatWorld and WarriorForum, which are innately neofeudalistic in their function, pointing to a giant pyramid scheme that drags along with the rest of modern capitalism; the innate respect given to media moguls and politicians when they are nothing special; the disrespect and disrepute given to the left wing health services of every nation; the blind acceptance of imposing imagery, themes and connotations left dirtying our minds which we call advertisements; the implicit fraud in denying people growing their own food indoors; that concepts like treason do not for most people extend to The People as an interest group; the incredibly rare use of the justification "For the public interest" and "For the public record"; the fact that the French Revolution is not associated for us in school as the birth of the first human rights (surely a non-feudal society would have no qualms or problems with teaching this truth of human history and progress); being frank about racism being too hot for school; the fact kids are now accessing hardcore pornography but not radical and sometimes dangerous ideologies and thinking; the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our age, and the lack of conscious awareness of what we are doing to ourselves with our time and the mental contents surrounding us (a wise man once said.. you will become what you surround yourself with); the mess of the Internet operated by the modern robber-barons of advertising and web traffic conversion and "upselling"; the open betrayal of the people by governments which can be exposed even in form of statistics and hard truths and evidences; the great silence of modern "intellectuals" and losers like self-help gurus (THE MODERN COURT JESTERS), who couldn't begin to address choice quotes of the great intellectual giants of human history; the platforming of celebrities and people with certain types of contours over their face that are pleasing to look at from every angle, over those humans who are better in substance, expertise, spirituality, etc.; the preservation of neofeudal lord roles in the workplace (the boss), the home (the landlord), the Internet (the website owner or advertisers), the land, parks and golf courses (the land holder or owner), and even the family (the wealth-holder parent(s) you are dependent upon); the appeal to authority; the way a poor person under free market fundamentalism must always choose the product most poorly produced i.e. the most likely to break or malfunction and cause them to lose more money, generally kept within reasonable losses or sunk costs as per investment brokers' "portfolios"; the way that moral and ethical wrong cannot by most people be pinned on day traders, Goldman Sachs starving poor people etc. by the inherent flow of the market, which will always favor the most production of immaterial and material wealth by abstraction. (In other words - although we can't fully know and intuit what will be best to produce in any given scenario, we can actually fundamentally and systemically rule out what will be bad and harmful for society - but not for the market which is the concern of free market fundamentalists); the rise of unpaid internships (strongly neofeudal i.e. the local "lord", the company owner, is "giving you an opportunity" and that's how they see it); the propaganda of war producing poor peoples' children dying for the rich few who control the military-industrial complex and massive amounts of money flowing around for rich interests, e.g. soldiers firing missiles that individually cost more than they earn per year, of course ultimately tied up as a capitalistic move/plot/bid to win more cheap oil; the way that companies are literally designed to offer minimal guarantees, insurances or protections for their workers yet they are keen to take with them each working day most of the material gain produced by each worker (remember I said corporations lean on society?); the protection of "limited liability" companies to lose money, versus the individual people who are enslaved by means of debt they cannot easily erase (this bleeds into a general distrust of the independent person compared to the corporate entity, when the people actually are in earnest and wanting to help one another, except for the psychopathic in society who can be known and traced by their behaviour and early signs in school); the fact that healthcare is not free in all countries despite the common people CONSTANTLY working to uphold the corporate masters and the endlessly rich, some of whom donate money to Internet streamers for a laugh at the shock; the mathematical intuitive rational incompetence of the science establishment, which seems to have no backbone when it comes to neofeudalism and major social issues and ills (they don't even speak up against gambling! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE SCIENTIFIC ESTABLISHMENT DOING AND WHY DO WE NOT PUBLICALLY SHAME THEM AS FRAUDULENT PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS - FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST AND THE PUBLIC GOOD?) and rather, they seem to be the lapdogs of the elite, continuing to produce inventions which can easily be taken advantage of by the right wing interests - tear gas and rubber bullets for example; the lack of public awareness of state interference in a negative way; the arrival of private police forces; the hierarchy of control of the Internet based on what they call "authority sites" - prioritized by search engines.
(I apologize for the formatting but this was a train of thought.)

Dr. Ronald Weiss:
Aug 25, 2002
Re: Painful reminder, Aug. 19.
This article is incomplete and misleading. Chronic post-vasectomy pain syndrome is exceedingly rare. According to Dr. Marc Goldstein, the foremost authority on vasectomy in the world, it's likely closer to 1 in 10,000 or one one-hundredth of one per cent, rather than the one to five per cent of men quoted in the article.
It is not unusual to experience some discomfort following vasectomy, or any other surgery for that matter, but this short-lived pain does not constitute post-vasectomy pain syndrome. Your readers should not be led to believe that if they experience some discomfort following their procedure, that they will be saddled with this distressing condition forever. Discomfort following vasectomy is a function of many things, including the experience of the surgeon (the more vasectomies the surgeon does, the less likely the complications); the technique (no-scalpel versus conventional, open-ended versus closed-ended); and the experience of pain during the procedure (better anesthesia increases the likelihood of a better outcome). None of this was mentioned in the article.
Chronic post-vasectomy pain syndrome is a well-recognized condition in the medical community and, rare as it is, forms part of all informed consents for this procedure.
Dr. Ronald S. Weiss, Ottawa, assistant professor, University of Ottawa medical school
Editor's note: Dr. Weiss, a family doctor, has performed more than 10,000 vasectomies.
https://imgur.com/gallery/nJkGG3B
Statement Score:
★★★☆☆ -- Mentions chronic pain risk but gives incorrect statistics

This article is incomplete and misleading. Chronic post-vasectomy pain syndrome is exceedingly rare. According to Dr. Marc Goldstein, the foremost authority on vasectomy in the world, it's likely closer to 1 in 10,000 or one one-hundredth of one per cent, rather than the one to five per cent of men quoted in the article.

Here are the chances for chronic pain caused by vasectomy given by several national level health organizations. These are the professional societies and experts that the urologists are supposed to be getting their statistics from:

• Canadian Urology Association give the chronic pain outcomes for vasectomy at between 1-14% (Link)
  
• American Urological Association says chronic pain serious enough to impact quality of life occurs after 1-2% of vasectomies. (Link)
  
• British Association of Urological Surgeons, patient advice reports troublesome chronic testicular pain which can be severe enough to affect day-to-day activities in 5-14% of vasectomy patients. (Link)
  
• UK National Health Service says long-term testicular pain affects around 10% of men after vasectomy. (Link)
  
• 11th edition of Campbell Walsh Urology (2015) cites 10% incidence of chronic scrotal pain caused by vasectomy. (Link)
  
• European Association of Urology (2012) cites 1-14% incidence of chronic scrotal pain caused by vasectomy, usually mild but sometimes requiring pain management or surgery (Link)
  
• Royal College of Surgeons of England says significant chronic orchalgia may occur in up to 15% of men after vasectomy, and may require epididymectomy or vasectomy reversal. (Link)
  
• Journal of Andrology cites large studies that find Post Vasectomy Pain Syndrome 2-6% of the time (Link)
  
• UpToDate says "surveys have found that the incidence of "troublesome" post-vasectomy pain is reported by approximately 15% of men, with pain severe enough to affect quality of life in 2%. However, survey respondents may not have been representative of all men who have had a vasectomy." (Link)
  
• European Association of Urology says Post-vasectomy scrotal pain syndrome is a scrotal pain syndrome that follows vasectomy. Post-vasectomy scrotal pain syndrome is often associated with negative cognitive, behavioural, sexual or emotional consequences, as well as with symptoms suggestive of lower urinary tract and sexual dysfunction. Post-vasectomy pain may be as frequent as 1% following vasectomy, possibly more frequent. (Link)
  
• German Federal Center for Health Education says "The information on how many men seek medical treatment because of this fluctuates between one and 14 percent." (Link)
  
• American Family Physician says "Recent studies estimate the incidence of severe postvasectomy pain syndrome to be between 1% and 6%" (Link)
  
• International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a meta-analysis in March 2020 to determine the incidence of PVPS, which examined 559 peer-reviewed studies and concluded that "Post-vasectomy pain syndrome occurred in 5% of subjects" (Link) The authors determined that "the overall incidence of post-vasectomy pain is greater than previously reported."
  
• StatPearls says "about 1% to 2% of all men who undergo vasectomies will develop constant or intermittent testicular pain lasting greater than 3 months which is then defined as post-vasectomy pain syndrome." (Link)
  

According to Dr. Marc Goldstein, the foremost authority on vasectomy in the world, it's likely closer to 1 in 10,000 or one one-hundredth of one per cent

I wasn't able to find an instance of Dr. Goldstein claiming that the rate of PVPS is 1 in 10,000 but here is an example of Dr. Goldstein claiming that the rate of PVPS is 1 in 1,000:

Several possible long-term effects associated with vasectomy include chronic testiculaepididymal pain, testicular dysfunction, vasitis nodosa, and chronic epididymal obstruction. Approximately 1 in 1000 men will experience chronic testiculaepididymal pain postoperatively. Possible treatments for this bothersome complication include vasectomy reversal, open-ended vasectomy, or even total epididymovasectomy.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16806411/ via (https://www.maleinfertility.org/sites/default/files/general/vasectomy_packet.pdf )
What do Dr. Weiss' patients have to say?
I had my vasectomy done by Dr. Ronald Weiss in Ottawa last year. Still in severe pain and taking numerous nerve drugs daily.
I was told by him that the risk was 1 in 10,000 risk of a chronic ache in the testicle for which a reversal is required. I read stuff on the internet beforehand, and here beforehand, and I honestly thought that some guys were exaggerating their pain and it must be really rare. I also thought ‘a doctor can’t lie about risks of surgery, with liability reasons and all.’
Well, I guess my suffering from PVPS is karma for not believing all the guys on here suffering.
https://www.postvasectomypain.org/t/are-you-a-pvps-victim-of-dr-ronald-weiss-in-ottawa-ontario/1777
I am experiencing PVPS. Dr. Weiss was very efficient. The procedure was also very efficient. His staff was also very efficient. That is where it ends. If you are lucky to have no complications after the surgery then consider yourself lucky. If you do have complications, and the risk is higher than you are led to believe, then don't bother calling Dr. Weiss. Once you are through his assembly-line procedure he is done with you. He has zero compassion. He has zero bedside manner. He will tell you to your face "It's not my fault" and spout off statistics like "I've done this 55,000 times" What doctor keeps stats like this?
If you are considering a vasectomy, my advice is DON'T. It is not worth the high risk of pain that may plague you for the rest of your life.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html
Having chronic pain 3 months after the procedure...
Seems to be granuloma. His nurse told me rest and anti inflammatory meds or a few days until it subsided.. after reading numerous forums on post vasectomy pain, I’m becoming increasingly concerned with the outcome... a recent 4-wheeler ride has made me have some sharp pain and inflammation.
I would NOT reccomend the procedure or doctor at this point...
Do not alter your body. The stats you are given are NOT accurate and you are at more of a risk than you realize.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html
DON'T DO IT
I've learned a few things since this regrettable decision I made. First and foremost is that nature is not to be f'd with - altering your natural body is not a good idea if it can be avoided. The other things I've been learning is how ill-informed us guys are about the consequences of having a vasectomy and all the things that can go wrong. "you'll be fine" they all said, "a couple days" they kept saying, "it can't be any worse than giving birth" - ya F that. Giving birth is the most natural part of living and a woman gets the gift of a child from it. Altering your insides is not natural at all and it has given me nothing but terrible pain and that sick nauseous feeling you get when kicked in the balls HARD - CONSTANTLY each and every day for 7 weeks now. I am so f'ing sick of icing my balls each and every f'ing day but it is the only thing that helps. I've now had the shits on top of all the other discomfort from being on meds for so long. I'm not even sure that the pills are helping but I take them and put up with the diarrhea because I am willing to do whatever it takes to try and get through this and get back to normal. I cannot put into words how badly I wish I could have a do-over and listen to my gut that was telling me over and over again not to do it. I did it for my wife and now I hate my f'ing life. I've contemplated suicide more times than I care to admit because I do not want to live like this. I was a f'ing stallion in bed before and I haven't been able to be who I was before with my wife ever since. The only sex I can handle now is very lame, lazy, and stupid careful so that I don't bring on the crazy pain I've experienced the few times I attempted to become even half the man I was before. Release has moved from a desire to a necessity because the pain increases substantially when my balls are full - not cool. Epididymitis I believe is what I am suffering from, although I don't know that for sure because when I went back for an exam I was told in about 5 minutes that I just need to give it more time and more drugs. This has affected my quality of life in a way I never imagined. I've given up exercise (and I am very active), I can't lift anything heavy anymore, it pains me to lift my children, I begin and end every day with ice on my nuts, I'm dealing with the effects of the nonstop ingestion of drugs, I'm in pain and discomfort constantly 24/7, and my sex-life has suffered terribly. Ball pain has become the new norm for me so now it just depends on the level I'm feeling that day whether I say I'm good or not - I'm never feeling great anymore, some days are just better than others - some are brutal. Guys are not informed enough about this so this is my attempt to remedy this. I wish I could go back in time but I can't. Instead I just have to hope and pray that this eventually goes away, though it doesn't feel like that is ever going to happen. Don't gamble on permanent ball pain guys, it is the absolute worst. I try not to blame my wife for the pressure she put on me to have this done but I curse her often.. some days I snap because I'm just so tired of feeling this way. I've yelled at people at work, I've been a grown man crying on my couch, I've thought about ending it - only reason I will put up with it is because of my 2 beautiful boys who I could never abandon no matter how much I hurt... just cannot describe how much I regret this decision. Sure most guys say they are fine but it's not guaranteed. If you feel pressured by any woman to have this done my advice is to tell them to go F themselves. There are other alternatives to contraception that avoid any chance of these terrible outcomes and they should be the go to. This practice should be banned in my opinion. All I can do is pray that this pain goes away. Worst decision of my life by far. Don't do it.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=2
My husband seen Dr. Weiss in April. We are now the end of August and he is still in pain. This isn’t normal. He went to a walk in clinic and they gave him inflammatories and told him to call doctor Weiss on the Monday. Monday morning comes, he calls and the secretary tells him she will prescribe him inflammatories and for him to come in a week later. Of course my husband got frustrated, he’s in pain, missing work because of this and this secretary plays him for a fool. He finally went in this morning and the doctor prescribed him inflammatories and tells him to call his family doctor as he was rude on the phone with the secretary and doesn’t want to see him in the office anymore. Seriously!!!!!! Just get your money and don’t deal with your patients problem afterwards. Way to do business. He’s been in pain for 4 months, shame on you and your coworker. You need to stop your practice because you aren’t very good at it and do not take responsibility.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=2
I had a V in 2006, procedure itself went fairly smooth however my life has never been the same. I called the office a day or so after the procedure explaining the pain I was in but my plea for help was dismissed and I was told it was "normal". I made an apt with Dr Weiss shortly after the V and told him the about the pain I was suffering. He simply didn't give a sh*t and even had the nerve to say "its not from anything I did". I saw a Urologist about a year after the V and he said to try and wait it out, the pain may just go away. Slowly, month by month, year by year, the pain did get better however I was far from 100%. Around year 4 I felt a sudden twinge in my testicles and it has been complete nightmare since. I'm now entertaining the V-reversal idea, I've seen countless Dr's, Urologists, Surgeons, Gp's seeking help but nobody seems to know what to do. I would strongly advise anyone out there NOT TO GET A VASECTOMY! The 1in10,000 odds are simply lies. Having the V was easily the worst decision of my life, I'll never be whole again. I sincerely don't want to continue living in this condition, if I was a family pet, my owners would have put me down long ago. I was duped by this man, the numbers speak for themselves. POST VASECTOMY PAIN IS A REALITY.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=3
I had a vasectomy done by Dr. Weiss in 2009, and am still dealing with the aftermath.
I had sometimes severe post-vasectomy pain for fourteen months following the procedure. Dr. Weiss initially told me the pain would just go away, and then when it didn't, became angry with me and told me the only treatment was a reversal. I wrote him a letter in an effort to improve his practice, but he again blew me off.
It is eight years later, and I now have cysts and debris in my scrotum. I have had to see urologists about the complications.
Dr. Weiss has the worst bedside manner of any specialist I have ever seen in Ottawa. He should not be performing a procedure the consequences of which he does not seem to understand.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=3
2 months later my balls still hurts, it ruins my life. No more sport, constant pain, to come back, never have done it!!!
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=3
Me too on the pain. Also have found out that the rates given were not true. I tried to report him to the urologists Ontario group but he is not a urologist. He is a family doctor. That's seems the next step. Anyone tried to sue for the misinformation and pain?
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=4
Dr. Weiss botched my husband's vasectomy and left him in constant agony. He went from being a great dad and sweet husband to a pill popping couch potato overnight. Dr. Weiss' staff said wear the support and take the naproxen.
It's been nine months now and my husband is getting worse - I don't know how we will make ends meet, we never, in our wildest dreams expected him to become incapacitated from this 'safe and simple procedure.'
I have come to find out through various medical channels that my husband's post vasectomy pain is more common than Dr. Weiss let on. It's actually more like 2%, so 1 in 50, not 1 in 10,000. I can't believe how many 'victims' of Dr. Weiss are on this site alone. It's mind-boggling.
You misled us Dr. Weiss and now our lives are ruined. You stole my husband from me and you stole my children's father from them. You should be ashamed of yourself, you greedy lying swine.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=4
Amateur Hack! Don't go. This guy aint even a urologist! He's just a family doc not a friggin surgeon.
When the kicked in the balls pain that I have never went away and I went to see him about it, he had no idea what to do and acts like he's never even seen this crap before! Then I start researching (shoulda done that before) and find out that anywhere from 1-5% will have severe scrotal pain and it cant be fixed! WTF!! I fell like Im being kicked in the nuts all day every day - I cant sleep I cant eat I cant work and its been almost a year now! Im ready to hack my nuts off with a garden shear, but will that make it worse?
Thanks Ronnie you lying scumbag...1 in 10,000 my a.s.s. more like 1 in 20
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=4
I can't believe I have PVPS. I cant believe this doc lied to me. My life is a living nightmare and I am now disabled.
My current urologist who is trying to fix my PVP/s (without much success) has told me that there are numerous postal surveys and studies done which show PVP to be anywhere from 1-2% or 5-10% depending upon source. He admits it's a serious problem and that vasectomists all over the place lie about the risks.
Dr. Weiss told me it was 1 in 10,000 chance of a chronic ache and that a reversal would fix it - couldn't be more untrue. I can't sleep, i can't exercise, I take pain meds all day and cant work as my job requires heavy lifting.
Dont go. I wish I could take back that fateful day.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=4
Count me in as another unlucky PVPS sufferer. If it was really 1 in 10,000 as Dr. Weiss stated, then why are there so many of us on here?
Also check this out: https://www.auanet.org/common/pdf/education/clinical-guidance/Vasectomy.pdf
It's the American Urological Association's guidelines on vasectomy, wherein they state a 1-2% chance of chronic scrotal pain severe enough to impact quality of life, with a bunch of peer reviewers, including, none other than Dr. Ronald Weiss himself!
So he peer reviewed AUA guidelines and agreed with the 1-2% severe pain figure, yet prefers to say the chance is actually .01%?
Unbelievable.
Oh BTW, a reversal failed to fix my pain, and it's suspected that the perineal branch of my pudendal nerve (which is in your scrotum) was hit by Dr. Weiss during my vasectomy.
No wonder why I not only have stabbing, tingling, burning scrotal pain, but also anal pain and severe pain when sitting.
I was perfectly healthy before and now life sucks. I'm middle aged and don't want to live another 20-30 years like this. No way.
There's nothing to be done that can fully bring you back to the way you were. Look it up online, it's all over the place, numerous studies have been published for decades. I've never seen such lies about a medical procedure before, never in my entire life.
Don't do it, just use condoms, sure they suck, but at least you won't end up with pain in your junk for your whole life.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=5
Dr. Weiss should be sued for misleading his patients into believing that the rate of Post-Vasectomy complications, also known as Post-Vasectomy-Pain-Syndrome (PVPS), is lower than it actually is. His brochure misstates the rate of this life-crippling condition. Whether he is too busy making $ to update his brochure with actual research findings or whether he is purposely misleading his clientele, matters little. He is uncaring and more worried about his reputation than his patients. Surveys in recent years have found that almost 15% of men suffer from PVPS, with 2% of men experiencing pain intense enough to impact their quality of life. One review reported that 1 in 1000 men who undergo a vasectomy will sustain long-term pain requiring surgical intervention. So his brochure is absolutely bogus. Do not believe a word he tells you--reconsider your options.
Dr. Weiss has been dismissive of chronic pain resulting form his surgery for years. His solution is to ignore or write prescriptions in doses that even raises the pharmacists' eyebrows. I think the worst problem is that in order to guard his obviously frail reputation, he refuses to write referrals to see REAL urologists that can actually help try remedy the problem.
Do yourself a BIG favour and research the risks associated with PVPS. Yes, all surgeries have risks, but if someone told you you have 1-3 chances in ten to be in debilitating pain for months, years, and possibly the rest of your life, would you make the same decision? Please think twice and see another doctor that isn't just interested in money. He is the WORST choice you will make in your life.
https://www.ratemds.com/doctor-ratings/98740/Dr-Ronald-Weiss-Ottawa-ON.html?page=5

In Jesuit controlled China, trafficking of children is a huge problem but there is a market where children are actually sold for money:

For sale: Chinese babies and children
HONG KONG — No nightmare is more chilling than having one’s child stolen away. But in China, that nightmare becomes real up to 70,000 times a year.
Although little known about it outside the country, child trafficking is epidemic in the People’s Republic. Every year, thousands of young children — typically from poor families — are kidnapped, transported hundreds of miles, and sold for $500 to $5000.
Some end up as prostitutes or slave laborers. Most are bought by people who want to raise the child as their own.
Stymied by poverty and indifferent local police, many birth parents hunt for their children for years and never find them.
Beijing has been trying to combat the problem for years. Police have rescued more than 54,000 children and cracked down on 11,000 traffickers since 2009, according to Xinhua news agency.
China does not release statistics on the overall number of abduction cases reported. “Estimates range from about 10,000 to 70,000 kids per year,” says Charlie Custer, the co-creator of a new documentary on the subject, Living With Dead Hearts. “You can't put that many kids on a milk carton.”
Official cooperation on the matter has been mixed. At a hearing in late September, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child asked a Chinese delegation whether Beijing would ban all forms of trafficking and sale of children. The delegation declined to answer. The committee also urged the government to enlist more help from civil society in rooting out trafficking.
Yet China is taking steps toward tackling the problem. The government has created an anti-abduction task force that investigates and cracks down on baby smuggling rings. This month, the group freed 92 children who had been stolen from poor regions of southwestern Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
But for families, such measures are not enough.
Many say that local police offer little help to parents filing abduction reports. When the police do act, it’s often too late. The first few days after a kidnapping are crucial, as organized crime rings can quickly transport children thousands of miles through a network of accomplices.
In fact, in some areas, the government is complicit. Earlier this year, a family planning official in Fujian province was arrested for helping broker the sale of four babies. Some officials have also helped falsify papers to put children in orphanages, where they can be adopted by international clients who must pay steep fees. According to a 2011 investigation by Caixin magazine, some of these children have ended up in the US, Poland, and other Western countries.
“I would just say, don't adopt a kid from China now,” Custer says.
Why is this happening? Many experts point blame at the one-child policy. Parents who want a son may decide to buy one on the black market, to avoid the risk of giving birth to a daughter and paying fines. One recent case involved a family with three daughters in Henan province who paid over $8,000 for an infant boy.
There are social factors as well. People who purchase abducted children face little or no penalty, as long as the youths are treated decently. And a long tradition in China of people raising distant relatives’ children as their own gives buyers some cover.
“More broadly, the problem is as big as it is because China has this culture of, don't get involved in anyone else's business,” Custer says. “A lot of these kids who are kidnapped, are taken in places where there are people around. But people don't say anything.”
Most importantly, child trafficking is a profitable business.
Even doctors, who are paid relatively little in China, can be tempted to join the trade. In August, an obstetrician in Shaanxi province was arrested for selling newborns for $2,500. She deceived parents by telling them that their babies were too sick to survive after delivery. She had carried on this way for seven years, and was only caught after a distraught father climbed onto the roof of his house and threatened to jump if police did not investigate.
Critics are calling for China to penalize buyers of stolen children. Yu Jincui, an editor at the Global Times, wrote that China must punish parents who buy stolen children, thereby “curbing supply as well as demand.”
“Both traffickers and buyers must realize there is a heavy penalty for their actions.”

Another article on Quartz:

Child trafficking in China often starts with parents selling their own kids
In China, anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 children are abducted every year, either sent into forced labor or sold to quasi-legal adoption brokers. While many of these children were taken away by strangers in public places, public court documents from China indicate that child traffickers often have a willing accomplice—the child’s biological parents.
A reporter from China’s Southern Metropolis Daily studied court documents (link in Chinese) from 364 cases involving a total of 380 abducted children and 508 suspects. In 40 percent of the cases, the child’s biological parents sold their own children to other people, who sometimes went on to traffic them.
According to the study, the most common cause of child trafficking is China’s one-child policy. Implemented in 1980 and partially relaxed in 2013, the law imposes fines on families who give birth to two or more children. Families ill equipped to pay penalties on top of the costs of raising a child—food, school tuition, etc.— sometimes opt to sell their offspring.
But for others parents, trafficking their children is a source of cash. Southern Metropolis Daily cites one case where a Hunan couple initially sold their second child for 6,000 yuan (about $1,000), out of economic necessity. But after the first time, they continued to conceive, and sold their third and fourth child for 20,000 yuan (about $3,000) and 10,000 respectively. The court ultimately sentenced the father to six years in jail and fined him 20,000 yuan.
Other unfortunate circumstances can lead to parents willfully traffic their own children—the report cites anecdotes involving gambling debts, divorces, and deceptive spouses. The court cases also reveal more about China’s marketplace for trafficked children. Of the 380 trafficked children from the court cases, 248 were male and 120 were female. Daughters tend to sell for an average of 10,000 yuan, while sons go for much more—an average of 45,000 yuan.
The study examines just a fraction of the total number of estimated kidnappings annually, so it is possible that this 40% number is too high, or too low. The study also only looks at incidents that have made it to Chinese courts.
Human rights and human trafficking experts in China told Quartz that the 40% figure wasn’t implausible. “There definitely are parents – a lot of parents – who sell their kids to traffickers,” says Charlie Custer, director of the 2013 documentary Living With Dead Hearts.
Parents who are publicly searching for their missing kids probably didn’t sell them, he said, because these searches can cost more than what a child would be worth to traffickers. “The ones selling their kids will often be trying to hide that they had a kid in the first place – when they discover they’re having a kid, they’ll go home to the countryside and lay low with some family so most of their social circle isn’t aware they even gave birth.”

An article on inkstone:

A Chinese baby for sale for $9,000 on social media
For sale: a healthy baby boy.
Six people have been arrested in central China after claims that a newborn baby boy was offered for sale on social media for 60,000 yuan ($9,200), according to a police statement.
An investigative report by the Xiaoxiang Morning Post was the first to point the finger at a group based in the city of Yiyang, Hunan province, which it accused of running a human trafficking operation via the popular messaging platform WeChat.
According to the newspaper article, the group posted a message in mid-June that offered “a newborn, healthy boy” for sale. Anyone interested in buying him should “please come to Hunan, Yiyang quickly.”
The post was accompanied by two videos of an infant and alleged information about his parents, who “felt unable to raise a second child,” the report said.
The police statement said: “Multiple media outlets and an unnamed individual reported that infants were being trafficked from a hospital in Yiyang on June 21, and the department arrested three suspects at the scene.”
A subsequent inquiry led police to other suspects, it said.
“After the establishment of an investigative panel … we arrested three further suspects. So far, there are six people [in custody] and the case remains under investigation.”
The newspaper report claimed that the traffickers contacted pregnant women when they arrived at the hospital and were often able to find buyers for their babies within two to three days.
Some of the gang members had contacts at multiple hospitals across the city, it alleged.
Child trafficking is a persistent problem in China. Children abandoned or abducted from poor regions are often taken to affluent coastal cities.
Some are sold to couples who cannot have children of their own, while many others go to families that want a son but are bound by the country's family planning policies. Traffickers usually charge more for baby boys.
As for the baby boy put up for sale, his birth mother was asked to sign a declaration saying, “I give up my infant voluntarily [and] for free. I hope you [the adopted parents] can treat him with kindness.”
The newborn’s current whereabouts are unknown.

Sources
Babies for sale: children openly sold online in China https://www.theweek.co.uk/62890/babies-for-sale-children-openly-sold-online-in-china
For sale: Chinese babies and children https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-10-03/sale-chinese-babies-and-children
Child trafficking in China often starts with parents selling their own kids https://qz.com/525900/child-trafficking-in-china-often-starts-with-parents-selling-their-own-kids/ A Chinese baby for sale for $9,000 on social media https://www.inkstonenews.com/china/police-arrest-six-people-suspicion-selling-babies-9000/article/2152461

The media is one of the Five Eyes (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four) of the state, or should we say the predatory capitalist elite and their corporate legal entities veiling their legal persons; and feudalism is alive and well expressed in more colour than ever - advertising and marketing, consolidation of power (purchasing of smaller corporations, producing monstrous shady entities like Tencent), incredibly hawkish startups like Fiverr, UbeLyft, Cameo where the company in question barely even does anything; the right wing "think tanks" that sing the hymn of freemarket fundamentalism, the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama absurdly won (Nobel Prize - mentioned in that Living Color song), the odd yet uncontested way that some TV shows put in more right wing guests than left (BBCQT inviting establishment stooges like Kate Andrews (IEA / Adam Smith Institute) and Isabel Oakeshott), the open neofeudal style by which bosses can fire staff and make up a reason without it necessarily being taken to court (the UK govt played with removing funding for wrongful dismissal cases), the initial turning down of the proposed uk law to make homes fit for human habitation (now finally here for 2020); the general trend of corporations shoving all the risk on the consumer and leaning as much as possible on socialized support thanks to the calculating thinkers working for corporations; the fact that truly left-leaning (not liberal) narrative is never referenced on space-age TV, the likes of which span hundreds of potential channels continuously each day; the fact that we are over 50 years into space-age technology and yet everything beyond computer hardware is firmly chokeheld by private interests seeking to impose an alien power over others for personal gain; the fact that everyone is affected by the way that the popular crowd is drawn to celebrity influence (neofeudalism by any other name, and the cult of personality); the fact that jobs are gated by even subtle presumptive aspects like your accent in what we call in the UK the "glass ceiling"; the irresponsible flooding and underinvesting of the job market by governments that can only see as far as their kickback pay packet; the extent to which music and video game media can be financially elevated without legal restraint (unlike gambling which is at least in the formal/technical sense regulated); the attitudes from product pushers being that they should be immune to criticism or shake it off at every turn, under the river of praise from MBTI Sensing-Perceiving types (artwork and memes and mythos mind a la suspense of disbelief rather than logos thought a la conscious self-awareness and critical evaluation) and by "online reputation management"; the open overt acceptance of power being held over everyone by corporate overlords in the movie industry, video game industry and so on - are we to include then the academic and scientific establishments, and the education institution?; the way that the rich siphoning up wealth from the poor divested communities in greater and greater speed ("money is a means to get wealth - not the wealth itself" —Akala) inherently and invariably means they are accruing more power to embarrass the poor when they encounter them and encumber them systemically and indirectly and take on more sex acts with greater choice by selection (the free market); the fact that the powerful go psychologically and sociologically unchallenged by the common people each day; the fact that figures like this "Jeff Bezos makes 2219 dollars in one second which is double what the average person makes in one week. In one minute Mr. Bezos makes 2219x60=133140 dollars. In one hour Mr. Bezos makes 133140x60=7998400 dollars)." go unconsidered and unchecked and unresearched by most; the fact that there are no interactive programming tools to trace, map and prove the linkage between wealth disparity and all social ills; the lack of people like Jaque Fresco in our world (If memory serves right he had a sit down with the power elite, who would have promptly denied him anything truly leftist in vision); the implicit neofeudal psychological programming that IS advertising; the borrowing and corrupting of natural world semantic meanings for selfish neofeudal aims and means; the direct pipeline from education to military and the mandatory military service which still exists in some countries; the fact that returning a product inherently throws the customer (slave) into suspicion by the seller (master - legal power holder); the very idea of a court system ran by the state and not a jury of 3rd party independent people; the lack of a "fairness and welfare supervisor" in every workplace and the presence of "compliance officer"s; the very "free market" in free market fundamentalism which inevitably and invariably defers to which/whoever market force has the most power (today - money - working capital); the fact that being poor and working in a low pay job literally makes you poorer as you work (in real terms); the predatory and inexcusable nature of gambling; the predatory and inexcusable principle of landlords making money off other poorer humans (it should be the state which intervenes if the state is truly a good state, which we can surmise every government is implicitly claiming of itself by holding power); the lack of naming and shaming of social ills like the Nestle CEO who said water access shouldn't be a human right (God I fucking hate Snopes); the trends of people trying to make money off other people via various scams and the likes of BlackHatWorld and WarriorForum, which are innately neofeudalistic in their function, pointing to a giant pyramid scheme that drags along with the rest of modern capitalism; the innate respect given to media moguls and politicians when they are nothing special; the disrespect and disrepute given to the left wing health services of every nation; the blind acceptance of imposing imagery, themes and connotations left dirtying our minds which we call advertisements; the implicit fraud in denying people growing their own food indoors; that concepts like treason do not for most people extend to The People as an interest group; the incredibly rare use of the justification "For the public interest" and "For the public record"; the fact that the French Revolution is not associated for us in school as the birth of the first human rights (surely a non-feudal society would have no qualms or problems with teaching this truth of human history and progress); being frank about racism being too hot for school; the fact kids are now accessing hardcore pornography but not radical and sometimes dangerous ideologies and thinking; the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our age, and the lack of conscious awareness of what we are doing to ourselves with our time and the mental contents surrounding us (a wise man once said.. you will become what you surround yourself with); the mess of the Internet operated by the modern robber-barons of advertising and web traffic conversion and "upselling"; the open betrayal of the people by governments which can be exposed even in form of statistics and hard truths and evidences; the great silence of modern "intellectuals" and losers like self-help gurus (THE MODERN COURT JESTERS), who couldn't begin to address choice quotes of the great intellectual giants of human history; the platforming of celebrities and people with certain types of contours over their face that are pleasing to look at from every angle, over those humans who are better in substance, expertise, spirituality, etc.; the preservation of neofeudal lord roles in the workplace (the boss), the home (the landlord), the Internet (the website owner or advertisers), the land, parks and golf courses (the land holder or owner), and even the family (the wealth-holder parent(s) you are dependent upon); the appeal to authority; the way a poor person under free market fundamentalism must always choose the product most poorly produced i.e. the most likely to break or malfunction and cause them to lose more money, generally kept within reasonable losses or sunk costs as per investment brokers' "portfolios"; the way that moral and ethical wrong cannot by most people be pinned on day traders, Goldman Sachs starving poor people etc. by the inherent flow of the market, which will always favor the most production of immaterial and material wealth by abstraction. (In other words - although we can't fully know and intuit what will be best to produce in any given scenario, we can actually fundamentally and systemically rule out what will be bad and harmful for society - but not for the market which is the concern of free market fundamentalists); the rise of unpaid internships (strongly neofeudal i.e. the local "lord", the company owner, is "giving you an opportunity" and that's how they see it); the propaganda of war producing poor peoples' children dying for the rich few who control the military-industrial complex and massive amounts of money flowing around for rich interests, e.g. soldiers firing missiles that individually cost more than they earn per year, of course ultimately tied up as a capitalistic move/plot/bid to win more cheap oil; the way that companies are literally designed to offer minimal guarantees, insurances or protections for their workers yet they are keen to take with them each working day most of the material gain produced by each worker (remember I said corporations lean on society?); the protection of "limited liability" companies to lose money, versus the individual people who are enslaved by means of debt they cannot easily erase (this bleeds into a general distrust of the independent person compared to the corporate entity, when the people actually are in earnest and wanting to help one another, except for the psychopathic in society who can be known and traced by their behaviour and early signs in school); the fact that healthcare is not free in all countries despite the common people CONSTANTLY working to uphold the corporate masters and the endlessly rich, some of whom donate money to Internet streamers for a laugh at the shock; the mathematical intuitive rational incompetence of the science establishment, which seems to have no backbone when it comes to neofeudalism and major social issues and ills (they don't even speak up against gambling! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE SCIENTIFIC ESTABLISHMENT DOING AND WHY DO WE NOT PUBLICALLY SHAME THEM AS FRAUDULENT PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS - FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST AND THE PUBLIC GOOD?) and rather, they seem to be the lapdogs of the elite, continuing to produce inventions which can easily be taken advantage of by the right wing interests - tear gas and rubber bullets for example; the lack of public awareness of state interference in a negative way; the arrival of private police forces; the hierarchy of control of the Internet based on what they call "authority sites" - prioritized by search engines.
(I apologize for the formatting but this was a train of thought.)

Sports making a bet is a difficult shape of making a bet and no matter its seeming loss of approach and entire reliance on know-how of the occasion, precise sports activities making a bet 먹튀검증 really is based on a wonderful deal of approach which have to be used for you to win. The maximum crucial methods contain a near evaluation of the statistics upon which a legitimate judgment have to be primarily based totally and thereafter the guess have to be located. A triumphing approach takes some salient elements into consideration which are:
1. The quantity of the bid
2. The form of guess three.
3. The odds on provide
Sportsbooks withinside the US and Bookmakers in UK are entities that take delivery of sports activities bets. The bets may be located predicting the final results of numerous wearing activities like Baseball, Snooker, Basketball, Hockey, Soccer, Football, Tennis and loads of different sports activities and atheletic activities. Just to cowl a few simple definitions: a sportsbook is the only that accepts the sports activities guess. An oddsmaker is the only who units the chances of making a bet.
Betting the Odds
In order to vicinity a guess, you have to first pick the kind of guess and the quantity you'll wager. This clearly will rely upon the chances which can be being offered. Before you pass beforehand and vicinity the guess, cautiously scrutinize the variety of to be had odds.
The odds have to be withinside the ratio of as a minimum 2:1 for the guess to be worthwhile. Another issue that have to be taken into consideration is the quantity being given through manner of fee to the sports activities-book. This preferably must be a minimum percent of the whole price of the chances.
Given under is a listing of a few not unusualplace sorts of bets: .
Single or Straight Bet: This is making a bet in its maximum simple shape and permits you to guess at given odds, upon a winner. .
Point Spread: Under this guess you'll guess on one in all alternatives which have been equated thru the allocation of appropriate factors. In the Point Spread the quantity of allotted factors are proven with a + signal for the favorable aspect and a - signal for the underdog. In order that the higher wins, the popular group have to win through greater than the Point Spread. On the turn aspect, if a guess has been located at the underdog, that group has to lose through much less than the Point Spread for the higher to win. .
Buy Points: This entails transferring the Point Spread positively, through paying a price. .
The Moneyline: This kind of guess is truly on who will win. It establishes the chances for every aspect however is the opposite of the Point Spread, with a - signal status for the favourite and the + signal for the underdog. .
Total Bet: This is just like factor unfold bets, handiest in that the higher bets on the whole factors scored. .
Ove Under: This is a guess as consistent with which the quantity of factors scored through the groups in any recreation can be beyond/ over OR unde beneathneath the whole set through the oddsmaker. .
Parlay of Accumulator: This is a manner of making a bet on a couple of wearing activities withinside the wish that a massive payoff can be made if all win. The selections made are with regards to the factor unfold. Even if one occasion does now no longer win or draw, the higher loses the complete guess. Huge quantities may be made thru parlay making a bet, withinside the occasion of a win. .
Teaser: A teaser is just like a parlay, but it has the choice of including or setting out factors from one or a couple of Spread bets. The odds rely upon the quantity of factors the unfold is moved in addition to upon the quantity of groups which can be mixed to shape the teaser. .
Futures: These are bets on who will win the championship withinside the occasion that there are greater than feasible groups to guess on. Substantial versions among sportbooks exist in residence area on futures. .
Buying Half a Point: In this, the directly guess participant receives the choice of transferring the factor unfold 1/2 of factor to his advantage. The maximum suitable time to shop for a 1/2 of factor is while one group is preferred through 2.five, three, 6.five or 7 in football. This is generally because of the truth that numerous video games lead to a three or 7 factor difference. The greater 1/2 of factor may also emerge as turning a loss to a draw or a draw to a win. Of these kinds of forms of bets, 3 forms of bets are distinguished and have to be used for the easy purpose that they may be easy themselves, are smooth to win and feature an excellent threat of triumphing. These are the Straight guess, the Doubles and the Future.
Here are some Betting hints to help you to vicinity the Best Bets and push you in the direction of a massive win, they may be:

1. Always make an sensible evaluation of the chances and the provide of the guess.
   
2. For a easy guess, keep on with the Straight guess as it's miles non-complex and has precise triumphing prospects.
   
3. Bet accurately through preserving your alternatives limited. Also try and restriction the have an impact on of bias for your making a bet. If you're a fan of a group try and restriction the impact of that favoritism while making a bet.
   
4. One of the maximum worthwhile bets is the 'Future' guess however handiest in case you realize loads approximately the game being performed and approximately the players.
   
5. By making a bet frequently aleven though systematically and in an analytical manner, you'll enhance your judgmental ability.
   
6. Contain the urge to guess together along with your winnings immediately. If you do now no longer comply with the usual rule of 50%, as a minimum placed a number of your winnings again into your pocket.
   
7. Make positive your sportsbook is a member of a regarded Gambling Association, makes a short price and is without problems accessible. Read in among the lines, approximately subjects concerning disputes.
   

• Gambling addiction has been shown to have the same pharmacological effects as opiates.
• Casinos are designed to disorient and confuse patrons, from the lighting and carpeting to the key of machine sounds.
• Nevada had the highest suicide rate in the nation from 1990-1994, according to statistics from the CDC.
• In Gulfport, Mississippi, suicides increased by 213 percent in the first two years after casinos arrived. In neighboring Biloxi, suicide attempts jumped by 1,000 percent in the first year alone.
• The National Council on Problem Gambling, citing various studies, reports that one in five pathological gamblers attempts suicide, a rate higher than for any other addictive disorder.
• In the UK more than 2 million households are affected by problem gambling including 50,000 addicted minors. Suicide deaths every day increasingly include young, healthy males with good careers from stable families. This is worth reading.
• Asia is even worse, with Macau generating about 8 times the revenue of Las Vegas, but Thailand, Korea, and India are also in very severe condition. Japan began the process of legalizing casino gambling in 2018, with a new agency established in 2020.
• 1 in 5 habitual gamblers attempts suicide
• 1 in 5 suicides is related to gambling (usually with no other health or psychological problems)

That's JUST the suicides. Not the drugs, prostitution, organized crime, alcohol, cigarettes, job problems, domestic problems, credit card interest, or whatever else people could be doing with their lives. It's just the suicides.
Gambling was illegal in 48 states for over 100 years, but in the last ten years has risen almost perpendicularly. Ask anyone who works at a gas station or convenience store, daily lottery drawings and scratch-off tickets are almost a $100B industry - with some states legalizing lotteries as recently as January of 2020. Sports betting is almost as large, formally estimated at $85B.
Casinos, together with strip clubs and the other forms of gambling listed above, are open and operating right now in states that continue to (illegally) force churches and businesses to shut down. By the way.

I’m not sure if this is something that is talked about a lot, but given that I personally haven’t heard anyone talk about this I’m assuming it isn’t.
I don’t know about other countries, but in the UK the gambling industry is at an estimated worth of £14.3bn, and each year £1.2bn is wasted away through gambling.
To me, this is more than enough for gambling to be considered a big problem. Of course, I don’t imagine gambling will ever become illegal in the UK due to all the complications that would arise, but I believe a big step in reducing this huge figure is by ceasing the marketing of gambling as was done to cigarettes a number of years ago.
If you watch TV at all, it’s more than likely that you’ve seen a gambling ad. There’s one during almost every commercial break, and some programmes are even sponsored by gambling companies. They almost always stick out as being vibrantly colourful and light hearted. Here is a particularly egregious example, stating that ‘Everyone wins, every day’ at the end of the video.
Even with the ‘When the fun stops stop’ slogan shown briefly at the end of these ads, they are all blatantly manipulative and filled with the empty promises of money and happiness that get as close to false advertising as humanly possible. It is really no wonder so many people fall into the trap when gambling is portrayed in such a romanticised way.
Anyway, I just had to rant about this since I’m not sure there’s very much I can physically do about it. I’m not expecting much of a response but if you did take the time to read this let me know what you think.

Hi all - recently was having a discussion with an American who was cursing out the country. It made me irrationally angry, I couldn't explain it, but I exploded. Also for people who are burning the flag...
Sure, the United States isn't perfect, but it's given my family and I everything we have in life. A little background - my parents escaped a warn-torn country in Europe when I was an infant, and brought my sister and I over to America. We were refugees with practically nothing. While growing up, I lived a very modest lifestyle, never being able to indulge in anything extravagant. However, the one thing my parents instilled in my brain was that if I worked hard, I could achieve anything I wanted to in this country. I've always had a great work ethic, but I dreamt big, knowing that America could make my wildest dreams come true. Long story short, I was able to attend an Ivy League institution, get a job making 6 figures directly out of college, as well as pursue my passions on the side (travel, photography, modeling, and music), among countless others. But I'm not done yet, not even close. I was also given the liberty to participate in really fun activities throughout the years such as ALMOST being a contestant on jeopardy (still salty about this :) ), driving cross-country to see the wonderful, diverse landscape of the US, taking monthly road trips to Atlantic City to partake in some friendly gambling, etc.
Point is - if my parents had stayed in their home country at the time (which is perfectly safe today), I wouldn't have been able to achieve any of my dreams. There's something very special about America that other countries don't have, and I can't exactly pinpoint it, but other countries just force you to believe that you're going to live a non-special life. That phrasing probably came out wrong, but it's hard to put into words. And for reference, I've lived in 6 different developed nations, hold three citizenships, and have traveled to more than 40 countries in my lifetime. My family is also very dispersed throughout different parts of Europe. I love my extended family to death, but again, they live very mediocre lives in their respective countries. Sure, they get by, but the opportunity is unmatched when compared to America.
Earlier this year, I was getting back from a friend's housewarming and called an Uber home. The guy starts chatting me up and has a heavy accent. So naturally, I inquire about his origins. He's from Barcelona. I ask about what brought him to America, if he intends to stay, etc. He just lays it out for me saying that he came because he's a dreamer, he's got big aspirations that couldn't be filled in Spain, and he hopes to become an American someday. He also mentioned how nearly every film / TV show they watch in Europe is set in NYC / LA / Chicago / Miami, so naturally most of his friends dreamed of one day visiting these glamorous cities. Him and his friends had been dreaming about moving here since he was 5 years old. He was in the process of bringing over his wife as well (I could tell that his words were a bit shaky when he spoke about her). I told him that everything would be okay, and briefed him on my life story - humble beginnings to dreams coming true.
Another anecdotal story - when I was at a restaurant in London, these chaps came up to me (hearing my accent) and badgered me about what America was like, how it's their dream to visit one day, any recommendations, etc. That's when it really hit me - the whole world knows everything about what's going on with America (the economy, politics, technological advances, etc.), but how many people know this much about other countries? Not much I presume.
Also think about how the US is a world leader in most industries... just to name a few examples:

• Technology that the US has created - Facebook (including Instagram & Youtube) Apple, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Netflix, Microsoft, we put a man on the moon, invented the computer, and countless others (including dreamers working on thousands of different start-ups in Silicon Valley). Apps that people around the world utilize every single day.
• Want to go into Banking, sure, we have the best Banks in the world - Goldman Sachs, JPM, Morgan Stanley, BofA, etc.
• We have the best universities in the world. Attending a top school, my university consisted of a VERY large proportion of international students. I am also attending an MBA program next year which has a >40% international population. Isn't that statistic telling that America has, BY FAR, the best Universities in the world? The only country that comes even close is the UK, but even that only has a handful of globally recognizable Universities.
• Want to get in the entertainment industry? Might be competitive, but if you work hard enough (granted, with some luck involved), you'll break through. Again, US movies, TV shows, music are the most popular globally. Even international superstars move over to the US to pursue their dreams / further their careers.
• We have the best sports leagues (controversial take) - I personally love the EPL, but I've found to fall in love with the NBA, NFL, NHL, college sports (no MLB, sorry baseball fans). Just so much diversity that I absolutely love the variety we have to choose from any given night. Although I definitely still do find myself tuning into the EPL.
• We have the best athletics - U.S Olympic Medals count is nearly triple that of second place (USSR).
• Salaries in America are much, much higher as well compared to the rest of the world. Take London for example, an identical job in my field, will earn you 40-50% less, while the cost of living is nearly the same, if not more! Sure, they do have other benefits such as universal healthcare (which has problems of its own according to my English friends).
• The most diverse landscape in the world... beautiful beaches, historic cities, skyscrapers, tundra climate, gorgeous national parks, beautiful desserts, remarkable lakes and scenery. I could go on and on...
• The most remarkable thing, in my opinion, is how you can make it without having to born into a wealthy family, without having to have the highest social status. Sure, America will NOT just hand you stuff, you'll have to work very hard for it. But the opportunity is there if you're willing to work. Any dream is within reach if you're willing to work.

With all of that being said - sure, we do have our problems, America is not perfect, but no country is. With a country of our size, coming to a common consensus on most issues is nearly impossible (especially when compared to a country such as Iceland, where the population is 0.01% of America). But that doesn't take away from the point that people take for granted how lucky they are to hold the American passport. My relatives and international friends all want to move to America after they visit and realize how much more opportunity and optimism there is here. The stereotypes they hear In Europe ("All Americans are fat and stupid") typically all end up being completely untrue. Also, please keep in mind that people ALL OVER THE WORLD want to move to this country. They dream of one day achieving that feat in life. I know because my family was in that exact same boat 20 years ago.
It hurts me deep-down knowing how hard my parents tried to immigrate to America and give my sister and I the American dream. Once it happened, they knew they'd made it in life. As soon as I got my college acceptance letter, they knew it was all worth it. As soon as I landed my first real job, they knew that their sacrifices had paid off. As soon as I received my MBA acceptance phone call, they couldn't deny that America is by far the best country in the world. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, my family and I gather around the dinner table and attribute everything we have to good ole Murica.

Good morning from the UK. Happy Friday. Apologies in advance if I don't get an update out over the coming weekend.
Virus update first:
Infection overview - The FT (Link) is reporting that four Iranian MPs so far have tested positive whilst the same blog reports that 1,000 people have been quarantined at home in the West German town of Heinsberg and that Nigerian authorities have now confirmed the first case in sub-Saharan Africa (an area that is viewed as being least prepared for an outbreak due to poor health infrastructure).
Panic buying has spread to NZ - The country has reported it first case from a passenger arriving on an Emirates flight. "Massive queues" have been reported in some supermarkets with heavy demand for water, hand sanitiser, soap and tissues. Checkout operators say it's busier than at Christmas time. (NZ Herald Link)
Beijing crowd gathering restrictions - In a measure to stop the spread of the virus, Beijing authorities have introduced new rules including an average of 2 square metres per customer in supermarkets (causing queues to develop) and ten of the capital's most popular parks are now restricted to only 30% of maximum capacity (Link to Xinhua article)
Global statistics - Multiple countries have now announced detections of the virus bringing the total to 50 countries; at time of writing there are 83,310 confirmed cases and 2,858 deaths. Source: WHO Dashboard: Link.
Capital Economics has been providing a page tracking the virus in graphs that's available to the public (hat tip to The Guardian for highlighting it) - if you like graphs check it out here: Link. The same company also says that the Chinese economy will contract in this quarter making it their worst quarter for over two decades.
Economics
Stock markets dropping around the world - Many stock markets are continuing to drop sharply with tourism / aviation stocks worst hit - at time of writing IAG (the owner of British Airways and Iberia) is down 10% today on the FTSE. The South Korean stock market finished with an 8% drop this week, the Europe-wide Stoxx 600 index is down 11.4% for the week (the worst performance since 2008), in Tokyo the Nikkei closed 3.67% today, in Sydney the AX200 was down 3.2%, Shanghai is down 2.95%, Hong Kong down 2.65% and yesterday the Dow Jones in the US experienced its largest ever points drop. Crude oil is down 3% and testing the $50 a barrel mark whilst safe havens such as gold and yen are up. Source: multiple, mainly (Live Guardian blog)
Supply chain specifics
Honeybee supply chain collapsing - The Chinese honey industry (responsible for 25% of global output) is reporting that travel restrictions have severely impacted it because beekeepers cannot transport their hives to areas where they would normally feed. As a result, multiple bee colonies are starving to death says Naturalnews.com (Link). In addition to disrupting the honey industry, the series of travel bans are also affecting other crops, specifically those that are heavily dependent on bees for their pollination. Currently, out of the 100 crops that make up about 90 percent of the food eaten around the world, 71 rely on bees for reproduction. This figure includes about 85 percent of the fruits produced in China, such as apples, oranges and grapes. The honeybee plays an irreplaceable role in growing almonds, pears and peaches as well as strawberries in greenhouses.
Major British clothing retail chain Primark looks to move away from China - The head of the finance unit at Primark owner Associated British foods has stated the company is exploring whether existing suppliers in Turkey, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam and Eastern Europe can pick up the China slack (currently China accounts for more than 40% of Primark's total imports). They state they have good inventory for several months but shortages may result if delays become prolonged but some parts cannot be made outside of China. The group expects a rise in sales of 4.2% this year. Textilegence.com Link
Myanmar textile industry hit by supply chain disruption at their own ports - The Myanmar Times reports that several garment, footwear and bag factories around the city of Yangon has had to shut down or reduce operations due to raw materials shortages. The issue here is a bit different than in Vietnam; there are lots of containers of raw materials that have arrived but are not being released by authorities who are saying they may hold the containers for 2-4 weeks for inspections or quarantining. The chair of one of the industrial zones said the situation highlighted the need for Myanmar to develop the capability to produce raw materials within the country. Link
American Micro-level example of supply chain issues - WBUR in Boston Massachusetts has written an article on the issues facing a maker of bike racks and other accessories. 80% of their manufacturing is done in Guangdong province in the Southeast of China. Their factory is up and running again but the company needs to catch up and is faced with not just a backlog in the factory but increased shipping costs due to high demand. The situation is worse for Vibram, a maker of footwear and rubber soles. It has three factories, one local to Boston, one in Guangzhou in China and the other in Milan which is the latest hotspot for virus infections. Their plan B to get the American and Italian factories to take on the slack from China is having to be reworked into a plan C or D. Link
Port of Long Beach in California experiencing a slow down - the local newspaper LB Post reports that low cargo numbers have led to an overall slowdown at the port. As with the Los Angeles and Georgia ports yesterday, the executive director is warning it could have a major impact on the economy adding that labor levels have not been this slow for 4-5 years with rail and truck activity down 25%. They are optimistic things will get moving again once factories return to 100% and are working on being prepared for a surge. Several local regions in California have declared local energy despite no current cases. Link
Kuwait bans some foreign ships - Port and Terminal.com is reporting that ships arriving our departing to China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Thailand and Iraq will be banned until further notice with an exemption only for oil sector ships. Link
Lloyds report drops in spot rates in container shipping markets - Lloyds List reports that faced with shrinking revenue and increased losses, spot rates are beginning to fall with the Shanghai Containerised Freight Index showing significant declines; Asia-Europe rates are down more than 12% from pre new-year levels, Transpacific rates are down 6-8%. Some operators have tried to offset these falls by blanking (cancelling) some sailings but this has led to more idles - currently 3.7% of the global container fleet is now idle, up from 3.4% last month before the Chinese New Year. The article adds that further blank sailings may double the idle fleet percentage in the coming weeks. Meanwhile in the ports, non local drivers from low risk regions will no longer have to face quarantine, the intention is which to significantly boost the amount of available truck drivers to reduce the port congestion in China. Lloyds List link
Tanker charter rates down over 80% - Reuters reports (Reuters Link) that tanker charter rates are down more than 80% due to the virus impacting major economies although there are hopes for a rebound later this year.
Scotland's health system checking on medical supply chain - the Herald Scotland newspaper reports an email has been sent from the procurement department of NHS Scotland to suppliers asking them to report if they are experiencing or expect to experience any issues with supplies. An anonymous supplier told the newspaper "It doesn't reassure me as it's a bit too late. If medical supplies are coming from China, then they would have left for the UK ages ago". Scotland's chief medical officer advised it's highly likely Scotland will see a positive case and cautions that major sport, music events could be banned across the country. Link
Vietnam supply chain issues likely to linger for months - An article in the South China Morning Post (Link) reports gives an example of one packaging firm in Vietnam which expects a significant drop in sales in the months to come. “If companies like Flextronics and Apple cannot produce products, then they do not need packaging,” Donegan said. “February numbers at my company will be a disaster. We want to get back on track for May or June, but it is uncertain at the moment. We do not have to make lay-offs for a while, we will see where we are at the end of March, but it is all depending on factories reopening in China.” Meanwhile, Samsung's very large smartphone plant in Vietnam is estimated to be operating at between 50-80% according to insiders, basing the estimate on volumes leaving the plant. The company was responsible for 28% of all Vietnamese exports in 2017 meaning a slowdown would have a significant impact on the Vietnamese economy. A supply chain director was also quoted anonomously as expecting big MNCs (Multi National Companies) such as Samsung, Nestle and Procter and Gamble may run out of supplies by mid March.
Air Asia defers plane deliveries and starts negotiations to reduce leasing costs - the budget airline has deferred 78 next generation A330neos and is aiming to return some leased planes early. Currently the airline has 24 planes. Air Asia's share price dropped to a new record low as it also posted another annual loss. Link
Editorial: The problem of deeply interconnected supply chains - "Think about it: one-third of the world’s manufacturing capacity was idling for weeks and is still idling. That’s a big deal" says the financial post. The article goes on to explain that modern supply chains often involve multiple producers before the final product is produced (which won't be news to any else who works in the industry). Of more interest though is that it quotes unnamed Chinese officials as saying the work resumption rate in Guangdong and Shanghai is now back over 50%, but 65% of electronic manufacturers in the US have been told by suppliers there are shipment delays whilst the US construction industry is also likely to experience delays due to 30% of their products coming from China (personal note: already reports have emerged of delays in construction in Hong Kong and Shanghai so this seems very likely). The article also points out that it takes 2-4 weeks for shipments to sail from China to the US and this is the fourth week of the Chinese shutdown so soon we will start to see significant supply chain disruption for the North American economy. One supply chain academic at the end of the article suggests that additional backlogs could be created once things return to normal if post-coronavirus production is routed to domestic Chinese consumers first. Link
Longer term impact
New bill aims to protect US medical product supply chain amid coronavirus outbreak - Yahoo Finance is reporting that Republican senator Josh Hawley introduced a new bill yesterday aimed at protecting the medical product supply chain in light of the virus. It would require manufacturers to report imminent or forecast shortages of live saving of life sustaining medical devices (just as they do for pharmaceutical drugs), all the FDA to expedite reviews of essential devices that require pre-market approval and increase the FDA's authority to request information from manufacturers of essential drugs or devices including where they source from and the use of any scarce raw materials. Democrat senators are also asking for more information from the FDA and there is growing cross-party consensus that there's an excessive reliance on China for the medical supply chain. Link to Yahoo Finance article
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EDIT: Rubber soles not robber soles
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EDIT 2: 16:40 UK time - just seen a report on CNN that Corona beer is struggling with a brand launch campaign in the US due to connotations with the virus; a small survey of just over 700 drinkers found that 38% of Americans wouldn't buy Corona under any circumstances due to the virus whilst another 14% wouldn't order one in public. There's no relation between the virus and the beer brand other than the name similarity. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/28/business/corona-beer-marketing/index.html

This list is a bit shocking (IMHO)...

• Being stoic
• Men are constantly given the message that they must be self-reliant, independent, physically tough etc. Men are told that to be this way will make them successful in terms of business, society, and finding a partner. Being vulnerable will cause men to be ridiculed.[1] [2] [3]
  
• Being promiscuous
  
• Typically, men will be praised by other men for sexual conquests. There is a well-known double standard regarding perceptions of male versus female promiscuity with men being praised by their peers and called ‘studs’ while rejecting women who have multiple partners and branding them ‘sluts’.[4]
  
• Being heterosexual
  
• Many men are programmed to react negatively to the concept of homosexuality as it is a sign of deviating from the traditional male stereotype. Through popular rhetoric and from an early age when boys are learning about gender roles, men are taught that to be homosexual is to be less masculine.[5]
  
• Being violent
  
• Statistically, men commit significantly more violent crime than women. There are numerous reasons for this, but there are clear links between male instigated violence and the need men have to use aggression and violence to prove their masculinity and bolster confidence in their masculine identity.[6] [7]
  
• Being dominant
  
• To be preoccupied with power and dominance to a point that it causes harm to others, such as verbal, physical and online bullying. One study found that over a quarter of men thought they should have the final word in relationships, over a third of men believed that they had the right to know where their female partner was at all times.[8]
  
• Sexual aggression towards women
  
• Men who conform to toxic masculinity standards are more likely to make sexual comments or sexist jokes to women, commit sexual harassment, accept rape myths and behave as if they are entitled to women’s bodies.[8][9]
  
• Not displaying emotion
  
• Emotion is treated as being a feminine characteristic. Stifling emotion is seen as true manliness. From childhood, males are shamed to conform with the standard that to show emotion is weak and feminine.[10] [11] [12]
  
• Not being a feminist ally
  
• It is unsurprising that the overly masculine would reject men who identify as the allies of feminists. Research shows that men engaging in feminist activism are the targets of harassment by men who prescribe to toxic masculinity as it is perceived as feminine and non-conformist to toxic masculinity.[13]
  
• Risk-taking
  
• Connected to male dominance, toxic masculinity encourages taking risks to demonstrate dominance, men who buy into this are more likely to take extreme measures such as perpetrate violence, drive dangerously, gamble, abuse drugs.[14]
  
• Not engaging in household chores and caregiving
  
• Again, housework and childrearing are seen as feminine qualities. Being asked to do a feminine deemed task such as housework, or worse, a man being criticised by a woman for not cleaning appropriately is often interpreted as an emasculating assault and provokes a masculine overcompensation response.[15]
  

I guess men have to walk a pretty narrow (and largely contradictory) path.
But apparently that's not enough...

• Violence and recognising it is a male problem
• It is absolutely necessary to address the elephant in the room and acknowledge that there is a connection between issues such as violence and sex based oppression. Few will be surprised to hear that males commit nearly 90% of violent crimes in the USA.
• * “Physical aggression is a socially constructed gendered behaviour embedded in the social meanings of masculinities across many cultures. The general unwillingness of people to recognize that violence is a men’s issue is also reflected in the broader scientific literature.” Kilmartin & McDermott.[20]

And where is this stuff from?

• Aurora New Dawn
• is a registered charity giving safety, support, advocacy, and empowerment to survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence and stalking.

Apparently this is in the UK.

The following are excerpts taken from a series by Ben Taylor, AKA Thinking Basketball on youtube. It's called "The Backpicks GOAT: The 40 Best Careers in NBA History" in which he uses a mix of statistical analysis and hundreds of hours of video review to breakdown and rank the career values of the all time greats.
For easier viewing I suggest viewing the articles on his website. There are a lot of videos in between showcasing what he points out and Reddit's formatting makes pretty confusing to follow since you can't embed them directly into the post.
On Michael Jordan

On defense, he entered the league as an unpolished risk-taker. His footwork wasn’t sharp and he constantly gambled for steals, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZTiNIIMyes
He loved to snipe the post, sneaking away from his man for a steal, then leaking out in transition. Only, he whiffed a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q5LNk9mBME
His rotations to the rim were soft, often avoiding contact and rarely dissuading the shot. His on-ball defense wasn’t anything to write home about in those first few years either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qt3yUkF8aI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDhnUGHfRYs
But then, in the summer of 1987, he sprinkled fairy dust on himself and magically learned to defend. While his man D improved a bit in his third year, it leapt forward in his fourth (1988). He curtailed his habit of leaking out for steals — probably a factor in his defensive rebounding spike that year — and many of his silly gambles were replaced with highly-attentive rotations, laser-focused steal attempts and even some rim protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZMD0NWkdNw
His reactions were sharper, his reads smarter and his motor revved up higher than any other season, save for 1989. He also improved his footwork on the ball, where he would often lockdown opposing point guards. In the following play, notice how he uses his size and textbook positioning to slow down Isiah’s drive into the lane. In the second clip, he clinically hedges around a screen before his trademark swipe leads to a turnover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUd9vbu5UEw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN3BHm7QQhg
But his style was still high-risk, high-reward, and his defensive error rates were on the high side, landing in the 17th percentile for the heart of his career. His highlights are impressive, but he bled value at times.
For instance, in the 1991 Finals, Jordan slowed the Magic Johnson train by picking him up in the backcourt, preventing him from building a head of steam. In the low-post, Chicago constantly doubled Magic, and although Jordan did a solid job bodying him up at times, he also struck out on a number of steal attempts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS8FmxhLL0c
His transition awareness could be a problem, misjudging threats in front of and behind him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1yk78a2K_s
Like nearly every guard, he was too small to check bigs, limiting some of his impact when compared to more versatile defenders like Pippen or LeBron. He was never a vertical paint defender, instead swiping for steals with his ginormous mitts while his teammates challenged shots up high. Yet his cobra-like strikes obliterated plays when they worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k7PLl1RiHI
His sneak-attacks generated six of the top-200 steal percentages ever recorded, but his gambling style exposed the Bulls at times. He’s so jazzed to intercept this outlet that he bites at the mere sight of a pass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D950-xsWENg
At other times, his bets led to huge payoffs — his ambush blocks could blow up possessions, and he often played the pass in odd-man fast breaks, baiting challengers like a basketball Jedi. This isn’t the layup you’re looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGpxmM9BQqU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgM4sruITR8
In 1990, his motor slowed from the fever pitch he had played at for two years, and his defensive involvement tapered down a bit. He idled more, resting his engines to conserve fuel. Although, on possessions where he went full throttle, he made ball-denial an art, navigating screens (a strength of his) and shutting off passing lanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6THaAHYv5l8
During the second three-peat, he swapped athleticism for guile, relying on added strength to grind through picks or to stake valuable position. Here, he completely kills Orlando’s idea of a cross-screen into a post-up, flaming out the entire possession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn74JvldknA
He liked to linger in the lane and help against penetration, but improved awareness made this tactic more efficient — notice how he immediately locates the ball as he passes through the paint, de-prioritizing his own cover (Chris Mullin) to shut off a dribbling threat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4bvMSFfPl0
It was another risky tactic that could be exposed with better passing, but was a clear net positive from the film I tracked.

On LeBron James

On defense, James improved in phases as well. In his first few seasons, he was prone to more breakdowns and lacked dominant defensive sequences. However, he would become one of the most impressive perimeter defenders in NBA history, gradually improving until 2008 before jumping a level in 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1EMgmfaqhQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkLp5w5bOjY
He is one of the only players ever to truly guard all five positions on the court. Here’s a sampling of him guarding three All-Star players at the point, wing and center positions, demonstrating quickness, strength and technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkh4Nnz9Ie8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2r45koedTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_X2_sIHOI
He regularly diagnosed plays and anticipated where to be, sometimes directing teammates like a linebacker calling out the action before the snap. (For instance, in the previous clip, he sends the smaller Kyrie Irving to the wing, immediately recognizing the mismatch Boston would exploit with Irving on a big man.) He often sacked pick-and-rolls like he stole the opponent’s playbook — in the next clip, notice how he slides with the action before running to Dirk’s sweet spot. Once there, his help didn’t just mitigate an advantage, it mucked up the entire possession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-5oAaw10g
So much of defensive impact is about off-ball movement, and based on my scoring, LeBron’s instances of “good” help spiked from 2009 to 2013. He disrupted offenses in a variety of ways, jumping passing lanes, pinching down on dribblers or crisply rotating to the rim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGdSndCHCB4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lsdKAtlXGg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edXwbwfGKh0
James was able to defend like this without fouling, regularly finishing near the bottom of the league in shooting fouls committed. His size bothered so many wings, and he used his strength to fight through screens and smother opponents at times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTCQU0FP4M
He became known for signature chase-down blocks, but he also protected the rim in the half-court, erasing shots like another backline big: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz2FlmuaUug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmgnztrMRbM
LeBron’s block percentage lagged just behind the top perimeter rejectors during his best years, but his blocks were more valuable (per the clips above), frequently swatting these high-percentage looks near the hoop. According to play-by-play data, 43 percent of his blocks were within five feet of the rim, a rate eclipsed by only a few wings in the last two decades.
His defense was not flawless — in his Cleveland years, he could gamble a bit too much, trading physicality for risky gambits. He also missed his share of rotations — his rates from sampling would land in the bottom quartile of the league.5 He was sometimes overly stationary off the ball, and in the following play, ends up in no man’s land while diagnosing some off-ball action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEeKR9EM4Pg
He’s been an elite defensive rebounder since his teens, posting rates above the 96th percentile for perimeter players for the last 13 seasons. His defense peaked from 2009 to 2013, then his activity started to wane in 2014 as the mileage piled up on his odometer. His closeouts were always a touch reckless, but that year they became more of a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fScIst8RdDk
While his foot speed noticeably faded by 2017, a more slender James regained bounce in 2016, leading to a brief defensive renaissance; in 21 playoff games that year, LeBron set a career-high in block percentage, with rates that would fall in the 88th percentile historically among all players. In the last two seasons, he’s been prone to major defensive breakdowns as his activity has dwindled.

TL;DR (still kinda long): When he came into the league, MJ had a very high risk high reward style of playing defense, especially in his younger years. He had a habit of gambling for steals, often leading to defensive breakdowns and his footwork was unpolished, limiting his on-ball pressure. In 1987 he developed into an elite lockdown perimeter defender however and reduced his tendency to gamble for steals. He became elite at playing the passing lanes and his high motor and improved footwork were major contributors to his lock down ability. He did retain his high risk high reward style though, sometimes leading to defensive breakdowns. However it was a clear net positive and paid off very well, resulting in some of the highest steal percentages on record. He was a very good rebounder and shot blocker for his position as well, thanks to his enormous vertical. Although he was very effective on opposing guards and wings, his size at 6'6 obviously limited his ability to check bigs and overall impact. As he aged, his motor slowed however during his second threepeat years his increased strength allowed him to fight through screens better and stake valuable position.
During his early Cleveland years, LeBron shared many of the same flaws that MJ did in his younger years, often gambling for steals and missing defensive rotations. He was sometimes too stationary off ball and would lose his man while diagnosing the play. However, in his later Cleveland years and Miami, he developed into one of the best, most versatile perimeter defenders since Scottie Pippen. His ability to guard multiple positions proved to have enormous impact and his basketball IQ allowed him to direct teammates and call out plays like a linebacker, often ruining opposing possessions. He developed into one of the league's best help defenders in Miami while retaining one of the lowest foul rates. He was an elite defensive rebounder the minute he came into the league and although his block percentages lagged behind the best perimeter rejectors, his blocks were more valuable on average because many of them came at the rim. In recent years his foot speed and motor have slowed down, leading to poor closeouts and decreased activity. However, his weight loss in 2016 did briefly allow him regain foot speed and the elite ability he had in his younger years.
Your TL;DR was still TL: Overall, Taylor seems to be higher on LeBron's defensive prime than MJ's as he believes that LeBron's edge in help defense, rim protection, and overall versatility proved to be more impactful than MJ's lockdown perimeter ability was. Although by his estimation Jordan did manage to be a impactful defender for a few years later into his career than LeBron.