Perhaps they were just quotation marks rather than scare quotes and they genuinely wanted to show how wild the price fluctuations have been. Cynicism abounds on the internet, but people are still sometimes genuine.
Thanks. I'm legitimately quoting, but also prefer use of more specific terms like "tripled" or "fives times more expensive" etc. than common dramatic headlines words like "crushed", "slammed", "blasted", "surged".
Yep. One of the ways reporters mislead people while remaining factually correct. Then they blame factually incorrect news as destroying society while they're just doing the same thing more tactfully.
"factually incorrect news" is not the same thing as "fake news". Fake news is like a fake Rollex. The correctness of the time on the dial isn't the thing that makes it fake. Fake news is fraud without the monetary connotation.
If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of people would believe it. Fake news is worse than wrong, its divorced from reality. There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with. Fake news is a click farm in Macedonia, not a news outlet that made a mistake.
See also: "deep state" (which has now been bastardized to mean "shadow government").
Well, sure. So "fake news" is like a fake Rollex. But then, what the "regular" news are is a genuine Rollex, except the company secretly swapped out internal parts for low-quality, less-precise but much cheaper ones, and are selling the watch for the same price, with the same SKU[0].
Sure, buying the genuine watch supports the IP holders and gives you bragging rights, but both the genuine and the fake are bad choices when you're looking for a high-quality, durable and precise watch.
> There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with.
By this standard, regular news would be fake news too. You don't get manipulative language in the article when someone is trying to "get it right" - it only shows up when someone is trying to get it wrong, on purpose.
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[0] - I.e. what computing hardware and home appliance vendors do all the time.
There's legitimate gripes you can have with news, but you can't say they don't literally send a person out to conduct interviews and whatever. "Fake news" isn't just less precise or some subjective quality issue about the internals of the organization There is no internals. That's the part that's fake.
Fake news is like the man at the store told you it wasn't ticking because it just needs to be wound up, wouldn't let you take it out of the box, and you got home with it to find the dials are painted on and the inside is a few coins glued together. Whatever legitimate gripes one may have about Rollex cutting corners, it would be laughable to pretend like the time on their dials is just as useless as the ones painted on the fake watch and really its all just an opinion which one is "real".
What do you call something that looks deceptively like a watch but is actually just a prop? I'd call it a fake watch. What do you call a website that looks deceptively like a news organization but is actually just outrage headlines made from mad libs for clicks? I sure wouldn't call it real news.
Not wanting to get caught up in this analogy war but I think there's a clear distinction between "proper" news which tries hard to be factually correct and "fake news" that's just made-up lies. The problem I see is that people judge the former type as being informative and the latter as misinformative. In reality, both intentionally mislead people using different techniques - proper news by exploiting human reading comprehension weaknesses to plant false ideas in readers' heads without technically lying, and fake news by exploiting gullibility by actually lying.
I think some of those dramatic terms are more specific, if and when the described occurence is something very unusual. Then they convey (if choosen right) the unusualness and thus gain a higher information density for the outsider.
Cratering seemed like it deserved "scare quotes" though, this trough is still one of the highest prices of wood compared to almost any time before 2017.
"Thanks. I'm legitimately quoting, but also prefer use of more specific terms like "tripled" or "fives times more expensive" etc. than common dramatic headlines words like "crushed", "slammed", "blasted", "surged"."
Doesn't seem to support your claim that these are scare quotes at all.
Yeah I don't have much of a quibble with calling those prices as being "skyrocketing" particularly if you look at the 25 year history. Those prices were very high.
Although it just "cratered" or "crashed" back down to entirely normal. Doesn't look like there's any oversupply glut causing it to overshoot to the downside. Lumber companies will have to learn to make do with charging the same prices they charged before the pandemic.
“skyrocketing” is a subjective term. It doesn’t matter if it’s something consumed every day. What one person considers sky rocketing for a price will be different than another.
> Not some silly fantasy speculation good, like crypto or... overvalued stock.
Apple is not a “silly fantasy speculation good” anymore than a lumber futures contract.
Because sometimes "skyrocketing" means going 1% over the average annual high, or "cratering" going 2% below widely published analyst forecasting.
In other words, the media is often radically hyperbolic to get clicks and ad views. So much so that when they use the same adjectives correctly they don't carry any weight anymore.
Average annual high (I'm assuming you're using the stock price daily high from a multi-year set of highs from its daily OHLC bars as the 'high' here) is a poor metric to evaluate whether or not a company is doing well. Low beta stocks usually don't really outperform so I mean you need to just optimize for low correlation, high relative outperformance vs. a sector wide index or something.
I just don't think the random numbers you asserted are real at all - this would be something that one would need to test.
Anyone getting their 'market moving news' from BusinessInsider/financial news sites is doing it wrong.
The entire point was that the metrics I chose were bad. Furthermore they were such minor differences that even if they weren't bad they still wouldn't be relevant. They were intended to be comically useless.
It means that the hypothetical author of the article didn't have any idea what they're reporting, which is exactly what I was trying to express. The authors rely on the readers' ignorance and the way many people reflexively accept numeric data as true, pertinent, and sufficient evidence of any claim.
Sorry about that - just saw the article and immediately started hyperventilating/wanted to vent as a child comment with someone that also seemed to 'get it' haha... cheers
I wouldn't define "returning to historic norms" as "cratering". Would you define a plane landing smoothly on a runway, even after a steep dive, as "cratering" the runway?
I guess it depends but to me cratering is more about slope of the curve than its final destination. So I can see a plane barreling or diving or catering down, before pulling up on the runway...
To me what is interesting is comparing to other commodities. For Iron you see a similar pattern to lumber. Copper and steel boombed but are only starting to turn now. Is there a lag between raw materials and more refined materials? Silver and gold similarly, though gold has fallen harder. I'm guessing because of all the doomers that buy gold when the economy dips. I don't know how to analyze wheat. And crude oil just flash crashed. Like literal flash crash.
I wonder if anyone knows the reasoning behind these different patterns.
There isn’t a common theme really because these things are nothing alike. Oil crashed because there was a glut and that toxic sludge needs special infrastructure to store it.
You can store a million dollars of gold in a suitcase. A million dollars of oil at $10/barrel (the price right before the crash) is 3.5 million gallons of oil that has to be stored somewhere. And on a physical delivery futures contract you’ve agreed to take that delivery.
99.999% of oil traders are incapable of taking or providing delivery for settlement because of this and what you witnessed was nobody wanting to get caught holding the bag.
Sorry, I'm not trying to say that these things are alike. I'm more curious about the socioeconomic that drive these commodities in different ways. I guess since everyone is telling me that they are different means this point didn't come across. I thought it was obvious since they didn't move in the same manner and I was pointing out different effects to begin with.
I just want to express appreciation for your comment. I don't know why the news article wouldn't include a chart like this, but I'm glad you posted it.
