You have to ask: what drives someone in this position.
And this is a question that only the 200k ultra high net individuals (30mm+) in the world can answer.
I think people stop chasing material possessions and start chasing prestige and power. These people don’t interact with the average joe much so they don’t really care about their opinion, unless you are a populist like Trump for eg. They care about their family friends and peers. So I think it creates a broey kind of culture where you want your peers to be happy with the job you are doing. If you are in finance you want the bankers to be happy. Your political party to be happy etc.
I think it becomes more about making and keeping friends. This stage for life without need for material possessions is all about people and relationships and power.
You just have to imagine yourself with infinite wealth but no friends. You would quickly run out of things to spend it on, and you would just want people to love and respect you.
Hopefully down the road the millennials and gen-z become a large enough collective that they finally push out the garbage...although the establishment wont go down without a massive fight.
Do Gen-Z have enough brains to understand that any sensible college loan relief must be accompanied by stringent control how colleges raise tuition? As it stands now loan relief is an invitation to the universities to keep raising tuition without limits.
Humans being social animals makes me worried that its going to be a fighting retreat by those aware of the manipulation against these technologies being used to manipulate.
The point being… it’s not a given that the current rejection/resistance to the normative cultural pressures will remain strong enough to prevent these younger generations from slowly bending towards conservatism the way the previous three/four generations have. And I was just highlighting the fact that we can’t yet tell if the component of this drive towards conservatism that’s powered by technological manipulation by the powerful (newspapers, then radio, then television, then cable tv (in America), then the internet, now social media) will continue to be ineffective of these people or if they will slowly be sway over time.
I've been part of campaigns where the leader actually had the brains to act right. Power, sometimes, can be tricky to handle. BUt NOtfor ALL.
There are times, when those in power, acting with not so complete picture of this situation - or the information, are prone to look stupid with hindsight. NOT the case with all, but a minority of leaders!
Millions of us think in sound bites provided by propaganda.
Our universities teach flawed unsustainable economic theory as reality.
Our politicians are at the forefront of the science of dividing voters into two equal parts attacking each other and voting on non-essential issues.
Please see the work of George Lakoff on framing - it is crucial.
How do you feel about his three houses?
The truth is people with the money don't want to change things and those with the power stop caring as much once they too get more.
1. 221 Van Patten Parkway, Burlington Vermont: purchased for ? in 1981 currently valued ~$405k
2. 311 4th St NE, Washington, D.C.: purchased for ~$490k in 07 valued at ~$736k
3. 310 Stone Gate Lane, North Hero, Vermont: purchased for ~575k in 2016
I'd like to think that a senator that is 81 years old could have done much better given this is the bulk of his worth. In fact many developers here working for FAANG will probably exceed how he turned out if they haven't already.
Angsty posting like this probably sounded really cool to people in high school, but I'm not sure why we should be impressed with your fact-free faux-radical grifterism.
What you call "angsty" is what I call "rational". I see you're happy to continue experiencing these crises which are, in fact, happening.
Also, I don't think you know what grifterism means, if that's even a word.
I can take crypto (and I'm talking about BTC/ETH, but can be others) and lend it out (generally for a positive APY). I can then borrow (typically USD*, but can be many other tokens) against that collateral (sometimes even for a positive APY!).
No permission needed and happens in the scope of transactions that cost pennies.
This is a massively important aspect of finance that goes beyond daily price swings. It is a relatively new aspect in crypto that has only been around for the last ~3 years or so.
Example: https://aave.com/ ($8.2b locked up right now)
imagining it will change for an entire economy ... is quite irrational.
no magic will make a constantly shifting ice floe into boring bedrock.
I'm not a fan of the fed and I think some sort of decentralized currency would be great. Bitcoin was a good idea and I'm glad we're experimenting along those lines, but it's a failed experiment. It's never going to work as a mainstream currency.
Maybe you're thinking of Ethereum, which just moved off GPUs last year and as a result, destroyed the economics around mining with GPUs. So, that whole wasted cycles argument doesn't really hold up any longer.
Bitcoin is a store of value. I can borrow against it as collateral, which gives it real value in finance.
Uhh...okay? My point is obviously that it's a waste of energy. If someone manages to mine it using vacuum tubes powered by an ox on a treadmill, do I have to mention that too?
> Bitcoin is a store of value. I can borrow against it as collateral, which gives it real value in finance.
I'm not disputing that some people are foolish enough to agree to park their money in it. That doesn't make it a stable place to do so, which is, you know, a slightly important quality in a currency.
No, it isn't. We could get into why it isn't, but we both know your mind is made up because you haven't really dived into that yourself. Or if you do really care, start reading a bit of what Dan Held has to say.
https://danhedl.medium.com/pow-is-efficient-aa3d442754d3
> That doesn't make it a stable place to do so, which is, you know, a slightly important quality in a currency.
You're missing the entire point of bitcoin. There can only be 21m. It is something that no government can compete with.
Jack Mallers had an entertaining rant recently... https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/163788645657097832...
As we are seeing right now, banks aren't a stable place. Literally, hundreds of companies were on the verge of losing everything a week ago, until the government bailed them out. USD isn't a stable place either. You probably earn dollars (ie: you buy dollars as a result of working) and those dollars are consistently worth less due to inflation every second of the day. How is that a better model?
Okay, I read the article. And it's an exemplar of the comical reasoning that characterizes cryptocurrency.
First he compares it to Ford's and Edison's idea of using "units of energy" as currency, which didn't work because it was hard to transfer and store. Except that Bitcoin doesn't store energy, it expends it as waste heat. A true energy currency has inherent value because the energy can be used at will to do something useful. Bitcoin can't be converted back into energy. It derives its value from the amount of energy that it has already irreversibly wasted.
Then he argues that wasting energy will "produce more efficient worldwide energy markets with Bitcoin miners performing an arbitrage of electricity between global centers"...by making energy more expensive in places where it's currently cheap. He also apparently thinks that flared methane is a form of renewable energy.
Then he adds a few non-sequiturs about "thermodynamics" to sound sciency. "Doing stuff requires energy, therefore there's no such thing as waste". LMAO. Okay.
Then he tops this steaming pile off with the argument that wasting energy will incentivize the development of nuclear fusion by making energy so expensive that we'll have no choice. And sprinkles on some bullshit about the "Kardashev Scale", as if that's a real thing that has any meaning, to hook the uber-nerds.
I'm sorry, but...give me a fucking break. The fact that this guy passes for a thinker in the Bitcoin community is why people have a hard time taking it seriously. All this nonsense about the Kardashev Scale and "efficient arbitrage" and absurd use of "incentives" makes him sound like a character on Silicon Valley.
> There can only be 21m. It is something that no government can compete with.
I'm well aware of that, I just don't see why it's a good thing. Let's say all or nearly all the Bitcoins are mined someday, and it's the world's primary currency, and it doesn't behave erratically. Economic development continues so there's an ever-increasing amount of real stuff that's worth something, but that ever-increasing value has to be represented by a constant number of coins. So every coin becomes more valuable over time. As with any deflationary scenario, if I already have money I'm going to spend as little as possible because I know it'll have more buying power the longer I wait, and that will suppress economic growth and investment. But this is even worse than typical deflation--there is zero new money being created. If I'm a young person trying to establish my career and finances, how do I ever get a piece of this pie? Not only are there few jobs because people are disincentivized from paying for anything that isn't strictly necessary, but every piece of the pie is already owned by someone and there will never be any new pie. If anything there will be less because some people will take their keys to the grave with them.
> USD isn't a stable place either.
No currency is completely stable, but USD is a hell of a lot safer than BTC. I keep my personal savings in USD. Yes, it'll have less buying power a year from now. But I know its value won't be cut in half by next week. I have no such guarantee with Bitcoin. BTC enthusiasts love to make the argument that because the dollar isn't 100% safe, you should park your money in something that's completely unsafe. It's like saying that because I might get hit by a car tomorrow, I might as well take up recreational Russian roulette.
If you want to create an alternative currency that has mainstream adoption, you have to make something that's demonstrably better for the average person. You can't just say, "well the dollar isn't perfect, so you might as well use $CRYPTO_OF_THE_WEEK". And for the love of god, don't let the idiot who wrote that article do the talking for you.
If you don't like Bitcoin's energy usage, then there are alternatives, like Ethereum, which now consume tiny bits of energy and secure similar amounts of value.
I also don't see Bitcoin as a currency. It is a commodity, like gold. You're looking at the price of BTC against USD, I'm looking at it like "How much can I borrow against it?" You don't go into the store with a nugget of gold and plop it on the counter, you buy gold because you feel like it will maintain its value over time. I can also leverage that gold by borrowing against it, the same with Bitcoin. That is how I can use it on a daily basis.
> But I know its value won't be cut in half by next week.
In the US. Other countries are not so lucky, should they just be stuck holding the short stick?
I wouldn't think so. Many of our "crisis" are due to the value of "cash" or liquidity to fluctuate significantly. This is the case in the recent banking crisis. In the case of Bitcoin, this will be a deep dive in price. Now which one is better? I don't know.
False dichotomy. The Fed can have good intentions, and a good-but-not-perfect idea what they're doing, and things can be working out, not perfectly, but better than they would in the absence of the Fed.
Is there any evidence for that? Yeah, look at the world before the Fed. Look at the "Panic/Depression of 18xx". There's several to choose from. They're 2008-or-worse events, over and over and over.
The economy is a really complicated system, with lots of humans (and their emotions!) as part of the system. It's really hard to tune it perfectly. That doesn't mean that the Fed is either malicious or incompetent.
One look at Norway tells me this is malarky.
If Norway can have such a stable economy and society, why can't the rest of the world?
What have they figured out that has eluded everyone else?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Exports_Treem...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden_Export_Treema...
Sweden has twice the population and what? Three times the landmass?
Sweden also does not have an oil fund where it invested much of the dino profits from the last 60 years. The Norwegian one won't last forever, but I'd bet it'll last longer than any of us.
Don't get me wrong; Sweden has a decent economy and the standard of living is still amongst top-20 on the planet. Norway just struck black gold and scored higher.
It also looks like Norway's economy is also having some trouble during this time [0], like many other nations. And finally, we need to be careful comparing specific economies like Norway to other nation's economies. Each country's economy is different, and prescribing something that works in an oil-rich, northern European country will probably not work in other parts of the world.
[0]: https://www.ssb.no/en/nasjonalregnskap-og-konjunkturer/konju...
Interesting podcast about copying Nordic countries to make ourselves happier: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/season-10-episode-25/
Considering how bad things were before the Fed, quite a lot before there is support for the idea that it isn’t making things better.
How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent?
The number of people here defending the system and saying this isn't inflation is mind boggling. Where do you think the money comes from when the government rescues banks? No matter how you slice it, the taxpayer pays through higher fees, higher rates or inflation.
This system of rescuing banks with no prosecution of the people responsible and printing a mountain of money is unsustainable. It's clear that humans will never implement an equitable system and it makes the case for Bitcoin every day...unless you profit from the financial system and then I'm sure you'd be thrilled to kick the can down the road.