|
Gutcruncher posted:So is “metaverse” what dummies are calling VR? Is that all it is was this whole time? Like when “cloud” was just “internet” for a while? Kinda. Basically it's techbros who did a rail and watched Ready Player One and thought that an all inclusive VR world seems aweseome. Basically facebook but you're wearing a headset.
|
# ¿ May 10, 2022 20:44 |
|
|
# ¿ May 17, 2024 19:24 |
|
The more interesting thign to me is the trade volume. If you look at it across six months there is an INSANE spike in volume in the last week or so. My guess is the tether printer propping up the price while the more connected investors head for the door.
|
# ¿ May 11, 2022 21:40 |
|
Lol cnn is reporting that the Fed - the capital F one - is “concerned” by the Tether fiasco and is looking into risks and exposure. Yelled actually discussed Tether while testifying in front of a senate committee. loving if this poo poo is what finally makes regulators wake up and an even bigger if that finally fucks up bitcoin.
|
# ¿ May 12, 2022 18:34 |
|
Cowcaster posted:is there someplace to go to watch the bitcoin number go down in real time? it fills my brain with serotonin https://bitcointicker.co/stamp/btc/usd/12hr/ I've had this full screen on a second monitor for days now. When my wife first saw it she got worried I was day trading and then I explained I was just laughing and eating popcorn while watching bitcoin poo poo the bed
|
# ¿ May 12, 2022 20:06 |
|
It's actually in a bit of a rally right now. Back to where it was yesterday at this time (~28000). It was down to 25000 overnight.
|
# ¿ May 12, 2022 20:08 |
|
Ouhei posted:Crypto invaded sports sponsorships so hard this year, basically every F1 team has one on board, really curious how many of those are around next year lol. You saw this exact same thing happen around 99/00 when the dot com bubble was priming to pop. In particular the superbowl was loving FULL of adds for poo poo like e-stamp.com and pets.com. Lots of arena renamings iirc, and a poo poo ton of other sponsorships, all driving retail investors into a market that imploded in the next year. It's the same pattern of insane/aspirational valuation getting a lot of attention and thus more cash and that cash getting spent in flashy and nuts ways to draw more cash to spend more to draw more. . . before it finally takes a poo poo.
|
# ¿ May 13, 2022 19:04 |
|
HKR posted:you will not trick me into putting elon musk in my youtube search history That's why porn mode exists. Also so you can see what the default youtube channel suggestions are and laugh at that because jesus gently caress they're like a parody of dumb internet poo poo.
|
# ¿ May 15, 2022 20:49 |
|
I just got off the phone trying to explain bitcoin to my mom for 2 hours. Apparently someone on some financial show she saw was trying to sell coinbase stock really hard (lol) and she was finally confused enough to just ask me, who she assumed would know what's up. I got her the general bits and had to deal with a lot of "yes, yes I know that sound stupid. Yes, it is." Right around where I was trying to explain how you mine with a computer I remembered the Dan Olsen video and sent her that. Going to go send that dude on whatever donation service he uses, goddamn it's great having a one stop for pointing normal, not-online people at to explain what the gently caress is up with these apes and coins and dogges and elon musk and russian hackers and drug cartels and venture capital techbros etc.
|
# ¿ May 16, 2022 20:23 |
|
Strong Sauce posted:Edit: ^^^ this one: Yeah, it's pretty much right for her. She's got a good grasp of a lot of the computer and financial basics, and it is entertaining enough. Basically better for him to sit down and explain it all to her over two hours than for me to do it, while having to stop ever ten minutes to explain that yes, it really is as stupid as that.
|
# ¿ May 16, 2022 20:32 |
|
Ouhei posted:I imagine a lot of celebs and other rich people with more money than they can ever actually use just got into NFTs/Crypto because it seemed like a way to make easy money. I'm sure some want to feel like their smarter than everyone else and got suckered into this poo poo, but I'm guessing most don't give a poo poo. I would imagine there has to be a huge overlap with how low-tier rich people (like, legit rich, just not motherfucking wealthy) "invest" in art and this crap. I got in touch with an old highschool friend recently who it turns out lives in NYC and works the lower end of the art world, and from the way she described it it basically sounded like grifting people who want the social cachet of being an "art collector" but have neither the money to buy all the really famous poo poo nor the knowledge about art or inclination to learn to actually make informed decisions. Just lots of trying to convince mid-tier celebrities and athletes that some piece of modern art is worth five figures because they're an up and coming genius who's poo poo will obviously be worth seven figures some day. Every time I see someone like Seth Green with an ape that's what I go to now. One part chasing what someone hyped as a good investment, one part trying to be (seen as) a cool and knowledgeable person who is patronizing the latest types of art.
|
# ¿ May 17, 2022 19:37 |
|
HolHorsejob posted:Can they dodge legal liability for quitting after poo poo hits the fan? As a party intended to lend a veneer of credibility to the company, can they be considered liable for rubber-stamping what is essentially securities fraud? Depends on what they knew, and when they knew it. Any lawyer worth a drat will purposefully keep a barrier between them and their employer as far as what they know about the day to day goings on with the business. Their job isn't to help run the company, their job is to handle legal problems that come up. As such they're better off NOT knowing the nitty gritty so that they can defend the company to the best of their abilities. That said, if they become aware of things or if things become obvious enough that they can't claim ignorance, that's when you see them quitting. IIRC that's happened to Trump - both personally and his business - more than once. It's not even some kind of statement that they disagree with you or don't like you, it's just that they're no longer in a position where they can ethically (from a legal standpoint - legal ethics aren't exactly people ethics) represent you.
|
# ¿ May 17, 2022 21:13 |
|
Durzel posted:The weird thing about this I think is that people hail NFTs as giving true ownership of thing. Because the blockchain is the arbiter of truth, no one can deny the truth that you own thing (or a link to thing at any rate). Except, OpenSea has positioned itself to be the arbiter of truth of ownership of things. When Seth Green had a bunch of NFTs stolen recently, one got sold but the others were "frozen" on OpenSea, somehow. So, the blockchain is incidental to ownership it would seem, and OpenSea is actually the gatekeeper. They can stop you from selling it on OpenSea but not other platforms. The real rub comes in when someone buys it on Larry's Discount NFT Trading and tries to re-sell it down the road. Does being locked out of OpenSea make it forever tainted? What happens if the people buying on another platform aren't aware that it's been locked out of OpenSea? How does OpenSea verify that a stolen NFT really is stolen as opposed to the owner doing a private sale and then trying to burn the purchaser?
|
# ¿ May 18, 2022 18:02 |
|
Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:It's just the token. It's only ever the token. People are buying and selling hyperlinks worth hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars. But it's a unique, one of a kind hyperlink. Some lawyer made a video about the legal questions surrounding NFTs and there's an interesting wrinkle about rights not stored on the blockchain. You can sell an NFT and include the copyright, for example. But most NFT's aren't containing a complex document (because size affects gas fees I believe - it's why the pics are stored on servers rather than on the chain itself) so the sales contract isn't something that is going to stay affixed to that NFT. So let's say you buy a piece of art as an NFT, and the artist includes copyright and whatever other ownership stakes you care to name. Do those rights transfer to the second buyer when you sell that NFT? Probably not, which is hilarious. I mean, you COULD make up a new sales agreement that includes that stuff all over again, but at this point you're drafting a non-NFT sales agreement for each NFT and at that point why do you even have the NFT? You can just, you know, buy the rights to a piece of digital artwork the old fashioned way and then sell those rights down the road if you so choose.
|
# ¿ May 18, 2022 18:06 |
|
A Wizard of Goatse posted:there isn't AFAICT any reason you couldn't write up a contract that grants copyright to the bearer of the NFT and leave it at that, but there's a reason nobody with a copyright worth having is rushing to have their lawyers draft a paper saying "whoever holds this document owns all rights to Mickey Mouse". Since no NFT is worth owning the copyright to, the validity of this may never be tested. The problem with this is that the contract is only between the people who are party to signing it. If you and an artist sign that contract, and then you sell it to me, and I sell it to someone else, no one involved in that third sale ever signed the original contract. There MIGHT be an argument that you're obligated to transfer the copyright to me, but I"m under no obligation to do that for the other guy. fake edit: found that lawyer's video. It's another good one that really focuses in on just how insanely problematic NFT's are from a contract law standpoint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6aeL83z_9Y
|
# ¿ May 18, 2022 19:48 |
|
limp_cheese posted:I like the female ape that looks like she is on the verge of crying and doesn't want to be there. Really nails the female experience of dealing with these guys. Is Coincel a term yet? Can we make it one?
|
# ¿ May 18, 2022 19:53 |
|
It will never not be hilarious that Gamestop is managing to completely squander this meme stock bump they god. loving hell, just print a bajillion shares, cash in while the cashing is good, and use that cushion to figure out WTF to to do rebalance your business.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 12:51 |
|
Guze posted:Remember when gamestop was know as the place that would rip you off on trade ins? Lol it still is if you're into that. Last I saw it was something like $20 for a brand new (as in launched in the last couple weeks) game that you powered through and beat, which they turn around and sell for $66.99 instead of $70. Numbers pulled out of my rear end, but correct enough.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 13:02 |
|
hotdog feet posted:drat, console games are $70 now? glad i still play the same garbage I've been playing for the last 15-20 years Yeah, the AAA poo poo for the latest gen. Of course if you can wait even a couple weeks whatever new game you want is all over eBay for half that. If you opt for the digital version you're just SOL, though.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 13:12 |
|
Wendigee posted:Digital editions are for the birds I've gone all digital on my PC for years now, but there are enough different stores over there that you end up getting deep as gently caress discounts. Once in a blue moon I'll pay launch prices but for the most part I just wait six months and get it for half off. The problem with console is the lack of competing stores which means you're stuck. I've got no problem with digital editions in and of themselves. I don't get too hung up on ownership of the game that I'm going to play for a month or three right now and then in 95% of cases not touch again after I uninstall it. Used prices on disks (edit: selling yourself on ebay) are so abysmal that it's usually not even worth offloading them unless you're sitting on a stack of dozens. So the fact that I cant re-sell my old copy of Crusader Kings II after CK III launches is a big whatever from me. Buying old disks is just how you get poo poo cheaply in console land, though. On my PC I wait for Steam/GoG sales, on the PS I lurk ebay.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 13:19 |
|
hotdog feet posted:digital editions are still a better investment than crypto though, tbf So are scratchers, to be fair.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 13:20 |
|
Deki posted:I'm pretty sure they did print an assload of shares to capitalize on the hype. lol if they did and still managed to gently caress this up.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 13:44 |
|
taco show posted:The og artist is selling NFTs for the song… but 100% of the proceeds are going to charity oh my god its worse than I ever could have imagined. I was ready for some cringe but I think I just hurt myself.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 14:51 |
|
Deki posted:Honestly are they though? I'm not talking about the NFT stuff specifically but the fact that they haven't really come up with a better business plan using this breathing room they've gotten. Immediately pre-pandemic they were getting a fair bit of buzz as the next likely dead brick and mortar chain which lead to a lot of articles about how their business model was fundamentally hosed for both typical chain store reasons and reasons specific to the gaming/collectables industry. I think there was also some activist investor or something writing a bunch of them because he was trying to push them towards shutting down the unprofitable bits and either selling, merging, or re-launching the good parts. The broad strokes as I remember: 1) the starbucks problem of way too many stores leading to crazy overhead compared to income, especially on rent. I remember one article highlighting this with some stock analyst in NYC walking to 3 gamestops in 30 minutes. NYC and all, but equally anecdotally there are at least three within a 20 minute drive of where I am right now. I say " at least" because for all I know there's one in a random strip mall I haven't spotted yet. 2) a kind of flailing store layout and generally lovely management on the retail front. They bought ThinkGeek a while ago and a ton of their floorspace is taken up by what I remember one article calling "hot topic for nerds." You can kind of see how this might work if that gets you foot traffic buying dumb gadgets and funko pops, but apparently it doesn't. 3) the growth of digital storefronts cutting them out of the loop on a good chunk of the primary sales and loving gutting them on the used game sales that were their bread and butter 4) however, they don't price the used games aggressively enough and are routinely undercut by sellers on ebay. Not the biggest problem in the world, but still an issue. 5) A lackluster online storefront and online prices that didn't compare well to other places you can get physical games online like Amazon. 1 and 2 are just kind of standard bad retail store problems and probably fixable. Close a bunch of stores (which I don't think they've done, might be wrong) and do a comprehensive redesign to focus on drawing customers in and getting them to put down money on high margin poo poo. There were a lot of think pieces back around then about maybe getting partnerships with console makers to have subsidized demo units, maybe expand into in-person events like tournaments a bit more (the Games Workshop model) etc. 5 is also probably fixable if they really wanted to focus on their online presence. Again, lots of random articles opining about using their established brand to set up a Stem competitor etc. Probably not as realistic, and in fairness the webpage has gotten significantly better in the last few years. 3 and 4 are where they're dying, though. For the last 20 years they basically became as suburban pawn shop for video games and got REALLY used to the insane margins. There were a few quarters around '18 and 19 where they were seeing both raw income and profit from used game sales dropping by 10+ percent, which was where alarm bells were going off and everyone was writing about their impending demise. Anecdotally it also just feels like "gamestop gives you gently caress all for your games" is more and more common wisdom at this point, so I wouldn't be surprised if the losses to ebay are becoming serious. That's the part that I don't really see them turning around. I think that the combination of covid plus supply chain bullshit gave them a little bit of breathing room, with people looking for poo poo to do at home driving more sales industry-wide and gamestop's specific invention of their annual membership (which you need to buy a high demand item like a new console or video card) helping a bit too. Then you have the meme stonks craze. But none of that fixes the fundamental, underlying problems and nothing I've seen indicates that they've made progress on that front. They had an amazing opportunity with some unforeseen breathing room to make those changes, and it doesn't look like they have. I popped into one a couple months ago to impulse buy a game when I got lucky and snagged a PS5 out of nowhere (from loving walmart of all places) and it struck me as just the same old gamestop as I remembered from 10 years ago, and from 10 years before that.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 15:26 |
|
Gutcruncher posted:“store who sells scratched up used games for 5 dollars off” This is also loving them hard on online sales, at least based on my anecdotal experience of myself and friends. I ended up with $15 in GamestopBux from getting their membership (when I was looking for the PS5 - it was like $10 for a year so it was cheap insurance if they got any in - not renewing that) and I was looking at the used games when I noticed this disclaimer that they might not come in their original packaging. Like. . . . ok. But you're still charging me more than the guy on eBay for this old game. It was specifically Ghost of Tsushima that I was looking at, and the GS used copies were like $30 and the average on eBay was something like $25. . . and I could see pics of the actual copy I was buying and get one with a box because if it's just as much, why not? It kind of blows my mind how much better ebay is for buying used games than Gamestop.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 15:39 |
|
Klyith posted:
Fundamentally they've got the same problem that every other physical store does: why should I go to you to buy my commodity item (be it a hammer or a lamp or a game) for $X when I can order the exact same thing, from the exact same manufacturer, from an online store for $X-10%? Some places figure something out. Being able to grab the thing you need now rather than wait even a day is convenience people will pay for. Some stores also loop in services that are either impossible or annoying to get done remotely. Best Buy and Geek Squad as an example, plus all the places that will install your crap for you. It's not something I need to do, but I did choose Best Buy when I bought my grandmother who lives in another state a TV specifically because I could have them set that poo poo up for her and know it would work and if it didn't I could have them come back. Some places don't. Shopping malls are full of stores that went under because they didn't crack that nut. The point is that their current business model isn't long term viable and they've got a window of opportunity to try a couple more things. Will it work? Dunno. But not trying is guaranteeing failure.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 16:03 |
|
precision posted:gamestop is based on the convenience store model, literally. it's like saying "lmao this yogurt is $3 at 7-11" Based on some of the brand-new in-wrapper games I've seen photographed on some grungy as gently caress looking backdrops on ebay, I think even the crackheads have figured that one out.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 16:04 |
|
Klyith posted:No, they have a far worse problem. If Amazon had star trek teleporters that could beam a hammer or lamp directly to my house within an hour or so of buying it, that would be the correct analogy. Eh, yes and no. I mean, you're not wrong about digital sales absolutely being a game changer that was not good for them, but the market for disks still exists on the console side of things. They probably could have seen the writing on the wall and tried a pivot that leaned into their one remaining strength. It's still a place people go to buy disks and it's still a place people go to buy and sell used disks. The problem is that they're even loving that up. There's zero reason for me to buy a disk copy of a PS5 game at Gamestop vs. Amazon, and holy hell there's every reason for me to do my used buying and selling on eBay instead of them. Same goes for buying the consoles to be honest. When I was looking for my PS5 I gave utterly zero fucks about where I got it as long as it wasn't some scalper rear end in a top hat. I was willing to throw a few bucks around on subscription services that gave me first crack at new stock, within reason (hence my Gamestop membership). Gamestop actually had them in stock a couple of times before I finally bought one from Walmart. Why didn't I buy from them? Because they loving insisted on bundling the console with a bunch of trash I didn't need or want, while Walmart just sold me the loving console. I remember one that was almost $800 that was the console ($500) plus $50 in gamestop gift cards, plus two games that I didn't want (I remember one was FIFA), plus some dumb controller accessories like rubber slip-over covers for the grips. Some other random junk in there too. Point being it all added up to $800 if you accepted the MSRP of that stuff, but the extra poo poo was just garbage that I'd never buy in a million years. The accessories for the controllers in particular were just garbage and overpriced at that. I'd have ended up buying my playstation from them probably twice over if they had just sold me the loving thing, but instead Walmart got my money despite me having to shell out for Walmart+ to get it.
|
# ¿ May 20, 2022 18:16 |
|
[quote="notwithoutmyanus" post="523625799"] Please. Elon has more horses in the stable, ready to go. Now he's just waiting for judges to do *their* due diligence. [/ yeah but at whatcost.
|
# ¿ May 22, 2022 00:42 |
|
Crosspost from the BWM thread (also watch the quoted video it’s hilarious) Loooool speaking of which: https://www.financialadvisoriq.com/c/3611464/462594/finfluencers_attracting_finra_attention?checkedlogin=1 quote:
Lol FINRA is looking at making tick tock and insta finance bros accountable as people giving financial advice which means they would need to be licensed.
|
# ¿ May 23, 2022 19:17 |
|
I'm the little green blips trying to buy the dip.
|
# ¿ May 23, 2022 22:36 |
|
Zil posted:So these rug pulls are just elaborate money laundering schemes right? No way so many people keep falling for them over and over again. How would this even work as money laundering? The whole point of that is to get cash that's illegitimate (and thus something you don't want to declare on your taxes) a legitimate fig leaf to explain where it came from. So funneling all of your gambling and drug money into a mysteriously successful chain of laundromats. But this? I, the wealthy drug lord, buy your ponzi coins and then . . . . ???? So the value goes to zero, you rug pull and then . . . . what? Even assuming we're in it together and you just give it back to me, now I've still got millions of dollars in cash with no obvious and legal source.
|
# ¿ May 24, 2022 00:45 |
|
I don't think that's 200 individual voters. I strongly suspect that this is one of those systems where voting is done by shares. So if you own 1 token you get 1 vote, and if you own 1 million tokens you get 1 million votes. Same way most companies do stockholder votes.
|
# ¿ May 26, 2022 02:11 |
|
Betjeman posted:I've read most of this thread and I still don't understand crypto mindset. At the end of the day crypto is worthless and it's only the dollar backing it that gives it any notional value. I'm going to self-quote something I wrote in the BWM thread when it got talking about wtf people are thinking when they get into crypto: Cyrano4747 posted:The root problem of all of this is two fold: tl;dr it's scams all the way down. The big scammers scam the little scammers, an the little scammers scam people who are staring into the abyss and desperately searching for a way to get that "middle class lifestyle" that was sold to them their whole lives.
|
# ¿ May 26, 2022 13:58 |
|
pogs can at least be fed into a pulper and recycled to make, I dunno, anything? Like worst case light them on fire and use the heat to boil a pot of water and make some tea. NFTs are generating emissions and carbon for literally nothing. The most obnoxious, wasteful use of resources you can imagine is still better. Pouring five gallons gasoline in a puddle on the parking lot and lighting it on fire to roast a single marshmallow, which you then only eat half of because it tastes like gasoline fumes? Still less wasteful than an NFT.
|
# ¿ May 26, 2022 16:25 |
|
Double Bill posted:The Terra denial is getting even more bizarre now. They renamed Terra to Terra Classic and created a new Terra now, but holders of the old one think Classic (which is a whopping $0.0001461 at the moment) is going to the moon any day now. People in the coinmarketcap.com comment section for it are absolutely convinced their $1000 purchase is going to be worth millions of dollars in just a few days. The hilarious thing is that even if they got super loving lucky and something crazy happened to make it pop for a bit, they'd all crow about being paper millionaires and not unload anything until it crashed again because hey my $1k investment turned into $1 million CLEARLY if I just keep holding this bag I'll be a billionaire soon.
|
# ¿ May 26, 2022 20:57 |
|
Squiggle posted:Man that just makes me think that there are absolutely people out there in the world who have stuck their dick in a piggy bank. No matter what you can imagine someone, somewhere, sometime, stuck their dick in it.
|
# ¿ May 27, 2022 18:13 |
|
zedprime posted:The crypto ecosystem is a symptom of even stupider systemic issues with treating the capital markets as the US's social security account and/or a premier savings account. "Why no research" is completely missing the point of how devious the pipeline is of giving you a taste with your 401k, then your bank constantly badgers you to start an investment account if you can manage to keep a savings balance above $1k. This is huge, and it's a huge part of why the disappearance of defined benefits plans (e.g. pensions) in favor of defined contribution (401k) is loving evil and has been a big part of destroying the middle class.
|
# ¿ May 29, 2022 18:36 |
|
Agents are GO! posted:I think this gets to the disconnect I have: how can people even believe this exists? I guess I'm just jaded. Because it does, especially in past generations. For both of my grandfathers (and thus my parents, and thus me) it was the GI Bill. My dad's dad never finished 8th grade and was a sharecropper. In 1940 he joined the Army because it would pay him more and, importantly, they would feed him. This meant he could send his pay home to his brand new wife. Then WW2 happens, he's getting combat pay for 5 years, and saves a poo poo ton of it. But most importantly he ended up with a benefits package that was HUGE in helping him do poo poo like, right after the war, buying his own farm. A farm which by the early 50s was a poo poo ton of acreage in what became a major suburb of a major city. That's how the sons of a sharecropper with an 8th grade education ended up all going to private high schools, good colleges, and eventually graduate and professional programs. More or less same story for my mom's dad, only in his case he gambled like a fiend all through the war and still came home with enough to open a gas station. Again, a guy who never went to high school, and who was able to turn combat pay plus a poo poo load of cheaply loaned money into a middle class lifestyle. Both my parents have college degrees, my father has a post-graduate degree, and none of my grandparents so much as set foot in a high school. This was all helped by some big changes in how mortgages worked between the 30s and 50s, which was part of a major policy goal of creating homeowners. The tl;dr on it is that pre-1930 typical mortgage rates were something on the ballpark of half down with 10 year terms. The 30yr 20% (or less these days) loan that we all know now is a product of those post-war policy changes. There are HUUUUUGE swaths of American society who have basically that same story. My family's own tale is comically common. Just one little hitch: you more or less had to be white. Not to say that absolutely zero minorities benefitted, but a lot of it hinged on making access to credit easier, and red lining was a thing so . . . But that's ancient history, who gives a gently caress about that. The more recent example that a lot of people look at are the tech stocks. No, not the ones that went tits in the air in the 00s and are worth nothing today, ignore those. They're looking at the people who got Amazon or Google stock at IPO and made out like bandits. Those people got in on the ground floor, and launched themselves and their families to entire new economic classes. Now, most of the people getting early tech stocks were already comfortably middle class, but a lot of the more vocal crypto bros are too. For them it's not about getting middle class status, it's about becoming motherfucking wealthy. The language they use shows that, what with all the lambo references. Basically a lot of this needs to be seen against the backdrop of the 1940s-1980s being a period of jaw dropping economic opportunity in the US (especially if you're white), and then the 90s-00s being a period when a poo poo ton of technological change happened that created an entire new class of tech million- and billionaires. The former sets the baseline for what people expect, the later creates the beautiful fantasy that if you just pick the right stock or right coin you can ride it to the moon. As an aside, I'll also mention that the 70s-00s is also where the system that let the WW2 generation and the boomers pull together that lifestyle was dismantled in favor of maximizing profits for the very top of the economic food chain, but that's another rant entirely. I mean, not really, because that then gets into the stock craziness and the venture capital and the alure of hitting it big with some no-name company that moves from being an online book store to the biggest retailer in the world.
|
# ¿ May 29, 2022 19:38 |
|
The thing to keep in mind about this is that people think that can become wealthy - not rich, all-caps WEALTHY - because there are always a few examples of people who did pick the right stock, or the right coin, and were in the right place at the right time and smart enough to cash out on top. This isn't a new thing, either. Some people made a fuckload of money off the Depression (like Joseph Kennedy, JFK's dad - he made bank trading stocks in the 20s and then shorted a bunch right before everything came crashing down. Remember the dude from The Big Short? Yeah, that just 80 years earlier). You're always going to be able to find someone who really did make it. The way I make sense of it is by looking at another low-probability, high-reward opportunity that people also get fixated on: professional sports. It's really easy to go and find a bunch of stories about people from really impoverished backgrounds who were good enough to get that big deal, sign that big sponsorship, and become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Of course, for every one of them there are thousands upon thousands who get ground into paste in college athletics and leave without a diploma or a professional career. And for every guy who ends up not being quite good enough for the NBA after college, there are even MORE who were decent in high school and never get that scholarship, but who still hosed up their secondary school studies by focusing on athletics instead of school. I saw the latter a lot when I taught at a community college. Kids who weren't good enough for a university team but who were still focusing on basketball at the community college level because they thought they might be able to get picked up by a university, and who weren't paying any attention to their classes at all. It was tragic all around. I had more than one reference Cam Newton to me as a guy who did time on a community college NFL team before making the pros, and all of them were ignoring that he was good enough to get a university scholarship first and then ended up in a CC because he hosed up and got kicked out. Basically it's all survivorship bias. You've got people looking for a way out who see someone who did it - be it via sports or stocks or coins - and decide that that's how they're going to get out too. Only what they aren't seeing are the thousands of other people who tried the same thing and ended up owning a portfolio full of Pets.com and OnMoney.com.
|
# ¿ May 29, 2022 19:51 |
|
|
# ¿ May 17, 2024 19:24 |
|
Hammerite posted:I know what you meant by this remark, that you were referring to the whole of your potted history of America's post-WW2 economy; but it's unfortunately placed, because you put it right after the paragraph where you discussed the effect of racism in barring black people access to economic opportunities. You're right, I didn't intend it that way, but honestly it works either way. No one - especially middle to upper class white Americans - wants to look at how centuries of racism prevented non-whites from enjoying the same relative success and tilted the tables WAY in the favor of white Americans.
|
# ¿ May 29, 2022 21:59 |