Im still not convinced that crypto is worth it. It seems like just about everyone either loses money in crypto or makes very little, chasing a dream laid out to them by some youtuber who is part of the very small group to make any nice amount from it. Just seems too volatile and sketchy
It’s a decentralized pyramid scheme. It’s a way for the rich to syphon money from the gullible and gambling addicts.
That’s all there is to it, it’s not really hard to understand.THIS. This is not being communicated enough.
The issue is the new(er) generations think they have discovered something never seen before, all the while truth being - the only new thing is the way people are being manipulated into investing in trickster scheme.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have been there when internet was born. We have witnessed it and we have learned from our mistakes. It is not you who are smarter, it is us knowing not to buy tulips.
I thought you were talking about NFTs for a moment there
Crypto is basically a ponzi-scheme. I made a little bit off of it, then sold too early. Then bought back in, and sold way too early. Then bought back in, then lost a lot. The only real benefit is anonymity, which I don’t really need and only really benefits criminals. I don’t see it taking over if someone like the EU introduces fee-free digital transactions.
Sounds very similar to what I have heard most other users say. Yeah, not the best. When the whole doge coin thing was going down (feels like forever ago) I ‘invested’ $100 and made a profit of $3. I never got involved in crypto again. Im trying to maintain my 100% success rate. Have a good rest of your day my fellow King
I’m old enough to remember going to Hollywood video or blockbuster with my grandma on Fridays. Have a movie night. Those were some amazing memories.
I remember going to friends places for sleepovers, we would all go down to the video rental and pick one movie each, then pick up takeaway on the way home. We’d stay up all night watching each video and pigging out on food
The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.
I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.
Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift. I read dozens of books about nazis, authoritarianism, societal memory, cults, fucking roman empire. But I still have cognitive dissonance every time I open news feed.
From “The Hunt for Red October”, to “you shouldn’t have started the war against russia then.”
Red Dawn to half+ our leadership bowing down to him, and a president calling him a good guy.
God damn what a wild ride.
The internet came way too quickly, or at least it evolved way too quickly for us. We should still be on 56k and surfing Limewire for what may or may not be what we’re actually looking for. 24/7 access to everyone all around the country, and world, was too fast as well. We can’t acclimate that fast. Our brains weren’t ready for it.
That’s the saddest thing about people born after the 90s. We expected the future to get better. Kids now are just hoping we don’t destroy everything.
Holy shit thank you. You finally put it into words for me. The shift of 'the internet is the greatest tool for knowledge, to what it is now, some cancerous corpo bloated bullshit that ignorant people are harnessing just to find others to support their shitty beliefs. Been such a hard thing to watch and understand how the fuck we got here.
I think it’s lack of empathy as the root for everything.
Which I believe is opposite of human nature but here we are.
Empathy is easily used for propaganda as well. All those “immigrants are going to r your wife” and “radical elites transing your children” are the appeals to empathy that work very well (there are examples from the left too lets be honest, they’re just less unhinged)
IMO you need empathy, rationality and introspection: empathy to feel for your fellow human, rationality to not fall for the grift, introspection to realize in what ways you were an idiot and self-correct.
The wave of scepticism that will inevitably come in 2030s will weed out the grifters, but I doubt it’ll last. Time is a flat circle afterall.
Nice, you’re spot on. We bonded for a while… now we’re in entropy!
Facebook and unregulated social media. Up to now most governments in the world don’t even have a clue or idea that the internet is a very powerful tool that should actually be regulated because there are very evil people who will always act in bad faith to manipulate others for power and control. The Golden era of the internet is definitely over, I think 2016 was a defined shift that will be recorded by historians.
In fairness, most internet users would have been extremely against regulating social media until quite recently
it’s all about how the regulations are designed… for the benefit of corporations? or regular people?
for example, there could easily be rules placing caps on the amount of advertising that’s allowed on any given platform. no fucking way now the government will ever put that cat back in the bag now that the 20 percent of GDP comes from tech monopolies fueled by advertisements.
Early internet was very much regulated. I wish we could all just go back to usenet and no internet on phones.
it was only regulated by its uselessness… it was the wild west of shit otherwise.
Regulated by my uselessness…
KICK MIDWEST.SOCIAL cabinet_sanchez "Fuck youu’
“before 1990” ffs. I was expecting “before 1960”
I’ve been called an “elder millennial” before and I thought that was funny. But just “elder”… bitch, fuck you!
Feels like licking a 9v battery!
My grandparents lived in houses before electricity and lived long enough that computers in their pocket could talk to them. Hopefully it is a few centuries before that much happens in 103 years
elders
1990
Noone is expecting you to understand crypto, but I hear this about modern technology in general all the time and I just don’t buy it. It’s only brain-melting if you’ve spent your entire life being deeply incurious. There are 80-90 year olds who understand this shit just fine because they bothered to keep up.
The problem with cryptocurrencies is that you can explain it, without going to technical details, to a person with the intelligence of an average investment banker. (Which isn’t much. Many animals make more profitable random investments when prompted.)
Same with generative AI I guess.
Apparently I’m an elder.
The shifts in tech were easy.
It’s the repeated economic punishment, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and political dive bomb this country has put us through that’s been tough.
I thought this was a Canadian site? You must be usaian
I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
Yeah.
We can move on to “complicated” things like crypto after we’ve made sure people understand basic things like FUCKING FASCISM.
Priorities.
It’s not “brain melting”. Even watching the internet go from “this is super neat, and way cool” (For nerds) to “Well, it’s ALL going through enshittification now” wasn’t “brain melting”, it’s just what happens under capitalism.
Us millennials basically had the internet to ourselves for like 15 years.
The only reason we’re still on it is chasing that high even though it’s gone
What? I’ve been on it since the early 1990s ….
Here’s a kicker: You’re a millenial, and yeah, us millenias had it all to ourselves, by and large, for about 10-15 years.
Remember when you can to configure Trumpet with the proper IP settings, and that was AFTER you configured your modem’s DMAs and IRQ’s (Unless it was an external serial modem…)
They’re a millennial if you assume they were also a child in 1990
You also had to figure all this shit out by trial and error. Google or YouTube didn’t exist in 2000. Let alone like 96.
Okay, as someone born in 1988, I am not an elder (but also I will accept you being kind to me please, thank you 🫠)
Is it really so hard to just stay somewhat connected to the world around you?
It’s not like it was a rapid shift, this shit has been progressing for DECADES and some just refused to learn. I’ve talked to 30 yos who can’t do anything beyond basic computer usage, and I’ve seen a 80 year old who was extremely with it and troubleshooting with me.
It’s not an age problem, it’s a lack of effort
I did not have any exposure to internet my until having to join online classes in 2020 pandemic, and it was still not as bad as some people make it seem.
Exactly. I’m 61, and I first used a computer in 1980. My uncle was receptive, so as I helped him over the years, he became more and more proficient until now. He can do most of his troubleshooting on his own, and he’s ten years older than I.
Nobody is expected to understand crypto. Same with the stock market and generally the economy. If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
Same with the stock market and generally the economy.
Okay, you can tap the breaks on that one. There’s a book from 1949 called “The Intelligent Investor” that’s been the benchmark for savvy stock market analysis for generations. Hardly the only one (although a lot of the newer stuff is just variations on the core themes). Understanding price-to-earnings, market share, debt-to-asset ratios, and marginal return gets you a long way towards consistent middle-of-the-road long term safe returns.
Same with The Economy. Get a copy of Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and you will have a firm grasp of macro-economic models and trends by the end of it. You’ll get a core understanding of the difference between short-term investment returns and long term value creation. You’ll get an idea for the broad reasoning behind different public policies and their impact on the broad growth and development trends seen over the last 500 years.
There’s no need to mystify markets or economic systems. In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment), a modern business analyst has a generally firm grasp of their industrial or market focus.
Even crypto is something people can broadly understand as a modern iteration of a privatized experiment in currency manipulation. The thing about crypto is akin to understanding how a casino works. Analyzing the system doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to profit from it. Its like analyzing a grizzly bear with a plan to engage it in a boxing match. The best analysts will tell you “You’re going to get horrible mauled if you interact with this thing, stay away.”
If it was simple and see thru you couldn’t run this many scams.
The scams aren’t a product of (lack of) transparency so much as they are the result of misinformation and market manipulation.
You’ve got a guy in a big wagon with a bullhorn selling “Better Than Aspirin!” for $10/pill right outside a pharmacy selling aspirin for $3/bottle in a bottom shelf at the back of the store. The moral of this isn’t “Nobody will ever understand pharmaceuticals”. It is that there’s is a great deal of money in capturing people’s attention and then lying to them.
In the same way that a modern physician has a generally firm grasp of the human body (without knowing how every single cell is going to behave or every single genetic variant of human is going to respond to a given treatment)
But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.
We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.
But the cells existed before us and we are simply trying to understand them.
So are the humans who are engaging in commercial activity.
We created the economic system and now we make conflicting theories about how it behaves.
We are participating in an economic system created by our forebearers and trying to create policy with an eye towards preferred outcomes. And there’s a lot of disagreement on which policies and which outcomes we should be aiming for. One could say that we are in a state of contradiction that is constantly refining itself in pursuit of new stable states. But this isn’t something any single individual - or even elite cartel - has dictatorial control over.
I only get to truly be a capitalist when I’m living in an industrial society. I only get to truly be egalitarian when I’ve reached a point of (perhaps Kropotkin-ian or perhaps more Roddenberry-ian) post-scarcity. We can create the technology and the social structures that allow for the existence of certain economic states. But we’re still constrained by our inputs and outputs. Understanding that is essential in achieving preconceived economic goals. And we can identify what those constraints are, how to mitigate them, and how to focus efforts toward an end by building new capital and new bureaucracy to channel human labor towards certain purposes.
Some individuals have the opportunity to exert exceptionally large forces over the system in pursuit of outcomes, while others are buffeted by the downstream consequences of these choices lacking significant agency. But we’re still all in and of the system, constrained by it to some degree. And we can extrapolate certain fundamental rules of order within the system, in the same way you could extrapolate the biological consequences of feeding a thirsty man a glass of water or a diabetic man a chocolate bar.
I remember being happy to watch whatever came on one of the four channels that your TV could pick up with a rabbit ear antenna.
Vhs? We used to be plopped into the local movie house to allow mom to go out on play. Videotape was something arcane used by the TV news crews
