I think like, 90% of the crypto trading volume is by people who know it's all a grift, but are hoping to get rich while the music is still playing.
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
> People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
Man, your anger is just pointed in the wrong direction here.
Be mad at the CEO & hedge fund managers making millions of dollars a year by exploiting the working classes, who will happily move all the jobs overseas tomorrow if they can't hire in America. Not your fellow worker who was born on the other side of an imaginary line.
You're not losing wealth because of the Honduran guy mowing your neighbor's grass. You're losing wealth because the top 1% is accumulating an ever larger share of total wealth.
Can you quote a any specific portion of my comment from which you inferred anger?
Also, do you not understand that reducing an American person’s wages, by having a Honduran guy come into the country and do his job for half the price, then use that to compete with him for an apartment, increasing his cost of living, and reducing the money Big Corp, Inc has to spend on labor, is a direct transfer of wealth out of your pocket, and into their pockets. It’s one of many ways rampant immigration is a war on the middle class, and yes, it is Big Corp, Inc, and the institutions that own it, who are doing this. I am not angry at the Honduran. I am critical of the people who gaslight us into thinking that allowing him and millions like him to come here and work for less money than their American counterparts, is somehow good for us.
People will say Americans don’t want those jobs. But here’s the rub - Americans did want those jobs, back when they paid enough to support a family. Americans also do want trucking jobs, and tech jobs, and medical jobs, and all jobs. And we’re forced to do them for a vanishingly small wage, while we watch our futures disappear, and the hope of ever securing financial security disappears.
> by having a Honduran guy come into the country and do his job for half the price, then use that to compete with him for an apartment, increasing his cost of living
So the immigrants are making half the income, but also paying more for rent? So your thesis rests on the notion that the Honduran is paying like 80% of his income in rent?
This is pretty straightforward economics. The Honduran guy doesn’t need to compete directly with him for housing to contribute to an overall increase in the cost of housing. I assume you are an adult, and since you’re on Hacker News, you’re probably an educated one. It’s crazy to me that I would have to explain such a basic economic concept to an educated adult.
> Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation
Desensitized some people, who understood and appreciated the irony, absurdity and inversion of norms.
It hyper-sensitized others, who often doubled-down on the type of authoritarian political correctness that South Park satirized.
There is clearly a huge segment of the millennial generation who don't agree with the South Park "make jokes about everyone and everything" ethos, and instead believe there are numerous individuals, groups, topics and issues which should never be joked about, and feel very offended when someone does.
We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.
yeah we're not talking about that, we are talking about people who were caught in the act of murdering a bunch of people. Everything you gave is false equivalency, this view is widely supported. These people already took way too much from society, they don't need to take any more.
To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.
There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".
Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."
My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
> Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.
I think it's a bit tougher than that. On top of what zahlman said, a lot of "casuals" don't really bring much value to a social media site. If you comment once a year you're not really offering much to the conversation. That's what makes this problem so tricky. The most motivated users are usually motivated by something more than intrinsic motivation. The least motivated users just aren't very good users of the platform. A better incentive structure would help incentivize the "moderately motivated" user.
As a thought experiment to check your own biases, how do you feel about people like Colin Kaepernick speaking out about police abuses and racism in the justice system?
There are people who made roughly the same argument you're making here- since this individual became rich and famous within the current system, they shouldn't criticize the flaws in the system that have victimized others who they empathize with.
by trying to make this comparison, you mask the other huge, important difference between these examples: speaking out against police abuse and racism in the justice system is a just and moral act, and the things andreeson says are very bad and very stupid. the nerd-sniping semantic argument is so boring.
They are not the same argument. Andreesen made his wealth because of the intended effects of the system, and rather than merely looking to reform it he's looking to wholesale tear it down as it is now holding him back from getting even more wealth. Kaepernick did not make his wealth from the failings of the justice system, and that system isn't really standing in his way today.
Furthermore, reform and wholesale destruction are very different things and anybody still supporting Trump on some notion that any of this is actually about fixing DEI/immigration/budget/regulation needs to get their head screwed on straight, and quick.
32 hours per week is about 10-20x what the average American household uses for cleaning/lawncare.
Most people have a cleaner or lawncare crew come like once every couple weeks for a couple hours, they're not hiring a full-time employee for their 3 bedroom house on 0.1 acre lot.
> how to buy stocks, what ETFs are, what a 401(k) is, etc.
I've seen this before, and I remain incredulous.
We learned about stocks in 4th grade and did a mock exercise picking stocks and tracking their performance over a few weeks. We did calculations on mortgage interest and investment returns in middle school math class. Every news source has a finance section and talks about stocks regularly. There are advertisements for brokerages on every TV commercial break and everywhere else ads are found. Every company I've ever worked for had a mandatory training about the 401k as part of employee onboarding and usually ongoing mentions at least once a year. There are a zillion personal finance websites, podcasts, blogs and youtube channels.
It seems like if an alien landed in the US or a time traveler arrived here, they'd learn about ETFs and 401ks within the first 24 hours whether they wanted to or not.
People have to be actively, intentionally avoiding learning these things or actively tuning it out or forgetting, because they're dead simple and information about them is incredibly easy to find.
I grew up upper middle-class and graduated from the ivy league. I will not list out how antithetical my own experience is to yours, but I promise you your financial education was highly abnormal.
I'd wager walking down Main Street USA and asking people in their 30s and 40s what stocks they own and what an ETF is would be get you a lot of blank stares.
When I did the equivalent "lets learn about stocks" at school, we opened the newspaper, found a stock, "invested" fake money in a ledger the teacher kept, and then cashed out at the end of three weeks after doing some rough calculations.
The equivalent for a real world person would have been to
1) know what a brokerage was
2) find one
3) drive there and fill out some paperwork to make the account
4) deposit a paper check or cash at the location
5) get a phone # with a specific broker at the brokerage
6) subscribe to a local paper with the stock section
7) watch one of several thousand stocks, and write down by hand the movement of the stocks to see if you could set a strategy
8) maybe buy subscriptions for some investment magazines, a few hundred dollars per year
9) decide the time is right, call your broker, leave a message with his secretary to get back to you
10) wait for that to happen, then place your order. your broker would then charge you a percentage (up to 3% of your trade!) as their fee
11) Angry men in a pit in NYC would yell at each other for hours to make the trade. The trade would be communicated on scraps of paper with hastily written numbers, then shouted over a phone on the trading floor
12) wait for your broker to send you physical mail with your certificates or a record of ownership showing that the trade closed several days after you placed it with him
13) go through a similar process to sell your stock certificates, but then have to self track capital gains for your taxes
Can you name a single reason why you think a poor person living paycheck-to-meal would even know about or wish to participate in this?
Things got better with the internet, which didn't exist for most people until I was an adult (I know because I helped start an ISP), it still cost $30 trade electronically and settlement still didn't happen for days. So somebody making hundreds of dollars a month would have to lose $30, just to make a bet of whatever they were able to scrimp together over months, in the hope it would turn into more than $30 so they could sell it and make money above the trading fee.
Again, why would a poor person, who may not even have a bank account, be a participant in this?
So, to help with your incredulity, why would somebody, who is from a poor family, with not a single person around them trading stocks, most without full-time employment, take a brief class when they were 10, retain those precious handful of classroom hours, until they get lucky enough to have disposable income decades later and suddenly decide "I'm going to trade ETFs" <insert rich yacht buying cat meme picture>
Most people don't work in companies with a 401k, or even with any benefits at all. Why would they be familiar with managing one? Next time you eat out, trade some tips with your waiter on how they diversify their retirement investments. Ask them which ETFs they like, and if any have especially low fees, or do they pursue a market segment strategy. What's their opinion on I-bonds? Maybe they have a prediction if Cathie Wood is a cook or not?
It wouldn't need to be some plan signed off on by ULA's top brass.
It could have been a single person acting alone for whatever reason. Plausibly an employee of ULA who formerly worked at SpaceX and was mad as mistreatment there, or mad they interviewed and didn't get hired, or mad that SpaceX was beating them at whatever and making them look bad or whatever.
Or it could have been a person unaffiliated with ULA who just found a way to access their roof.
History has a handful of pretty significant events that were basically "one guy with a rifle".
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
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