South Korea and Japan are 10-20 years ahead of the same curve here. However, the result has been resignation and stagnation, not revolution.
Elsewhere in the world, this same generation also represents itself as ISIS and revolutionaries in Syria, cartels and gangs in Mexico & central America, and pirates in Somalia. As a developed nation, demographic realities reached America after they reached those countries. We'll see what form it takes here.
People in poor countries, the Philippines for example, have fewer opportunities, less ability to save, yet somehow form families, raise kids and look to a better tomorrow.
In rich countries people feel like they’re missing something if they’re not keeping up with the Joneses.
In the Philippines not many people are ashamed of second hand clothing. In Korea that’s just not something people would do.
It’s not pride but it’s also not the best way to deal with reality.
Stagnation and resignation has also been the answer for millenials in the West. If by revolution you mean the recent Capitol riots, most of the protesters were over 40 and well off. If anything I'm surprised by how politically apathetic this (my) generation is.
In the end, most people flock to the greater Seoul area because that's where most jobs are.
I am finishing reading the Code of Capital, very interesting look at this exact issue (though bit though for me to go through)
Rigged pharma. Unethical medical billing. Out of control healthcare costs. 2008 mortgage crisis. High Frequency trading firms front running trades. Panama Papers. Libor. And a million more.
Citizens won't have it any more. Fixing congress (so they don't sell us out), and congress CAN would WOULD fix this.
That said nothing preventing kick starter for seed rounds with a cut for said audits of at least good faith intent to build business value in some way.
Citizen's will not ever fix this until they pick non-sellout congress people over only caring about their partisan fights.
I find it funny how first-worlders are horrified by the idea that they might have to live in mild discomfort. Maybe try looking at how most of the world that isn't the US and Western Europe lives before saying people's lives will be "nasty, brutish and short" because they won't be working some low-skill 9 to 5 for 40 to 50 years while making 6 figures and then retire with the rest of their lives pretty much planned out for them.
IMHO I think globalization is to blame for this; it has transferred equity/ownership from Western countries over time. It has given us cheaper electronics, cheap aviation/holidays, and other discretionaries but in return has denied people of the essentials (cheap houses, job security, etc) and has transferred existing wealth away. The rich have the means to protect themselves and even profit from this redistribution of wealth; it's the middle class instead where much of the wealth was has slowly been drained. Instead of wealth they now substituted it with debt to keep the system running.
In the country I live in house prices are highly proportional to debt growth, much accrued to foreign debt. Our exchange rate stays high since issuing debt in the local currency despite increasing the CAD and draining wealth bids up the currency on the FX market. As long as houses don't crash (which is where most debt is issued) the dollar's worth doesn't deteriorate and we don't see the drain of wealth. As long as debt growth keeps growing we always create positive pressure on our exchange rate. The sad part about this of course is while young people can't afford houses, the goods they may substitute for this (cars, holidays, gadgets) are all underpinned by the debt used to bid those houses higher via a higher than otherwise FX rate.
Do they mean decreases in life expectancy? Student debt? Homeownership? Disease prevalence? Violent crime?
It's continually stated as an axiom, but poor writing such as that really weakens their argument.
When Hobbes coined the idiom "nasty, brutish and short" he was thinking of a lifestyle with next to no guarantees. You might be dead at any moment.
Compared to that, I can't really see how first worlders being a bit less comfortable than previous generations is a valid use of the phrase.
What I did there-- and what you are doing-- is referred to as "one-downmanship." Essentially, attempting to ignore or downplay suffering by talking about a case of worse suffering that you have experience with.
When not part of comedy sketches[1], it's usually considered disruptive.
I understand that "one-downmanship" can be used to dismiss legitimate claims, but the existence of such tactics does not automatically validate anyone who claims their lives are hard.
The original article used a line from Hobbes regarding existence pre-society, which does not apply. The author could have used many valid other things in the US (homeownership and marriage rates, opiod addiction, savings rate) that would have made that part of their argument valid, but decided to go to the rhetorical extreme.
I don't think the author has a point here. I think he's appealing to the fact that, on an emotional level, humans think they're entitled to always have their standards of living be equal or better to what they were before to make people think they live in uniquely hard times.
Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.
I think it is important to differentiate people's subjective feelings of being let down from there actually being a problem, or their lives being "nasty, brutish and short".
But why? Why can't more kids get into STEM fields? Why aren't there more decent jobs, say manufacturing jobs? Why are American kids so bad at basic reading, critical thinking, and basic arithmetics? Why is there an apparent bifurcation in the K5 system, where a large number of perfectly capable kids get misled and tortured by craps like Common Core, while a small number of kids are ready for algebra or more advanced maths? Why do we have kids who get straight A in high school yet can't pass placement test in a community college? Why do we have so many kids who ace through high school think entry-level courses like introductory calculus or organic chemistry are too hard? The questions can go on.
And I certainly don't hope that the answers are what Seattle and California public schools have started to teach: https://equitablemath.org/
Because not everyone is predisposed to be a programmer, engineer or statistician. Not everyone can become a whitecollar worker. This is reality of the world we live in, no amount of though experiments will change that.
What you are really doing is blaming victims of a system set against those people.
Our society should be built so those people can have decent lives too. Ie minimum wage should provide you with above poverty life. Currently in some cities 3 minimum wages are barely that.
I am not talking about giving poor people money for palm beach holidays twice a year. Working in McD should be enough to pay for an small apartment bills and food and sending you kids to school.
What current situation created is that middle class has to subsidize the social welfare for working class people - WORKING people. Ie middle class pays part of wages of minimum-wage workers because they are in poverty while holding a full time job(s).
Also in China art graduates make more than STEM graduates since a STEM grad is a dime a dozen.
The problem inherently lies with the assumption that the free market will fix all and assuming that some entrepreneurial person is going to lead the charge and redevelop our country. What a joke.
The boom after the Great Depression that made the US into a superpower was driven entirely by government dollars.
My solution would be: * Raise minimum wage to $30 an hour. * Implement land value tax + higher capital gains taxes in order to stem inflation. * Hire 10x the amount of construction workers, civil engineers, etc and provide them with the funding for projects.
Get to work. It's laughable that someone working at Snapchat can make 1M a year while the jobs that literally build our country are paying dogshit.
We need wealth redistribution but not via UBI, via actual development. Let's raze the slums and rebuild with shiny skyscrapers. It's possible. We just have to get away from capitalists getting increasingly rich while the rest suffer.
Also as an aside, my bet is that "programming" reverts to the mean within 10 years as a career. 20 years ago programmers were paid peanuts. Most of the heavy lifting of building software has already been done, AI, low-code, etc. is going to make it increasingly easier. Be ready.
All of this is GOOD, why does it cost 5 million dollars to build a site so that I can reserve a place in line at the DMV (made up example). The tech industry has enjoyed a monopoly on transmitting data. Building an app or a website should be as easy as opening an excel spreadsheet or a word doc. That is coming and your UI coding skills are going to be essentially useless very soon.
Systematically, the average American will and must confront quite the bleak future.
Working for someone else has been the "easy" route (mentally) for a long time, and easy things never pay well.
I'm grateful that STEM pays so well nowadays, but I don't mind if my pay goes back to norm in exchange for many people having a better future. I don't see the current K12 system will help, though.
Unionization will fix this. A glut of STEM candidates will not.
I myself enjoy having choices for myself and my children but that is a consequence of money. This is why I support school vouchers - let parents determine how to spend their money, and let schools compete for students.
The problem (US) is we've been steadily decreasing the relative cap on public school spending.
If the spending wasn't so little, you'd probably be a lot more adamant about that voucher.
It’s not about kids and education anymore. Just look at how all teachers unions and most teachers are opposed to opening schools. They know the joke in the system and just want to ride out the COVID plan forever.
Teaching kids about anything, especially difficult STEM subjects, are very difficult and requires excellent teachers. The teachers unions don’t care about that, they just run the kids through the system. That’s why good education is lacking in US.
This completely ignores the fact that the stock was shorted over 100% of float, and people knew it was going to squeeze so they bought in hoping to ride the wave. And that did in fact happen, although timing is everything.
I could go on, but this philosophical piece is incredibly lazy with its historical accuracy.
> Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Andersen Horrowitz those guys are making transaction fees
"Andersen Horrowitz"? Does the author have any idea who he is criticizing or what industry they're in?
> Failing microcap stock
GME is not a microcap stock, and it was not a microcap stock, even before this entire saga
> I make no pretense that I don’t despise the bitcoin philosophy
Erroneous double negative here, does he even proofread his own work?
Somewhere in here he states that "Bitcoin doesn't work". I've seen a lot of lazy criticisms of Bitcoin, but this one just falls flat -- of course it works. Say what you will, but the entire system works with continuous uptime, the ability to transact, etc. etc. That's why it's worth a trillion dollars.
Saying that you don't understand how bicycles stay upright doesn't make them fall over. And similarly, saying that Bitcoin doesn't work, well, doesn't make it stop working.
Once I saw this obvious error and realized the author doesn't even understand that VCs are different from a stock exchange, and can't even spell their name properly, I realized how ridiculous this blog actually is. His Bitcoin argument cemented it.
I want the 5 minutes of my life back that I spent reading this drivel.
> Erroneous double negative here, does he even proofread his own work?
I think he got this part right.
I make [no] pretense that I do [not] despise the bitcoin philosophy ---> I {admit} that I do despise the bitcoin philosophy.
Unfortunately, this is one of those weird English phrases where the more you look at it, the weirder it is. I'm actually less confident of this now having written it out and reread it multiple times.
> Erroneous double negative here, does he even proofread his own work?
Do you? The double negative stands.
He has previously written extensively on his dislike of Bitcoin. Far from lazily.
Except the squeeze failed at $400, and short interest was still above 100% as GME dropped below $50 by my understanding.
As such, the short-interest story seems to be a weak argument for anything. Clearly, short interest > 100% is meaningless: the stock can go up, or down, no matter what its short interest is.
It doesn't take into account that at 400 shorting GME became a much more appealing idea than even at 20/share. Everyone knew 400/share was unmaintainable.
It's likely that as the price rose, the funds and investors that were shorting at the pre-squeeze prices were forced to close their positions at a loss. Then, they (or other investors) opened new short positions at the inflated higher prices, thus keeping the overall ratio high.
It was shorted to below 2/share at some point which is imo insane given what we've seen EVERY SINGLE CONSOLE RELEASE EVER.
The media saw an opportunity to make this about populist rage, and we all bit it. But this was started as a short squeeze and a very effective one at that.
EDIT: Just to clarify. There was obviously a short squeeze. That short squeeze could have stopped at 20/share and been a GREAT short squeeze. I have friends who got off the ride at that point thinking the squeeze was over. The frenzy that happened that pushed the stock to 400 was insane, and wouldn't have happened if this stock didn't start trending. You don't have a subreddit go from 2m to 8m in 2 weeks unless there's some serious frenzy.
This has very strongly increased during that year of pandemic. In my country a vast amount of money is spent on protecting old people that future generations will be liable for.
If you don't see what's happening, then quite bluntly, you need to broaden your circles to familiarize yourself with people that aren't privileged enough to be able to continue working remotely.
I'm not defending the current system/situation, but this seems to mischaracterize the article it links to.
Wealth wasn't redistributed, because millenials (more generally, younger generations) didn't have it to begin with. What happened was that older generations were able to - and did - capture almost all of the surplus that was generated.
I'm not saying that the author intentionally mischaracterized this. I'm saying that you can't solve a problem if you don't understand the nature of the problem. You can't solve a problem by focusing your efforts on a different problem (possibly the wrong problem, at least in this context).
This is great.
Sums it up.
"Buying lottery tickets and trading manipulated crypto assets are both a tax on the poor and disenfranchised."
Feel free to short Bitcoin in a futures market, and keep all your wealth allocated in assets associated with the US dollar.
We'll talk again in 5 years time.
> Bitcoin doesn’t work, it’s a naked speculative bubble based on a technology that doesn’t scale can’t and can’t replace any existing financial service
When you say Bitcoin doesn't work, what are you referring to? As a medium of exchange, you're correct: it doesn't work. But the narrative in crypto communities is that Bitcoin is becoming a store-of-value. Under that narrative, Bitcoin is "working": it's replacing gold as a store of value. We're seeing institutions expand their portfolios to include BTC. There are additional arguments for why Bitcoin may be a better hedge against inflation than gold or oil. Here is an interesting analysis by Winklevoss twins [1]
There's more to cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. Today, there are over 4,000 crypto tokens out there and they're each solving various use cases with varying success. One particular thriving area is Decentralized Finance (DeFi) which creates decentralized exchanges, market makers, lenders/borrowers that aim to disrupt traditional (centralized) financial structures. As proof that there's something here, decentralized exchanges are taking market share from centralized ones - which are valued at $100B.
Or consider the more visionary take on cryptocurrencies: decentralized computation networks that create economies for network participants. Centralized businesses must act in the interest of shareholders and are built to extract as much value from their product as possible. Decentralized computation networks, on the other hand, do not. They can (and are) constructed to be minimally extractive, taking only what is needed to reward network participants & secure the network. Thus, the value capture is distributed across all network participants, enabling new forms of humans organizing together to achieve a common goal. Check out [3] if you're interested in learning more.
I hope this spurs your curiosity to dig into cryptocurrencies beyond just the surface. Thanks for writing the article!
[1] https://winklevosscapital.com/the-case-for-500k-bitcoin/ [2] https://defipulse.com/ [3] https://smartcontentpublication.medium.com/the-purpose-and-v...
I'm reminded of an advert campaign slogan that New York State ran for it's lottery: "All you need is a dollar and a dream". Spot on.
An astute friend's comment was: "We'll keep the dollar and you keep the dream".
I've long agreed with the author that lotteries are an innumeracy tax. His insight that BTC is also largely the same is spot on.
https://saito.io/saito-whitepaper.pdf
The network pays the nodes that run infrastructure rather than miners or stakers. Cost-of-attack is generated by the same nodes, so paying for infrastructure does not defund consensus. Security scales with fee-throughput of the network, while fee-throughput pays for scalability.
With a chain like Bitcoin's, if you want to perform a 51% attack, you would have to purchase a large amount of SHA-256 ASIC mining hardware. After the attack, public confidence would be shaken so severely that the market price would crash, and might never recover. So afterwards, the attacker is left with a pile of ASIC hardware that's nowhere near as valuable as before.
If the PoW algorithm were based on something more "useful", then after a 51% attack, the attacker would have a large amount of hardware that they could easily repurpose, so it would retain a lot of its previous value. That makes the total cost of the attack much lower.
Socialism provides a "yes" to every "no" in this article. Authors critiques are good, but author too lapses into nihilism.
Even cryptocurrency is not beyond rescue, it is only beyond rescue under a capitalist mode of production. Technology is the cause and effect, but we _do_ have agency.
That is pure irrationality. IMO The real issue is a crap education system which gives neither opportunity, nor good advice-- instead of training rational actors w/ valueable skills it focuses on building activists before they have any life experience and smacks of marxism.
What's the path out? Free education for socially profitable degrees might be a fix (ie STEM). Not wasting the first 18 years of a person's life might be an alternative (eg: why are we memorizing dates permanently recorded online, why arent we teaching (personal) financial and programming expertise?).
Edit: by financial I meant personal financial skills, not wall street skills. My apologies for the imprecision.
It's not an alternative, it's strictly necessary. People look around and wonder how 70 million Americans voted for a certain someone, and the clear-cut answer isn't farther than their local public high school.
A system designed from the ground up to mold nearly everybody into obedient manufacturing drones in a economy that doesn't rely on manufacturing anymore is bound to create huge issues.
The nihilism of YOLO has little to do with schooling. A broken education system is well after the fact of the economic and social reality constituting their environment. The young today have impossible economic hurdles: unaffordable shoebox apartments, high student debt, no incentive to save, no good jobs for modest tasks. And society is generally incoherent: "communities" are activist and political minority groups, or online, and not your actual neighbourhood; in-person communities are fractured by many different spoken languages; plus the cultural promotion of pornography, sex, and drugs.
I highly disagree with this. The S&P 500 has returned 400% since the crash in a mere 12 yrs. If doubling your money every 6 years does not sound excellent to you, the it's a financial education that is lacking, not real opportunity.
> in-person communities are fractured by many different spoken languages
I actually have found this really enjoyable, to have lots of opportunity to speak/learn Spanish.
> cultural promotion of pornography, sex, and drugs. Given how these affect the reward centers of the brains, IMO these should all be reserved as post success rewards. If someone wants to smoke weed all day and do nothing, that sucks. But if they're high achieving and want to relax _after_ killing it, who are we to tell them no?
Programmers and financiers are not the best at shaping childrens minds, its not like those fields teach about childhood development.
I agree, Pedagogical science fits in STEM and I think it's very important we deeply invest in childhood development. I mostly think the subject matter of school is questionable, not the fact we go to school (hence why I suggested we also fund STEM degrees for anyone smart enough to finish it)
Bitcoin is like the lottery? It's up thousands of percent over the years. Many, many people have made real money and/or are sitting on massive gains. Regardless of if you think Bitcoin has actual utility (I think it does in spades), labeling it a "failure" means your argument is instantly ignored by every person who's up on their investment (aka every person who's held Bitcoin over the past 10 years).
> [Bitcoin is] a naked speculative bubble based on a technology that doesn’t scale can’t and [won't] replace any existing financial service
So that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, and provides no financial service of value. I don't think it's fully true, because Bitcoin facilitates underground transactions and is a practical asset in countries with high inflation and currency restrictions, but the fact that "some people made a lot of money" is no counterargument.
1) Ransomware
2) Electricity usage
3) International reserve currency for bad actors such as North Korea, terrorist cells, and drug cartels.
I don’t see any of these three as a positive; certainly not the greatest financial innovation of all time. I also don’t see other use cases having the size of these three. (Ignoring speculative investment as a use case)
is gold not one of these?
For me, Bitcoin has value because it can't be inflated, and I can carry it on my head over any country's frontier without governments harassing me because of it.
Sure, Bitcoin is a means to an end, I can only "use" it by exchanging it for something else, but so is any other currency.
I think this completely misses the point. This isn't just a plain pump-and-dump scheme. Before /r/wallstreetbets got involved, the price of GameStop was being artificially held low by over-zealous shorts. So some investors figured out the shorts were in an untenable position and called their bluff. The extreme high prices are as far as I can tell just part of the process of the stock price returning to a regular equilibrium, whatever that is. Blaming WSB for a valuation that wasn't based in reality is a bit silly when it wasn't based in reality to begin with. Without the shorts, the stock couldn't have spiked as high as it did.
And in the end, GameStop will survive a bit longer (or even thrive, if it can figure out a successful model), and the people it employs will continue to have jobs.
I stopped reading the article when it turned into a rant against Bitcoin. I mean fine, you can criticize Bitcoin if you want but there's more to it than just people investing in currency speculation. If you don't think Bitcoin has any legitimate uses you're just not paying attention.
