the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it basically mimics humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
7 karma · joined June 8, 2021
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
Absolutely not. You do the opposite of that. You go at layer zero. At the population level and enter the culture wars arena with the goal of winning.
Some of these companies are structured in a way that the founders are poised to retain control of their companies till they retire (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire).
If you are Zuck or Brin or Dorsey and you want to do this until you are 95 like Buffett then you are better off barking and biting back, acquire a reputation of a fighter so that people like Sanders and Warren would leave you alone. There will be consequences such as employees criticizing and leaving but in the long term you are better off fighting.
When a politician comes after you and your company, you just attack back, if you are not prepared to do this you should simply not start a proper company and opt for a carrer in a hedge fund instead, where you can make money in the dark.
Founders and CEOs should not be the first offender but when they are called out they should absolutely attack back.
Sanders is pouring manure all over corporate America since 2015 and all he had to endure was Michael Bloomberg attacking him back for half a debate, and wouldn't have happened if Bloomberg didn't decide to run.
If a guy like Bezos or Zuck were to tweet back at Sanders something to the tune "I've started a company in a garage and now it has the same credit rating of the US Government, what have you done with your life?"
That would be fair game, politicians prey on weakness, they smell it and keep biting till you lay there unconscious
If you are somebody who wants to win an election, whose vote are you winning by proposing and/or signing a bitcoin ban?
It's not like Bitcoin has a CEO that you can point at in the Forbes billionaires list and claim that you are going against him.
You have to explain and present to people the coins per wallet distribution statistics and convert it to dollars to get to the topic of inequality, then from there trying to equate Wall Street to Bitcoin.
It's not easy, even for a socially competent person, you lose the room and people's attention quite easily. It's far easier to attack Bezos
2) You are getting your data from the wrong source, Coinbase alone has 56 million verified users. And unlike FB those are real , not bot, as every user have to be KYC'eed for AML purposes. That's just one exchange.
3) Also with regards to those millions of users, the situation is peculiar because it's for sure one person per family (the millennial or the college kid). So you enrage one person, but that person then would badmouth you with all the people in their close family who were otherwise neutral to the BTC ban, but now that you hurt their son finances, they just aren't anymore.
Nobody ever thinks about this, but government and all the infrastructure it owns are embedded in society
The general view is that Bitcoin takes hold among the population and then there is a fight between the population and the government....quite the contrary, Bitcoin simply takes over the government at an equal or slighly inferior rate compared to the general population.
See how many people in the Capitol are being bitten by the bitcoin bug. For every critic you'll find somebody who is willing to speak in favor of it.
The only ones who maybe can do it are Xi and Putin, and the latter seems more pro than against because everything which goes against the dollar is Putin's friend.
Xi is also on and off again with Bitcoin but every day which goes by in which he is not decisive is a day in favor of Bitcoin.
You are left with the Warren, Sanders, Corbyn types as well as this Dutch guy who have only one style of messaging: modern day Robinhoods (or Pocahontas) trying to take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves
This is nothing revolutionary: The Hollywood Stock Exchange was a similar project
Not to be pedantic about it, but science always, and in any event supports non vaccination for self and everybody else vaccinating instead.
This is true for every disease. If possible it's always smart not to inject yourself with stuff.
They just can't say it because then everybody would try and be the last person to get the shot, because the last one gets to skip the shot!
Fossil fuels extraction is the best of the industrial/non-talent based sectors, Saudi Aramco basically sticks straws in the sand and oil comes out at 7 dollars per barrel.
Electrons they are all the same, there is not some consumer convenience in using green electrons.
The only success story in terms of marketcap is Tesla, but that company is based on constant lies told by the CEO to keep people energized.
If we manage to solve climate change it would be the biggest letdown ever for the general population: the way this thing is being socially and politically advertised people expect a technoutopian future where all of a sudden rainbows would appear all over the place from cows derriere in lieu of methane. A technoutopian pipedream sold by Musk and the like.
In reality we'd just manage to keep things as they are now, our lives won't change that much.
Tl;dr Long SaaS and fintech, short energy and construction
Who needs criticism when you are in control of B2 bombers? Let corporations play, let them compete and give them free reign, while remaining chill knowing that you always have the last resort option to tame them: violence in the form of B2 bombers
I'd be worried much more about the public officials who are in control of the aforementioned B2 bombers and should use them for the benefit of Americans.
When the hated big guys move, there is always the suspect that somehow, somewhere, somebody else could have done it better, or with less externalities or with less publicity or with less branding or in a way that it's local.
It's not the act itself which troubles people. People will always find a way to hate on Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin or Gates.
Now that Netscape went belly up everybody suddenly imagines a world where if only Microsoft was broken up then we'd all live in a Jetsons type future with flying cars and tubes carrying us around, all thanks to Netscape
Musk is like a weird combination of Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump.
He tweets like Trump, but when he gets on stage he stutters and speak as badly as Michael Bloomberg.
Regardless of what one thinks of Trump people knew him for more than being just a rich guy, he was the CEO of the Apprentice and Yankees #1 fan for a long time.
He also speaks with the utmost confidence, this is a great social skill and you can use it at will if you don't need the academics and the high IQ people on your side...in politics it's one person, one vote
[Country's]+[company name]
Whereas if the company is American it's always:
[founder's name]+[company name]
I don't know if it has to do with media or with the fact that foreign founders might want to be more in the dark compared to American ones.
In Europe wealth is historically frowned upon so people might be trying to get their millions or billions in the dark and only speak and be relevant among decision makers circles.
If that's the case then those people will dominate American corporate world in the future because it's appearent that being famous only means trouble.
Besides it makes tremendous sense. Wealth gives you a megaphone but such megaphone is useless if people are able to look your speech rehersals, while you sweat,strutter and stop mid sentence.
It's my opinion that the journey of an entrepreneur who wants to get into politcs should be:
Money > Sports franchise > social relevance ..or
Money > Own Rock band > social relevance
Money > your own movie > social relevance
It's really cringy when these SaaS guys or EVs guys try to appeal to the masses. You end up being hated by those who hate the rich and ignored by everybody else
Now a country has BTC as legal tender, add to that the 700 B marketcap and the fact that it cannot be banned because nobody has enough political capital to piss off millions of holders.
We are in a new era. The social messaging out there is BTC vs Central Banks and maybe we'll get to that fight someday in the future, but in the meantime BTC is cannibalising Gold which was always the go to option for Libertarians, Government haters and Central Bank critics and opponents.
In my opinion Central Banks have nothing to worry, at least with regards to BTC. By the time BTC takes all of gold marketcap it won't post the outsized returns that it has up to now (regardless of the deflationary protocol) and so people will stop rushing in.
Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination.
Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the subject of the character assasination du jour has the immediate feedback of millions of people piling in and commenting aganist them.
There is no defense mechanism really. The only way is trying to make money having the least amount of interactions as possible and in a position which is not under the spotlight.
New York City, Wall Street and the financial sector will benefit from this, also sports betting comes to mind and every domain where the arena is already built and you enter it knowing that it's a zero sum game. Other winners will be a particular demographic which historically always needs to be on the lookout for social unrest and people ganging up against them. They have the most sensitive internal alarms and have timely retreated to finance