graedus

You're paying with your data, same as with Facebook and many others. These extremely successful businesses are obviously able to make plenty of money using that data.

Author has now added the "Do What The Fuck You Want Public License" (v2) [0]

[0] https://github.com/p1v0t/Sort/blob/master/LICENSE.md

IANAL

My understanding is that proof of intent to break the law is not the legal standard needed to move forward with prosecution[0]. It's being used as cover for insufficient political will to prosecute a powerful protected class - Wall Street executives.

https://www.leagle.com/decision/199634380f3d2631296 § II A

Presumably things are discussed in those terms at the shareholder meetings. The "feel good pseudoscientific bullshit" is of course PR and should be ignored.

> a really smart thief with enough money behind them might not even need to steal any Bitcoins. They could just destroy cold wallet keys in a very stealthy way and profit from the appreciation of coins they hold elsewhere.

This is a cool idea but I'm not sure it works (or I don't understand it correctly). In order to reduce the supply enough to appreciably increase the value of the remaining coins, you'd need to freeze/destroy a lot of keys, or keys to wallets with large holdings. If the owners of those keys start reporting their losses and the news spreads, people could start to lose confidence in bitcoin itself and move to other assets, reducing demand.

> The key difference between an asset and investment is that investments produce returns.

Right, but an asset can go up in price and stay there if demand increases and/or the currency the price is denominated in is losing value over time. Especially true if supply is limited.

I don't expect BTC to stay at $17000 - it could go down or up, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it's currently in a bubble that pops. It might then go to near-$0, or it might proceed to regain those levels and continue even higher over time, depending on how demand evolves against the ultimately fixed supply. I remember $500 for 1 BTC seemed insanely high at the time. $675 must have seemed crazy for gold in 2006, but I don't expect it to return there again despite the intervening ups and downs.

> I think this is easier said than done.

Agreed

> And once that happens, why sell half of it, vs all of it? 3 times the current value is a LOT of money and that usually takes at least 8-10 years in the equity market. Now that it happens, you're cashing out just to recoup your costs? Cash out everything, or cash out nothing and let it all ride until it's an even larger amount.

I agree "just recouping your costs" is not really exciting by itself. The idea is that you think it might go much higher, but - crucially - you're not sure. It's just about reducing your exposure to risk at the cost of some upside potential. It all depends on your risk appetite.

The unit error is in the comparison between USD/year (a rate) and USD (a value at a single point in time)

So a basic problem arises when this belief causes people to vote against their interests for policies that benefit the actually-rich to their own (incorrectly expecting that they will be rich next year) detriment. Tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, dismantling programs that benefit the poor and middle class, defunding various public institutions, etc.

It's fine to strive to achieve as much as possible and earn a bunch of money, but the core of the issue highlighted by that quote about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" is a sort of class-affinity with the rich that is unwarranted for most people.

It only becomes remotely intelligible if you include these extra constraints:

- Assume all other houses in the area also appreciated the same amount as the poster's house (say 2x).

- Assume the poster will only consider a move within the same area.

Now if they want to make a "lateral" move, they are looking at $2m houses, not $1m houses, since all other houses they would consider - local to their area - also increased in value.

I feel like they should just get a $1m house (yes, a "downgrade") if that's the case and have fun with their near-$1m profits, but what do I know.

I think the post you're responding to is being critical of the unexplained/unexamined axiom that "deflation is bad", which is usually an underlying assumption in the financial press.

Presumably those fans are buying those things at least in part because they want to have the album, concert experience, or merch. With twitch donations/tips you get comparatively very little in return - your username might pop up in a video overlay for a few seconds, and the streamer might be like "hey thanks, [username]!". Those 3-4 seconds are typically the entirety of your several-hundered-dollar experience.

I'm guessing the argument is that some significant portion of the demand for NVDA parts is due to crypto mining (I don't know how significant). If you imagine that demand dying down then NVDA doesn't look as good I suppose. Their products are still good though and there was plenty of demand for them before crypto mining and speculation became a factor.

Thanks for the information. About how often do you have to replace the filter in that unit?

Maybe they arrived at that gray by increasing the transparency of the normal text color.

Really interesting. There are a few scenes like this in the excellent art film Homo Sapiens[0][1] that stuck with me. Overgrown Japanese landscape with vending machines (don't remember if these were actually powered though).

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5450084/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgjEzB36Lo

> cheaper, more expensive

Huh. It's cheaper (worse quality) but costs more money?

Or, bail them out (emergency liquidity, QE1, etc) but also nationalize them at least on a temporary basis so that as they recover, the profits do not go to private pockets but rather are socialized.

Yes they do. Here's a Bloomberg headline I just ran across today: "Rich Retirees Are Hoarding Cash Out of Fear" [0]

The word hoarding is often used to cast ordinary and prudent saving of stable, non-speculative currencies like US Dollars and Euros in a negative light. Economists and central bankers often want the inflation rate to be higher - to reduce debt loads, among other reasons - so they want people (other people, of course) to stop saving so much and start spending more.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/rich-reti...

edit: grammar

Cool. What's the bot written in, just out of curiosity?

The massive cost of the great financial crisis to everyone except the financial elite is deeply underappreciated by most people. High finance and central bank operations (QE etc) are generally perceived as both dauntingly incomprehensible and deathly boring so most people don't bother trying to understand them. Even more unfortunately, the effect of it all on everyone's day-to-day lives is sufficiently indirect and diffuse that most people do not connect the dots.

Good point. I wonder if this might be measurably worse. A click-bait image might have the power to grab your attention from your peripheral vision in a way that pure text, however click-baity, can't.

I think even with the broader context it doesn't sit right with me, because he could have easily made the completely serious and valid point about banks needing to be competent at their core functions without characterizing "doing evil stuff sometimes" as "fine". Totally possible that my sarcasm detector is broken right now but it seems like he's "only half-joking" here (another of his favorite phrases).

Off-topic, sorry: Levine gets a lot of praise around here, and he does have a great talent for breaking down complex finance topics so that they're easy to understand and often entertaining to read about. That being said, sometimes he is awfully sanguine about bank misconduct and crimes. Edit: from the article:

"A bank that keeps very careful track of how much money it has, and who owes it money and whom it owes money, and sometimes does evil stuff with that knowledge -- that's fine, really."

Link can be found in the footer. In my experience it's more commonly placed in the top nav which is more prominent.

> The problem is, it could be years before there is a collapse, or it could be tomorrow. That's a lot of yield you might be losing out on. A near similar argument could be made in 2014. You probably could have doubled or tripled your money in that period.

All true. I think what makes sense then is not to get out of the market entirely, but depending on your risk tolerance, simply re-balance so that you own less stocks at a time like this, while holding more cash or alternative investments.

> So I would say you're not an odd duck, there's just a different set of values you're trying to signal.

I agreed with most of your comment, but this sentence seems to imply that all decisions are purely or at least primarily for the purpose of signaling values to others. I don't think this is true. Humans may be very social and tribal creatures, but I don't think that means it's impossible to make decisions without caring what other people think, like who reads the "signals" generated from e.g. the prudent purchase of a used Honda or whatever.

Indeed, or a USB drive.

> Wealth follows the wealthy, and most of the wealth in the US rests in very few hands, much of it offshore and in other ways hidden from taxation. If they leave, the "wealth" leaves with them for the most part.

All true enough, but I'm not convinced the wealthy would leave the US en masse as it gradually declines in power and we enter a more multi-polar world, with the dollar possibly losing reserve status at some point. Where would they go, China? I think in the scenario where the US is less powerful compared to the rest of the world, it's still a very attractive place to live in many ways (edit: especially for Americans).

There is a stereotype that "black people can't swim". May be local to the US.