phil_e_delphian

I generally agree with you here, since it seems like "tech" or "not tech" should be based on services actually provided (ie selling physical books online isn't really tech).

Except, many of these companies have a second, b2b service that they're cultivating as a goal unto itself: customer attribution, identification, aggregation, etc. Companies like goPuff (or Amazon, but Amazon has a hand in everything so is more complicated for this example) have a core "not really tech" service of online ordering of human-delivered goods, but they are actively working to turn all of those engagement/sales/preferences info into a packaged product they can sell to brands and marketing companies, which is at its core, data aggregation and analytics as a service...so "kinda tech"?

Yes, and we've established that these people exist - aside from the info you've been presented, it should be pretty clear, anecdotally, if you have spent time with communities of first generation immigrants.

For example, I grew up with close friends whose parents were Bulgarian immigrants. Their parents had "good" jobs (dba, generic in-house IT) and were not hurting from money, but: they did not purchase homes, did not invest their money, and literally kept stacks of cash in the home.

Your personal experience and values are not necessarily representative of every other group in your country.

There are some good points here on the futility of doing the "ritual" for the sake of doing the ritual. Especially when it comes to raising blockers - if you aren't attempting to resolve them when they come up, then are they even really blocking you?

But, I do think there is value in stand-ups for teams outside of a classic SE environment. I work on a team supporting a portfolio of related, but not necessarily interdependent analytics work. Stand-ups have proven valuable for us to look at ongoing work in the sprint, and identify deploy (shift) resources to individual stories that may need them. We're all in the same timezone, meeting virtually due to covid, and having a consistent meeting where we can talk through what we plan to do for the day has also opened doors for more informal collaboration than we had in prior formats. This may be the exception in implementation (or the "wrong way to do it") but we're trying to do what has value, and not just what's prescribed.

Yes, people with no money have trouble investing money, I'm not sure where I stated otherwise. But sure, let's continue down the rabbit hole of analyzing a group I referenced off-hand for the sake of a hypothetical example.

wrt my comment about 401ks - they are often opt-out these days in part due to regulatory maneuvering on the part of the C-suite to protect their own benefits (e.g. safe harbor plans). Including folks with a 401k as "participants" in the stock market vastly overstates their actual investment activity and participation. More telling of actual participation is that 86% of households in the US don't own any individual stocks - most people with a 401k have it invested in whatever the default managed fund is.

Convincing some portion of that 86% to participate on their own in the stock market is the parallel I was drawing - those with resources to participate in a financial system, which has lower barriers to entry than they might anticipate.

"This is a fundamental social policy issue and not something you’re going to solve with blockchain magic."

This conclusion is so orthogonal to the literal content, and point of my original comment that I can only recommend you reread it and start from there.

I've started selecting for brands that have more information than those two measurements. Seat and taper are more helpful, for instance.

More casual button-downs are also very frustrating, as sleeve length and chest circumference aren't provided accurately for S vs M vs L

In line with what you were saying above, I was raised to expect to have multiple career changes in my life. What satisfies us changes as we age, and we may not have the skillset for the dominant, high-earning fields as well

48% of the American populace, if we're talking participation in the stock market. A significantly higher percentage if we exclude those whose only holdings are in opt-out company-sponsored 401k plans. [0]

More than 5% of US households are entirely "unbanked," so literally cash only. [1]

I hope that fills in the knowledge gaps, so you can now engage with the content presented to you.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/more-than-h...

[1] https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html

That might be a fair criticism of a reading of this as "you should speculate in NFTs".

Less so if you follow the conclusion that recent sales of NFTs are the latest in a long line of mass adoption/mainstreaming of Blockchain tech and investments. From that perspective, it's more comparable to telling lifelong cash holders people to begin "investing" - there's certainly survivorship bias if you're looking at specific stocks/markets, but the thing to "buy into" is the ecosystem.

RE: this section "If you recognize (recognize – you don’t even need to be able to define) one of those words, you’re early to crypto"

This does resonate, as we have seen huge growth and continual adoption (even by what wall street would call Dumb Money") over the past several years, while otherwise tech-savvy non-olds sit on the sidelines. Myself included.

I've been making an effort to educate myself recently and keep up with crypto trends, because it really does feel that this is a key innovation of this century. Maybe it's irrational, but I feel like if I opt out of this in my late 20s/early 30s, then I'll be our generational equivalent of the Boomer who never bothered to master Excel basics at [insert bank here].

Agreed. The difference this time is that the gains are socialized this time, not retained in the fraternity of HF, PE, and IB.

Which is exactly why Wall Street and financial media is denigrating it. They hate that they don't have the edge, or a monopoly on profits in this case.

And anyone who bought shares at peak yesterday is up 50% today - those who bought _any_ Call option are up much, much more

Tell that to the investors holding >$200 GME shares right now

no one is saying anything "magically" happens. The profit-taking has happened and will continue to happen - there are a finite number of shares to be purchased, yet shares are still being purchased by shorts.

There is room for profit-taking at every cost basis except for the very top - looking at that subreddit, there are no illusions that it will literally last forever, only that selling en masse now (when shorts are actively working together to fight back) undermines the squeeze.

DoorDash has had negative earnings for all but 2 (1?) quarters it has existed, and trades at about $190 a share, despite direct competition from multiple functionally identical competitors.

The market is broken, at least retail investors are benefiting for once.

this a profound (intentional?) misreading of how a short squeeze functions. the shorts are the ones who end up "holding the bag" in that they are contractually obligated to buy shares at current (higher) value in order to cover their position.

hence the "taking on wall street" angle - institutional shorts are the chump, not the retail investors (and the institutions going long with them)