636 karma · joined July 3, 2020
It is really odd until you reveal below that you have a pretty clear bias against Bitcoin because you personally worked on some traditional payment processing software.
But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?
So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.
We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.
The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.
If he had known the virus was being researched and escaped the lab, certainly his recommendation should have included requests for any and all research and records related to the virus research. As such records have been very pertinent to public health guidelines and guidance, if not potentially toward treatments and future vaccines.
Also there is the very real financial and legal component if that were the case. On a much smaller scale it would be on par with destroying video evidence of a slip and fall, denying it ever existed, then when caught claiming it’s immaterial to the medical treatment of the injured…that’s still fraud and at minimum a clear attempt to escape legal and financial liability.
The printing isn’t really the problem either, it’s a symptom of policies from both parties for 50-60 years resulting in a nation that functions purely on debt from individual households, small businesses, publicly traded businesses, to the government itself.
Before the pandemic the majority of households couldn’t cover a $400 emergency. But the truth is businesses and governments were in the same position, and even in “the greatest economy the world has ever seen” the majority of them live the equivalent of paycheck to paycheck just servicing their debts.
Still, for all the BS lawyers get, much of it deserving, for every lawyer behind the brokers/investors/funds there are others representing the victims. These are the types of lawsuits that include egos so big that sometimes discovery of emails/communications and the prospects of sitting for depositions result in a resolution, and even change.
It’s funny you mention the army of lawyers, because many of these cases have been consolidated and one 1 Zoom hearing were 141 lawyers…they represented the plaintiffs.
Sure it’s more convenient online, competition being 1 click away, but antitrust still applies to online content creators/distribution businesses.
So it’s more important to ask if you wanted to watch Netflix created content can you watch it outside Netflix? It’s not a simple yes or no, black/white kind of analysis though. You also have to look at the whole of the industry and when you do you will begin to see how the sausage is made and the antitrust nastiness.
Say you want to create a movie/show you contact film company A, Director B, actor C. Turns out you can’t hire any of them because they have contracts with Netflix. New content creators can no longer compete or even enter the market to compete and new distributors will not have any content to distribute so they won’t be able to compete or enter the market.
Even if it results in more/cheaper content, which may or may not be something to brag about, ultimately a competition is harmed and lack of competition is what harms the consumer.
The monopoly held by the studios was effectively broken up following WWII. Yes, there were multiple studios competing but individually they were engaging in antitrust behavior.
This acquisition is essentially a waiving of the white flag and passing the torch. It will be allowed because big tech/Hollywood own politicians.
However, and I think to your point, it is impossible to reconcile that Netflix is engaging in the same behavior (producing, distributing and exhibiting) as the Hollywood studios when the courts broke up the industry to allow fair competition.
But based on your comment, you either: a) were inspired by the post itself and decided to have a little fun roasting this comment; or b) need to take a vacation.
Think about the efforts Amazon and Walmart go to keep their employees from unionizing.
Consider how Uber misclassified workers as contractors to avoid providing legal benefits.
Or how every year before the pandemic there was push back on not just raising minimum wage laws but efforts to completely repeal them.
This goes back in history to unsafe working environments, overtime, health insurance, workers comp, etc…
Stock markets are at record highs, companies have record profits, economic inequality is at all time highs…yet businesses continue to push the narrative they pay to much to workers and the would rather strip all Americans of benefits, who really need them, just so they can fill a handful of jobs at below market rates and below living wages.
People who make $100MM are no smarter than those that don’t, I mean Einstein didn’t make that type of money right? It’s not merit either, it’s simply money...under our system money makes money, concentration of capital doesn’t benefit everyone it benefits the person with the capital.
Consider wealth management itself, you want to diversify your investments, you would never put 90% of your wealth into .1% of the assets you own. The rich know and live by this rule, well that same rule applies to society, you don’t want .1% controlling 90% of the wealth so investment is determined by .1% of the population. You want the wealth diversified and in the hands of many so no single person controls investment.
For better or worse the only way that type of inequality happens is as a direct result of the policies of the country they live in, thus they should be grateful and thankful for living in a country that not only allows but promotes that type of concentration of wealth.
In exchange for the benefit of living in such a country that promotes such wealth inequality, they should pay a 90% tax rate to reflect the wealth inequality itself. They will bitch and moan of course, but they will still be far richer and better off than everyone else, and everyone else will be better off not living in a country with such high inequality and a country with tremendous national resources, as opposed to a country that is $28T in debt further decreasing the quality of life of those without the personal wealth to not need public services.
He isn’t more sensitized to privacy issues, so much as he can afford to spend the time and money required to protect himself...most people, like the majority of his users responsible for him having that kind of wealth, don’t have the luxury.
It’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard...to not protect someone because they should have been smarter than to act upon a desire selfish desire to make money, well no shit that’s why fraud and cons work, because almost everyone acts on the desire to make money. It’s why people have jobs and work, that doesn’t give employers a green light to defraud employees.
Should all those old people who fall for scams down to the Nigerian price email scams not be protected because they are stupid and acted selfishly?
Let’s say a casino rigged a deck of cards or rigged a slot machine and falsely advertised the odds of winning to the public, would victims not be entitled to protection because they are stupid and acted in a greedy way to get rich?
Why shouldn’t the victims of Elon, all the Twitter bots , and those behind them, that are pumping and dumping Doge be protect besides calling them stupid and greedy? What is it is shown millions of the victims are actually just kids that idolize musk? Are they still just stupid and greedy and thus deserve to be scammed?
It’s the same individual who has already faced legal repercussions with the SEC for his Tweets related to publicly traded stock. Let’s not forget Martha Stewart didn’t actually go to jail for insider trading, but she did go to jail for publicly stating she would be found innocent of the insider trading and they ended up nabbing her for those comments which amounted to securities fraud because they boosted her stock price.
It’s not like he doesn’t know his tweets are primarily influencing young, uneducated investors, and as they say in tech...that’s a feature not a bug. And for what it’s worth your comment is consistent with the opinions of scammers who never accept responsibility, to them it’s always the victims that deserved to be scammed for what ever reason.
Like many books written of experiences involving extreme suffering and trauma it’s extremely powerful and I tend to have to stop just to contemplate and dwell on certain passages or just sentences. I like your “thought experiment” as it’s not unlike how I go about reflecting on these kinds of books.
Frankl talks about being on a train being moved from one camp to another, and upon seeing there were no chimneys at this new camp there was a silent celebration among the prisoners. For whatever inhumane reason, that night the newly arrived prisoners were made to stand (I believe naked) throughout the whole night in the freezing cold. Yet they were all still greatful not to be at Auschwitz or another camp with chimneys. There is a separate passage where he describes the types of prisoners, the last he describes are those who had lost all meaning, spirit and would walk up to and grab the electric fence.
I can’t tell you how much heart it gives me to think of the human spirit in these conditions that can’t be broken. It’s very similar to some of the slave narratives I read, and on occasion coming across passages with descriptions of slaves on a plantation celebrating the opportunity to sing and dance together around a fire at night. I have shared with others I wish if push came to shove I’d have that type of spirit, to your point about brainwashing, I’ve received similar responses that I am romanticizing it and even that my mental impressions reflect racism, but The reality is I could have pointed to many other counter examples from my readings like the prisoners that lost meaning and grabbed the fence, but for better or worse that doesn’t lift my spirits and it’s not the examples I tend to pass on.
I often ask myself what I think I would do in a camp or on a plantation, what actions would make me the most proud and if I would have the courage and spirit to make them, but I never pretend to know what I would actually do and I’d never once judged the actions of any of them...even the most deplorable acts, like the prisoners that worked on behalf of the guards for the slightest of comforts. Even more challenging is trying to put myself in the shoes of some young German or Southerner born into and inheriting the evils of these situations, it’s a lot easier to say what I hope I would do, but just the same I have to admit no one knows what they would do, after all how many people do you really encounter that are willing to go against the grain rather than fall in line much less when it means death?
Look at how he pumped it leading up to 4/20/21 (DogeDay) and then Twitter bots and scammers pumped it on Twitter getting “DogeDay” trending by multiple times and all the uneducated “investors”, if you can even call them that, bought in at the height thinking it would pop to $1 on 4/20/21 DogeDay with Elon’s continued support and instead it got dumped losing 50%.
I wrote a post on here about the scam and said it would get bought back up on the dump and go to new all time highs as the uneducated investors that got scammed sold due to fear and not only did that happen it happened on Musk’s tweets of doing SNL and skits of the DogeFather. It honestly is like a predictable a moral neural net that’s single purpose profit on self created pump and dumps that it is capable of creating with unlimited liquidity.
When I made my post it got the inevitable comments of “so what, it’s no different than X, and the way it’s always been”. Maybe but its always poor people targeted and ultimately hurt, it’s immoral and should be fucking criminal. Especially if he is pumping it just for shits and giggles.
> A whale liquidating lots of BTC sounds like a sweet bargain to me.
This is my point, it’s all me, me, me. What about the people that lose everything. And what about when it’s no longer a situation of “only invest what you can afford to lose” rather that’s the currency you get paid in and it’s regularly subjected to pump and dump schemes. That’s not a system of currency, much less a democratization of money.
The entire defi system is currently set up for people to literally act as vultures and skim money from liquidity pools staked by others. NFTs are effectively money laundering schemes mixed with guerrilla marketing consisting of fake collectors, self purchases/self dealing, and more pump and dump scams.
Imagine some senior citizen just trying to pay rent, buy groceries and pay for meds fiddling with the most user friendly centralized wallets much less managing their own private key and setting gas. They fact is there are whales and they are sophisticated persons/organizations (if not live neural nets/bots trading on their behalf with unlimited capital and liquidity seeking to scrap profits by manipulating the prices) they certainly aren’t the unbanked which is another bs marketing scheme of the technology.
What if satoshi (unlikely but maybe the Fed itself) decides to liquidate its position of at least 1M Bitcoin. Ethereum foundation forks ethereum again to roll back transactions. Or Doge is uncontrollably minted (I don’t think it has a supply cap) or Elon decides to stop pumping it and decides to dump it.
Everything else in between is just a bunch of discord/telegram armies pumping for their own interests. I just that’s great so long as you have the social credit to be on the inside.
There is a reason your comment was downvoted, hint it’s not because people agree with you, and acknowledging a premises is correct while the conclusion is wrong is not the same as agreeing with you (but you knew that).
The downvotes are because the haves want the have nots to shut up and get back to work for them. It’s the equivalent of taking legitimate points raised by workers and responding with stop being a smart ass.
So does taking a shit job and that being in your employment history.
From the employee perspective it is a lot easier to monitor the job market and actively seek out employment while not employed.
It’s true unemployment is not enough for most people to pay their bills, but that is also true of a lot of full time employment...employers can blame unemployment for being unable to fill positions but if your full time position can’t compete with unemployment benefits the answer isn’t to take away a minimal safety net so employers can force shit wages and no benefits on workers...at best the employer gets the employee they wanted below a living wage and it’s left society as a whole with a significant number of unemployed works with absolutely nothing and not even enough shit jobs with shit wages to employ them all.