Which industry, company and/or consequence is the first structural failure that brings this piece of shit crumbling down on everyone?
Gambling? Legal and normal-- in fact, it's your only hope to achieve "status quo" material comfort!
Housing? It's stocks now baby!
Student loans? Totally a coincidence they keep pushing moratoriums on interest back even through COVID is "over"!
Electric cars? No, you don't understand-- Tesla has this really cool battery tech, that's why it's worth 24x the stock price of General Motors with 1/100th of the material output!
Healthcare debt? I can't even joke about this one, it's genuinely fucking grotesque and insane.
Mass Homelessness? This one is cool because you can either go California-mode and try to make the population 1:1 indoors to outdoors, or you can pay some developing firm $3B to make the root problem 10x worse!
Military-Industrial Complex? Is there such thing as business suddenly getting too good?
China? Big long shot-- but there is a distant horizon where the Chinese middle class grows enough to sever the US consumer economy; and maybe not willingly either!
Tech Sector? Hear me out on this, but I think that maybe a secondary shadow-economy with +/- 200% daily swings in boutique currency value might be a bit "risky" to the classical investor-- but at least the art is incredible!
Climate? Ukraine being turned into blasted mud; India being in a 105F heatwave for all of April; 122F "heat domes" in continental BC and Alberta; year-round wildfires and collapse of all non-monocrop farming in Central America = I hope you are ready to eat the bug, pussy!
Inflation? Select this option if you are really, really stupid and gullible and you have a big cone on your head 24/7.
Thermo-Nuclear War? The final gift from our rotting overlords!
Interest Rate Shocks? Paul Volcker shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell!
Feel free to add on with your wild-card of choice that will bring misery directly to your doorstep within the next 3-??? months!
And, i mean, Marxism 101: the bourgeoisie are the ruling class, and capital itself has no flag. For a lot of these firms, the first among industry competitors that manages to maintain its contracts in Washington while reopening business in Russia? They're going to make a fortune overnight.
Themselves posted:When the dollar falls crypto freaks will declare victory can't wait
Maybe this is showing my hand to the fact that I don't know the precise specifics of the blockchain; but the value of bitcoin is certainly in some way tied directly to fiat currency, right? It's not like people make transactions with actual Bitcoin very often anyways because it takes fucking forever and you have to expose yourself to a level of scrutiny that a lot of people who use it will not want to opt into. For every dimwit investor type, there's also an equal or greater amount of people who like bought 1 BTC in 2009 because they were trying to buy heroin or acid on silk road, walked ass-backwards into now having like $600,000; the odds of this happening again are basically zero now. The hype around crypto is that it is a valuable speculative commodity where petit bourgeois consumers who exist in the soft middle of the economy can spike a bunch of stagnant money without having to go to a bank and ask for permission to take out a mutual fund in the riskiest possible investment strategy. Nobody is lauding the buying power of BTC, just its constantly cratering and spiking value against fiat (specifically USD obviously)-- but it's not fiat. Okay sure lol.
Totally leaves me open to looking like a fucking idiot in 10 years when we're all using some fuckin shitty altcoin to pay rent to live in hell, but something tells me that bitcoin and the rest are not as resilient or independent of bourgeois economy as some liars and waterheads make it out to be. We're already sub-$50k since the Fed started pulling back on injecting historically massive amounts of cash into the economy anyways.
Because, and i'm speaking strictly in hindsight here........... that's probably how most of the "value" of (supposedly) high-price individual NFTs has been established: through fraudulent transactions, where the seller is the buyer, or the seller and buyer are collaborating, NFT-speculating groups working together to drive up the price of each others' products, and the bill never comes due.
The idea being that 1 in 20 NFTs involved in that fraud, or 1 in 100, or whatever, get sold to some chump who thinks he's paying for growth, or some boutique investor who doesn't care if they lose the money, turning the fake valuation into real money. So of course the NFT has no value in the sense that it's not really much of anything in and of itself—but it also has no "value" in the glib market sense, because the value was established by fraud, by one of probably myriad ways involving other transactions that means a million-dollar NFT sale, or ten $100,000 ones, or whatever, balances out to net zero.
I kind of got this hunch back when there was that news story about some guy goofing and selling a NFT for 1/1,000th of its supposed value or something, and the guy made a big point of responding to it in interviews with a shrug. One side of that story was about how vast fortunes were being made on the vague and impossible-to-understand cutting edge of finance. The other side was about how there's no security or insurance in this market.
But what seemed most likely to me, just intuitively, was that there was never going to be a million-dollar transaction there, or whatever the value of the NFT was supposed to be. Nothing would really change hands in the process, so a transaction for 0.001 times that value was exactly the same. Either that, or because the value was determined by fraud, there was no reason not to take the "accidentally" super-reduced payment. Who knows, maybe it was even engineered to pitch that to the buyer as a secret steal.
In any case, Melania Trump and company would necessarily have AAA, top-flight resources to commit this sort of gray-market fraud in a fashion the finance press could studiously ignore. They just didn't have to, really, given absurd the market as it existed. But anything with Bloomberg's name attached is happy to pop a lunatic bubble like that in some niche retail-market corner of finance if they can embarrass Trump in the process. They knew it was going to happen soon anyway.
And it's not like your average NFT monkey man, or even the pop-up scammer one or two levels up from that, has Trump money or Trump people to enact that scam, let alone to hide it. After Bloomberg said "Actually it's incredibly easy to prove all of this is fraud, and we're ready to write that story now," the knowledge probably osmosed out at the speed of light among the Real Big Money that it was all over, the fix was in. Bye-bye everyones apes.
Probably the funniest part of it to me though is that Gabe Newell of all people called it out in an interview recently. Someone was like, Are you gonna get into NFTs? and gaben was like, Let me tell you a little story. Valve used to take crypto payments for video games on Steam. It turned out 90% of Steam customer crypto transactions were criminal fraud, so we don't do that anymore, The End.
And I mean........Steam must have gathered one hell of a data set on the exact sort of person eager to jump into a hot new billion-dollar market for hexagon-shaped Posting 'tars.
cars posted:Because, and i'm speaking strictly in hindsight here........... that's probably how most of the "value" of (supposedly) high-price individual NFTs has been established: through fraudulent transactions, where the seller is the buyer, or the seller and buyer are collaborating, NFT-speculating groups working together to drive up the price of each others' products, and the bill never comes due.
I have seen folks claiming they’ve done this and them and others advocating doing this not even as an explicit scam but as some kind of self deluded “this is a way to prove the value of your art” or “another cool trick to try that will create free money with crypto”
wheatdevil posted:something tells me that bitcoin and the rest are not as resilient or independent of bourgeois economy as some liars and waterheads make it out to be.
cars posted:This is prognostication to an extreme of unreliability, but if NATO manages to keep up the same level of theatrical economic warfare it's waging against Russia right now for ~2 years, and Russia manages to avoid mass unemployment regardless... especially if Beijing succeeds at playing both sides to China's benefit... i feel like that could backfire wildly on the West as a business center. Like... if i were any government outside U.S./Europe at that point, i would start hedging every single bet I made.
cars posted:if NATO manages to keep up the same level of theatrical economic warfare it's waging against Russia right now for ~2 years, and Russia manages to avoid mass unemployment regardless... especially if Beijing succeeds at playing both sides to China's benefit... i feel like that could backfire wildly on the West
at this point I would honestly feel like I were violating posting etiquette if I provided regular updates on this one. Easy lay-ups against the mercy rule. There’s still plenty of time for me to be proven wrong though.
wheatdevil posted:Interest Rate Shocks? Paul Volcker shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell!
Wow!
paris hilton voice: "thats hot"
The three unnamed officials further agreed that the three officials Walsh, Vilsack and Buttigieg are "very smart guys" and handsome in an approachable sort of way, and told POLITICO later that one of the three would probably be the President someday, though they disagreed on which one.
“Look, it’s not like I killed (Osama) Bin Laden, right?” Buttigieg said. “I don’t want to overstate what my role was, but it certainly is something that was dangerous.”
He said he was often assigned the role as driver, which they jokingly referred to as “military Uber,” because he was trained to fire a rifle to keep watch for ambushes. Yet explosive devices along the roads presented equally grave danger.
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Jason McRae still remembers the moment he met Buttigieg at the Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center near Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He didn’t know the man assigned to be his “battle buddy” was also an Indiana mayor.
“One of my early memories was that he had an earbud in and he was learning a language, I think it was Dari,” McRae said in an interview, recalling that day five years ago. “Certainly I don’t remember other folks that were picking up a language at that point in time.”
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every sentence a painting for the handsome and smart mayor who you need to be paying attention to for he is is an up and coming one to watch this season
cars posted:The three unnamed officials further agreed that the three officials Walsh, Vilsack and Buttigieg are "very smart guys" and handsome in an approachable sort of way, and told POLITICO later that one of the three would probably be the President someday, though they disagreed on which one.
*cars cocks pistol* always have been tears