#Never invest in market

[ichtios]

20.10.2023

guys I made very hard decision and closed almost all of my market transaction except one. It means loosing tons of money and it is hard to accept it, but it was taking my life away from me, as I was always stressing about it and loosing eating and sleeping. I left one transaction that is suppose to go up next week when google, meta, and something else will publish quarter earning reports. Also it is so low now that it shouldn’t go much lower, rather only up. I left it so I can restore some more money and give it back to my mom. I borrowed lots of money from her in hope of rescuing my funds (I had enough of my own money but it wasn’t immediately available because it is on some funds etc). But I just don’t want to fight anymore. I want to live normally. I talked about it on therapy yeasterday and I felt convinced.

i was never interested in investing in the market. This company called me hundred times and I finally broke, you know, ok I will see how it works, just leave me alone. I had money that I received after my dad died. It was so much that after I bought some stuff for home, I had no need for the rest of them so I thought it might be not so bad idea to invest it. You know, my intentions were good, I like to help people, I thought when I have more money I will be able to do more good. Sounds reasonable. BOY WAS I WRONG. Of course at the beginning everything went great. Then, first mistakes, and problems, also bad advice from that company advisor, and I was spiraling down for almost a year. The truth is that I was mostly deceived and manipulated by this investment company. I can’t really blame myself for all of it. I experienced so much stress and trauma during that year because of it that it is unbelievable. I want it to be over whatever it costs me.

i’m planning to close that last transaction next week when it reaches the level that I hope for. It is realistic goal. I think so. I hope it is a good decision. I was neglecting everything. I want to stop staring at charts and numbers all the time and get back to real work. Thank God all that I do as my job, are good things that bring joy and are helping people. I’m so glad for it now. If I worked in a company that is casually making people loose their money I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eyes. I really appreciate my work now even if it doesn’t bring me huge wealth. I realize now how much more important is what you do than what you have on your account.

It’s ok, I still have enough money that in case, lets say, I need to replace my car, I will be able to do it. I also earn a good money and I’m self employed. I don’t have to worry that I don’t have a money for living. It is more of a psychological effect. I need to process it. It is not easy. But I think it will be easier to get over that loss than live in constant stress and tension night and day. Writing about it here is a part of processing for me. i will update next week when it is - lets really root for it - finally over. Also it would be nice if Euro go up a little bit, as it is very low now - I would also get some more money when changing to Polish Zloty.

[imgonnagetyoubacktv]

i think growing up is just life repeatedly sucker punching you and saying bitch you thought things were gonna better lmao no you're so naive and stupid for having hope in 20 years the world will be flaming bag of garbage and no matter how hard you work you'll get eliminated at some point

[lakakinat]

This guy's too real day 2

[jaythelay]

Man as a kid, I took modding for granted. Now I feel like I gotta step up and continue the passion.

I remember using the trainer for GTAIV, at the time, it was The Trainer since there seldom if any were alternatives. It has literally, every conceivable option you'd want, literally think of it, it has it.

Then GTAV came out and...wow. None of these trainers are remotely feature complete. It occurred to me then that, such expected things and standards, aren't guarantees in modding. That someone took their free time to make something for free with no payment, it's incredible.

Then I see that same mentality applied to Paid Products and I'm out of patience to explain the free market a 50th time and how we're the sole and only regulators, the literal half of the free market, yet we just give companies all the power regardless.

Anyways next time you're mad about some mod that's non-inherently bad, just remember, some people pay for that quality or worse, expect it. The modder wasn't trying to garner anything but adding onto people's experiences. The dev much the same, but the publisher, the CEO, considerthat they've effectively ensured you never own a single piece of media without piracy, ever again. We Lost That War because we Believed The Rich Would Be Decent. For 2 decades.

There's a reason Not to have the same mentality with modders, with purchased products. You're no longer 2 buddies playin' games and making stuff for it. You're a consumer enabling, normalizing, and supporting an industry/company who's entire goal and state of being is to lower our standards so much they can get away with worse later.

It's rich people. Not people like you and me. The employee is closer to you than the CEO, understand that, and learn to respect yourself enough not to allow them to swindle you, it is, quite literally, their main skillset and they never shut it off, you're larping to pretend anything otherwise and are doing so thinking you're protecting either friend or ego, but the fact is, you gave them that, and are scared what they'll do with it. Stop giving them trust and power over you, you're literally able to bankrupt them by not buying from them. We've seen it, time, and time, and time, and time again, when the community strikes back, We Win.

We just don't because too many people are unwilling to raise their standards, and instead, take time to defend the undefendable. Sorry but there's no way to defend a company with a streak of SA issues. Maybe consider where your money is going and how that's impacting everyone's jobs and purchases. Comes down to self-respect and demanding better.

Whilst your entire generation became Noticeably Very Poorer, the rich have amassed an absolutely unfeasible level of insane wealth, taking half our dwindling money during Covid. Why the fuck is the only thing improving the graphics? Why are we Crawling our way towards 5% of the 6th generation's standards? Why are we celebrating that? Games went down in price since cartridges, but did not change what so ever for online distribution. We are literally, paying, for the Manufacturing of Physical Copies, for Digital Copies, we Don't Even Own, that's how bad it's gotten, they literally got a free 10-20$ by moving to online.

So again, please, Please, understand I am closer to you politically than you are to any CEO or corporate logo. You are closer to your dog than you will ever be to 100k. You do not, and will never, be in this industry as the CEO's friend or company mascot, you are not that. You are a consumer, start acting like the other half of the free market and not a Pay Piggy Useful Idiot.

They even raised the prices. Good. God. We Are Losing.

[sugary-sheep]

DOKAPON FUCKING KINGDOM

I played this game ONE FUCKING TIME when i was at a friend’s house when i was like. eight years old. and for years I have wondered what the game was. For over half my damn life I have wondered about this game and needed to know what it was. and now i finally fucking know. AND IT’S OVER 150 FUCKING DOLLARS TO BUY IT USED!!!!!!

[lightgaswaterelectricityrent]

before I got paddington I went to the humane society to visit the cats and see how I felt because I've never had a cat before and I liked a few of them so much but didn't pull the trigger and then a few weeks later I saw one picture of paddington on petfinder and was like I want that one. No I don't need to meet him

[fingertipsmp3]

Why is my granddad messaging me and shading my uncle

[bigshoeswamp]

forever thinking about that one Mujica interview where he says the left governments of the 2000s failed Latin America by making its people into better consumers, not citizens

[paladincecil]

I'm avoiding continuing my dark souls playthrough by looking at the process that goes into buying a house and one of the steps is

[sufficientlylargen]

Story Concept: Star-crossed lovers, destined to fall in love but be kept apart, except they don't actually have any interest in each other, the stars are just super obsessed with shipping them for some reason.

[gwandas]

I wish I cared about another sport that I could use to distract myself because the Boston Red Sox are dead. It's never been more joever

[lakakinat]

Süße Waffen, süßes Blut, süße Gegner und ein süßer twitch livestream (lakakinat): was will man mehr?🎃🎃🎃

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[milfsoup]

they're not exactly right but they got a point/have their views validated by sony's recent failure with concord

Finally confirming that Xbox is run by people that legit don't know how games are made anymore.

"We fired them because they wanted to make games!"

"No you see, It would be expensive and take time to make games so we would rather fire them"

They could ask for a smaller scope but all they want is AAA, which is inherently expensive and takes a long time.

Literally the end game capitalism of having business people trying to run a company they know nothing about by using the strategies they were taught regardless if they apply or not to the industry they are in.

Beyond moronic.

[a-story-teller]

Had another dream story idea and it's BAD out here y'all. My subconscious said "you don't go for sad old white men yaoi? Well here's one and you have to care about it so much. Good luck"