#the thing about this economy and being a college student in a for profit system

[littletrumpetcat]

how the fuck does anyone afford anything. please let me know. i haven't gotten my hair cut in two years. i've never paid to get my nails done. i rarely ever buy alcohol. i haven't eaten out this summer. it's those god damn student loans i fear

[reasoningdaily]

Schools do a poor job of teaching about America’s legacy of white supremacy, according to a scholar who researches racial discrimination.

A Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., in 1926

When it comes to how deeply embedded racism is in American society, blacks and whites have sharply different views.

For instance, 70 percent of whites believe that individual discrimination is a bigger problem than discrimination built into the nation’s laws and institutions. Only 48 percent of blacks believe that is true.

Many blacks and whites also fail to see eye to eye regarding the use of blackface, which dominated the news cycle during the early part of 2019 due to a series of scandals that involve the highest elected leaders in Virginia, where I teach.

The donning of blackface happens throughout the country, particularly on college campuses. Recent polls indicate that 42 percent of white American adults either think blackface is acceptable or are uncertain as to whether it is.

One of the most recent blackface scandals has involved Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, whose yearbook page from medical school features someone in blackface standing alongside another person dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam has denied being either person. The more Northam has tried to defend his past actions, the clearer it has become to me how little he appears to know about fundamental aspects of American history, such as slavery. For instance, Northam referred to Virginia’s earliest slaves as “indentured servants”. His ignorance has led to greater scrutiny of how he managed to ascend to the highest leadership position in a racially diverse state with such a profound history of racism and white supremacy.

Ignorance is Pervasive

The reality is Gov. Northam is not alone. Most Americans are largely uninformed of our nation’s history of white supremacy and racial terror.

As a scholar who researches racial discrimination, I believe much of this ignorance is due to negligence in our education system. For example, a recent study found that only 8 percent of high school seniors knew that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. There are ample opportunities to include much more about white supremacy, racial discrimination and racial violence into school curricula. Here are three things that I believe should be incorporated into all social studies curricula today:

1. The Civil War was fought over slavery and one of its offshoots – the convict-lease system – did not end until the 1940s.

The Civil War was fought over the South’s desire to maintain the institution of slavery in order to continue to profit from it. It is not possible to separate the Confederacy from a pro-slavery agenda and curriculums across the nation must be clear about this fact.

 A Confederate treasury note from the Civil War Era shows how reliant the South’s economy was on slave labor. Photo from Scott Rothstein / www.shutterstock.com.

After the end of the Civil War, southern whites sought to keep slavery through other means. Following a brief post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction, white southerners created new laws that gave them legal authority to arrest blacks over the most minor offenses, such as not being able to prove they had a job.

While imprisoned under these laws, blacks were then leased to corporations and farms where they were forced to work without pay under extremely harsh conditions. This “convict leasing” was, as many have argued, slavery by another name and it persisted until the 1940s.

Southern jails made money leasing convicts for forced labor in the Jim Crow South. Circa 1903. Photo from Everett Historical / www.shutterstock.com.

2. The Jim Crow era was violent.

While students may be taught about segregation and laws preventing blacks from voting, they often are not taught about the extreme violence whites enacted upon blacks throughout the Jim Crow era, which took place from 1877 through the 1950s. Mob violence and lynchings were frequent occurrences – and not just in the South – throughout the Jim Crow era.

Racial terror was used as a means for whites to maintain power and prevent blacks from gaining equality. Notably, many whites – not just white supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan – engaged in this violence. Moreover, the torture and murder of blacks was not associated with any consequences.

During this same time, white society created negative stereotypes about blacks as a way to dehumanize blacks and justify the violence whites enacted upon them. These negative stereotypes included that blacks were ignorant, lazy, cowardly, criminal and hypersexual.

Blackface minstrelsy refers to whites darkening their skin and dressing in tattered clothing to perform the negative stereotypes as part of entertainment. This imagery and entertainment served to solidify negative stereotypes about blacks in society. Many of these negative stereotypes persist today.

3. Racial inequality was preserved through housing discrimination and segregation.

During the early 1900s, a number of policies were put into place in our country’s most important institutions to further segregate and oppress blacks. For example, in the 1930s, the federal government, banks and the real estate industry worked together to prevent blacks from becoming homeowners and to create racially segregated neighborhoods.

This process, known as redlining, served to concentrate whites in middle-class suburbs and blacks in impoverished urban centers. Racial segregation in housing has consequences for everything from education to employment. Moreover, because public school funding relies so heavily on local taxes, housing segregation affects the quality of schools students attend.

All of this means that even after the removal of discriminatory housing policies and school segregation laws in the 1950s and 1960s, the consequences of this intentional segregation in housing persist in the form of highly segregated and unequal schools. All students should learn this history to ensure that they do not wrongly conclude that current racial disparities are based on individual shortcomings – or worse, black inferiority – as opposed to systematic oppression.

Americans live in a starkly unequal society where health and economic outcomes are largely influenced by race. We cannot begin to meaningfully address this inequality as a society if we do not properly understand its origins. The white supremacists responsible for sanitizing our history lessons understood this. Their intent was clearly to keep the country ignorant of its racist past in order to stymie racial equality. To change the tide, we must incorporate a more accurate depiction of our country’s racist history in our K-12 curricula.

[neverwritewhatyouknow]

I'm the previous anon who was talking about Indian Colonial history

I do follow you but I wanted to remain anonymous because I'm kinda shy 😭. You can call me Madhuri so that it's clear who I am

So I hadn't really put much thought into Shaan being a direct employee of the British monarchy until the other anon pointed it out and the more I think of it, the more weirded out I get because in a fictional novel, I feel that the author has the responsibility to make their content respectful to all groups of people and this move was kind of thoughtless.

Indians were treated like shit when the British governed our land. Basically, the British arrived as cloth traders and by creating this elaborate debt trap for rural weavers, they took over our economy and gained trade monopoly. They got some tax cessations from different kings and finally in the Battle of Plassey, they took over Bengal, a super super important place because it was in the plains, had a long coastline and was one of the most industrialised towns.

They started taxing people to hell and back with no regard for their well being. They told our kings they would provide them arms and forces to protect themselves against other rulers all while instigating whatever the opposite of peace is (I literally cannot think of a work for this, I'm so sorry)

Indians were forced to pay them, work for them without pay and make goods for them at extremely nominal amounts while the British got all the profit. We were kidnapped from our own lands and sent to plantations. There was this inland immigration act which did not allow workers to even exit tea gardens without written permission which was rarely given. They shut down our press and arrested our revolutionaries. Our people were forced to fight in the army. The first revolution actually started because the army was being forced to use bullets greased with pig fat and cow fat one of which was haram for muslims and the other was the product of an animal holy to the Hindus.

They decimated our country and the impact is still felt today.

I have watched a lot of movies about colonialism in India and one of the most chilling lines Ive heard was something along the lines of 'A bullet costs one pound by the time it reaches your gun Soldier. Are you really going to waste it on brown trash' this was followed by the soldiers beating a mother to death in front of her daughter and the entire village.

I'll recommend some movies to you. They are fiction but manage to capture the history so so well. You can find these on Netflix btw.

1) Lagaan- it's about taxation during a time of drought and a surreal way to escape it

2) RRR- honestly, I had watched some part of it but couldn't watch further because of how chilling it was and how hard it hit but it is considered to be amazing

3) Rang De Basanti- It's about college students shooting a film about freedom fighters and it alternates with the story of the revolutionaries and their parallels with the characters. These students are changed forever when one act makes them question the entire system and they become revolutionaries themselves. The ending was surprising and I could feel my heart being ripped out of my chest

Hey, Madhuri! No worries, I totally understand wanting to stay anonymous, I’m literally the same way on here so I get it.

Thank you so much for this! Yeah, my history classes definitely didn’t go over enough about any of this, but I’ll be reading more about everything this week, because it’s important and I want to learn more. It’s clear there is an entire history between Britain and India that I only know the very tip of, so thank you again for writing this all out. I’m sure a lot of people probably don’t know much about this (unfortunately, since our textbooks tend to… you know… veer on the side of the oppressors), so this will all be incredibly educational to anyone reading it. Feel free to send more my way whenever you want! I love this!

I’ve heard awesome things about RRR, but didn’t know what it was about. I’m gonna watch it this weekend! And that last movie sounds really good too! Thanks for the recs!!!

As for Shaan… I honestly think Casey just wasn’t thinking. This isn’t in defense of them, an author should always think about what they’re doing and how it could show up on page or screen, but I truthfully think they just wanted to fill that role with some sort of minority and picked Indian because of the large UK Indian population. I’d bet all of the money in my wallet ($20) that Casey doesn’t know any more than the vague basics of everything you’ve told me. I noticed that they described Nora, who’s Jewish, using some stereotypical Jewish traits too (I can write more on this if anyone wants, don’t want to hijack this post). It really was a guess-and-pick of races and ethnicities for them. I love how diverse the book is, but it’s sorta clear it was done for the spectacle, not for any real heartwarming reason. Casey knew it would probably sell better, since it would be talked about as an incredibly varied collection of characters, I don’t think they thought about more than that, or didn’t think it would matter because of the positives.

Do I think Casey meant any direct hurt with it? No.

Do I think that Casey’s lack of understanding or having any knowledge beyond their contained worldview causes harm indirectly? Yes.

[lunarsilkscreen]

Demand on currency decreases its value

So I've made this observation before: When people need money, demand increases on currency, unlike any other good, it's actual value goes down. I'd like to take a minute to analyze *why* this might be.

The "demand" comes from the necessity of business entities and individuals needing to pay off their debts and other bills. Which removes currency flow from a system, which is where the inflation comes from.

People are trying to get out from under their debt, which means that they start charging more and more for their services. And I don't just mean a college student with no job history who can't afford the loans.

Businesses *also* behave this way.

This is part of the budgeting process. As with all budgets you need to start with your debts.

These originate with the absolute basics; Food, Water, Dwelling.

And they go up in tiers of importance; Hygiene, Transportation, Other costs of business (or just living, like electricity, and other utilities)

And finally; Debts Owed.

As more money goes towards bills, like debts, companies have to increase their own prices as much as their customers are willing to pay. Because their customers are going to start forgoing niceties.

People will survive on 30¢ ramen packets if they have to. Or a bag of tortillas and BBQ sauce if you catch a good sale.

And because of that; more companies start failing to reach their goals. They can't sell their service or product, because people can't afford them.

And this will even affect people who aren't hurting for money. The societal pressures of an economic downturn will encourage people to stop buying niceties, because their neighbors can't afford them.

Either because they'll lose social capital, or because they're worried that other people, trying to make ends meet, will start trying to do what you gotta do to make that bread.

Which is why there's A LOT of media saying "Everything is fine, economy is fine." Because once people stop buying things, that's when the economy *really* starts to take a turn for the worse.

This is the *real* source of inflation when looking directly at budgeting, and ignore the other factors that could cause inflation in other facets. (Which, some may or may not be affecting us now.)

And why there is an *real* discussion to be had about both not forgiving debts, AND debt forgiveness. (Because both will effect the economy to the negative, the question is; which one would hurt more?)

The reason things inflate in price, arguably, has nothing to do with supply and demand. Our economy barely works on that idea anymore because of the efficiency we have created at collecting resources. Which is good, because it means that it's likely nobody will starve.

What it means is that our worries about inflation have to do with where the currency actually flows. If debts cannot be paid, we have an economic downturn. If they can be paid, we have economic prosperity.

But it also means that; we can actually gauge exactly how the economy will react based on the cumulative outstanding debts of a country (not the federal debt ceiling mind you, that's just a gauge of circulating currency).

In no uncertain terms either; because currency can only come from two sources; the government (who creates currency), or a loan from a bank (which is individualized debt)

See... The idea is, that everybody works for each other, and they pay off each other's debts.

The real question that should be asked; that nobody seems willing to ask; if almost all currency comes from debt in the first place--how can there be any profit at all? Without, of course, creating debt somewhere else in the system?

An individual will say "Well that's not my concern if somebody goes into debt buying my product" The assumption being that a person *should* be able to buy things without needing to acrue debt is a sound decision for all individuals.

But in the system as a whole; if there is profit in the system, then that profit has to come from somewhere, because money in the U.S. (not counting counterfeiting) can only be created by the Federal reserve under the guidance of the federal government.

And a debt cannot be paid without having a profit source.

Meanwhile, debt exists, as does interest on that debt. Which means that, in its current state; the entire economic system is geared towards the impossibility of profit. And the paying of debts, that if it were on a smaller scale, wouldn't be possible to pay.

Even with inflation.

[bi-furiosity]

while me and the gang are yelling we need to talk about the way middle class people perceive debt and how it affects financial status. the amount of times i've seen people much more well off than me act like we are on the same level because they have student loan debt is sickening.

do not pretend that the "progressive" position of cancelling student loan debt is anything other than a play to win back the hearts of middle class America without fundamentally fixing any other part of our society that destroys the poor.

look at the way they justify it. "it pays itself back, so our millenials and zoomers can invest in our economy." it's not about minimizing the hardship faced by being in debt. student loan debt can be devastating. i've seen it happen in my own life.

but access to student loans is a privilege. i am 28,000 dollars in debt and that is a privilege. of all of my friends i went to high school with, a handful of them went to college, and even less graduated. the amount of friends and family who live with medical debt? credit card debt? too many to count.

we don't stigmatize student loan debt the way other debt is stigmatized. medical debt? something is wrong with you. any decent person would have insurance through their job, how hard could a co-pay be to cover. what happens when you can't go to the doctor because you can't pay off more debt? don't worry about it. don't worry about the countless people in my life who wait months or years to go to the doctor because the only thing you're going to get is more bills you can't pay and more solutions you can't afford. what good is knowing your knee's bad if you can't get the surgery? medical debt kills. even if it doesn't kill us today or tomorrow, it trims years off our lives. years we live in fear and anxiety, wondering what kind of financial state we'll leave our family in when we die.

credit card debt? irresponsible with money. god forbid you use your credit card to fix your car so you can get to work, or to pay your doctor's bills or buy groceries or whatever other trivial things you wanted in the moment. how can you be trusted to rent a home, buy a car, get a line of credit that isn't egregiously exploitative if you can't pay the one you've been given?

forget the payday loans people use in desperate moments. forget the medical debt, the credit card debt, the housing foreclosures. forget all the things that poor people have held over their heads every day. forget the fact that there are those of us who have lived every day of our life with debt and will die like that. forget the fact that at every opportunity, we are told to our faces just how little our life is worth. forget the fact that many of us have no long term plan. where will we be in ten, twenty years? hopefully alive. if we're lucky, in a better home and working a job that doesn't leave us bitter and aching. what is retirement, when you can't even take a month of work off to have minor surgery.

the bare minimum is cancelling medical debt. but as long as healthcare remains a commodity and not a right, people will still die for want of it. but cancelling medical debt isn't profitable. when you cancel student loan debt, you free up millions of middle and upper middle class millenials' and zoomers' finances so they can buy homes, gentrify new neighborhoods, invest in stock, have more upperclass babies to keep up with the frightful masses of impoverished.

forget cancelling credit card debt. or anything else. there are huge swathes of industries dedicated purely to exhorting money from the poor. debt is an opportunity of wealth for the rich. the fact that middle class people ever got caught in the crossfire, with student loan debt, is a fluke, and the only reason they want to fix it is to get you to stop questioning the system as a whole.

[qqueenofhades]

Question for you. When you have time. And if you want. I know things are busy for you. What do you mean by end stage capitalism? Thanks.

Aha. I am sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for a while, since I’ve been busy and doing stressful things and not sure how to answer this in a way that wouldn’t immediately turn into a pages-long rant. Nothing to do with you, of course, but just because I have 800 things to say on this topic, none of them complimentary, which I’ll try to condense down briefly. Ish.

In sum, end-stage capitalism is at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today, more or less. It’s the state of being that exists when the economic system of capitalism, i.e. the exchange of money for goods and services, has become so runaway, so unregulated, so elevated to the level of unchallengeable dogma in the Western world (especially after the Cold War and decades of hysteria about the “scourge of communism”) and so embedded on every level of the social and political fabric that it is no longer sustainable but also can’t be destroyed without taking everything else down. Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level, but also… we can’t go on like this. So that’s a fun paradox. The current world order is so drastically, unimaginably, ridiculously and wildly unequal, privileging the tiny elite of the ultra-rich over the rest of the planet, because of hypercapitalism. This really got going in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, still generally worshiped as a political hero on both the left and right sides of the American political establishment (even liberals tiptoe around criticizing Saint Ronnie), set into motion a program of slashing business and environment regulations, reducing or eliminating taxes on the super wealthy, and introducing the concept of “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. In short, the principle holds that if you make it as easy as possible for rich people to become EVEN MORE RICH, and remove all irksome regulations or restrictions on the Church of the Free Market, they will benevolently redistribute this largess to the little people. To say the very least, this….does not happen. Ever.

Since the 1980s, in short, we have had thirty years of unrestricted, runaway capitalism that eventually propelled us into the financial crisis of 2008, after multiple smaller crises, where the full extent of this philosophy became apparent…. and nobody really did anything about it. You can google statistics about how the price of everything has skyrocketed since about the 1970s, when you could put yourself through college on one part-time job, graduate with no student debt, and be assured of a job for the next 30 years, and how baby boomers (who are responsible for wrecking the economy) insist that millennials are “just lazy” or “killing [insert x industry]”. This is because we have NO GODDAMN MONEY, graduate thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (if we can even afford college in the first place), are lucky if we find a job that pays us more than $10 an hour, and often have to string together several part-time and frangible jobs that offer absolutely nothing in the way of security, benefits, or long-term saving potential. This is why millennials at large don’t have kids, buy houses, or have any savings (or any of the traditional “adult” milestones). We just don’t have the money for it.

Even more, capitalism has taken over our mindsets to the point where it is, as I said, at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world. Climate change? Won’t be fixed because the ruling classes are making money from the current system, and if you really want to give yourself an aneurysm, google the profiteers who can’t wait for the environment/society to collapse because they’ll make MORE money off it. This is known as “disaster capitalism” and is what the US has done to other countries for decades. (I also recommend The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.) This obviously directly contributes to the War on Terror, the current global instability, the reason Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, and other private-security contractors made a mint from blowing up Iraq and paying themselves to rebuild it, and then the resultant rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist reactionary groups. The bombing produces (often brown and Muslim) refugees and immigrants, Western countries won’t take them in, right-wing politicians make hay out of Threats To Our Way of Life ™, and the circle goes on. Gun control? Can’t happen because a) American white supremacy is too deeply tied to its paranoid right to have as many guns as it wants and to destroy the Other at any time, and b) the NRA pays senators by the gigabucks to make sure it doesn’t. (And we all know what an absolute goddamn CLUSTERFUCK the topic of big money and American politics is in the first place. It’s just… a nightmare in every direction.)

Meanwhile, end-stage capitalism has also systematically assigned value to society and to individuals depending entirely on their prospects for monetization. Someone who can’t work, or who doesn’t work the “right” job, is thus assigned less value as a human (see all the right-wing screaming about people who “don’t deserve” to have any kind of social and financial assistance or subsidized food and medicine if they won’t “help themselves”). This is how we get to situations where we have the ads that I kept seeing in London the other month: apps where you could share your leftover food, or rent out your own car, or collectively rent an apartment, or whatever else. Because apparently if you live in London in 2019, there is no expectation that you will be able to have your own food, car, or apartment. You have to crowdsource it. (See also: people having to beg strangers on the internet for money for food or medical bills, and strangers on the internet doing more to help that person than the whole system and/or the person’s employment or living situation.) There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as an economic theory. Exchanging money for goods and services is understandable and it works. But when it has run out of control to this degree, when the people who suffer the most under it fiercely defend it (see the working-class white people absolutely convinced that the reason for their problems is Those Damn Job Stealing Immigrants), when it only works for the interests of a few uber-privileged few and is actively killing everyone else… yeah.

Let’s put it this way. You will likely have heard of the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes in recent months: the Lion Air crash in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. Together, they killed 346 people. After these crashes, it turned out that the same malfunctioning system was responsible for both, and that Boeing had known of the problem before the Max went on the market. But because they needed to make (even more) money and compete with their rivals, Airbus, they had sent the planes ahead anyway, with unclear and confusing instruction to pilots about how to deal with it, and generally not acknowledging the problem and insisting (as they still do) that the plane was safe, even though it’s been grounded worldwide since March. There are also concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is too deep in Boeing’s pocket to provide an impartial ruling (and America was the last country to ground the plane), and other countries’ aviation safety bodies have announced that they aren’t just going to take the FAA’s word for it whenever they decide that the Max is safe. This almost never happens, since usually international regulatory bodies, especially in aviation, will accept each other’s standards. But because of Boeing’s need for Even More Money, they put a plane on the market and into commercial passenger service that they knew had problems, and the FAA essentially let them do that and isn’t entirely trusted to ensure that they won’t do it again. Because…. value for the shareholders. Or something. This is the extreme example of what I mean when I say that end-stage capitalism is actively killing people.

It is also doing so on longer-term and more pernicious everyday levels. See above where people can’t afford their basic expenses even on several jobs, see the insulin price-gouging in the US (and the big pharma efforts in general to make drugs and healthcare as expensive as possible), see the way any kind of welfare or social assistance is framed as “lazy” or “bad” or “socialist,” see the way that people are basically only allowed to survive if they can pay for it, and the way that circle is becoming smaller and smaller. The American public is also fed enduring folk “wisdom” about “money doesn’t buy happiness,” the belief that poverty serves to build character or as an example of virtue, or so on, to make them feel proud of being poor/deprived/that they’re doing a good thing by actively supporting this system that is responsible for their own suffering. And yet for example, the Nordic countries (while obviously having other problems of their own) maintain the Scandinavian welfare model, which pays for college and healthcare, provides for individual stipends/basic income, allows generous leave for parenthood, emphasises a unionised workplace, and otherwise prescribes a mix of capitalism, social democracy, and social mobility. All the Nordic countries rank highly for human development, overall happiness, and other measurements of social success. But especially in America, any suggestion of “socialism” is treated like heresy, and unions are a dirty word. That is changing, but…slowly.

In short: the economic overlords have never done anything to give power, money, or anything at all to the working class without being repeatedly and explicitly forced, they have no good will or desire to treat the poor like humans (see: Amazon) or anything at all that doesn’t increase their already incomprehensible profit margins. The pursuit of more money that cannot possibly be spent in one human lifetime, that is accumulated, used to make laws for itself, and never paid in taxes to fund improvements or services for everyone else, lies at the root of pretty much every problem you can name in the world right now, is deeply, deeply evil, and I do not use that word lightly.

[geekns]

Turns out being poorly informed does not mean you were forced to do something.

Also, college debt is...kind of a big deal. It's been a household word for, what, the past decade? At least?

Oh, my sweet Summer Child. I was meant to graduate from high school in 2000. I became deeply depressed trying to keep up my grades because in every single class I had, teachers expected me to lie in order to pass tests! I had to give the answers they required even when I knew them to be 100% wrong!

The internet was brand new. Poorly informed? There was nowhere for me to Google or even Yahoo info about student loans. My entire life, adults told me that I was expected to go to college. That I had to go to college in order to be successful. That I had to go to college to be happy. And, as a naive, abused, suicidal child, I was deeply unhappy and desperate for escape.

But when I got my GED, I was flat-out told that my abusive parents made too much money for me to get any financial aid despite my 4.0+ out of 4.0 GPA (i was in weighted classes and my GPA was perfect). Even though I had been supporting myself for over a year and lived in a completely different state than they did.

I'm white. My parents were middle class with seven kids and two mortgages. And the financial aid people said my only option for financial aid was to have a baby outside of wedlock.

So, when all authority figures tell you that this is the only option your entire life, the normal decision, the smart decision, and you're still struggling between finding your own way and believing the lies that were spoon-fed to you your entire life, what do you think I chose?

I didn't even know what a trade was. I was too fat to enlist (all 5'5" lifeguard/jock of me). There were no options. I took out a loan.

Now I am much older and hopefully a little wiser, and I freely admit that I made a stupid choice, but I have to forgive myself for this choice because i had absolutely no way of knowing that it was the wrong one to make. EVERYONE HAD TOLD ME THAT THERE WAS NO CHOICE, no other options. Incidentally, I worked full time most of my college career and tried to take out the least amount of money possible to survive. And every step of the way, every class, your professors expected you to do the same thing they had: get a Masters or Doctorate. Keep going into more debt.

I didn't know that all my debt is held by the US government and that student loans are their main source of income until a week ago.

I didn't know that the "#1 most useful major in the USA" would suddenly become the major that was tantamount to a General Education diploma that no one wanted to hire you for achieving.

I didn't know that over 90% of college seniors in my graduating class were going to be forced to move back in with their parents.

I didn't know that Obama was going to become president and deliberately tank the economy in my state and most of the US.

I didn't know that I was going to be forced to work 3-4 part-time jobs simultaneously just to make ends me (and would still not be able to support myself).

I didn't know that it was going to be impossible to find a full-time job, that no one was hiring college graduates anywhere locally, that everywhere I applied I would be told that I was overqualified if I even heard back at all.

I didn't know that I would have to move to a foreign country to find a job using my degree.

Now you take all of this info and think about it. How would you know any of this beforehand? How would you know with no internet access? How would you know without FB, Twitter, or Tumblr? When your only news source was from the mainstream media that tells you what they want you to know and how to think the way they want you to think? How would you have been smart enough to shake off the system that you were born into, one that was intended to profit the government and turn children into brainwashed little workers and that has, over time, perfected this brainwashing more and more.

Kids today don't learn how to read, write, or do math. They learn CRT and and Trans rights. They don't have home economics, or shop class, or accounting, or typing, or music. They have been sitting in front of a screen or in a classroom with a mask on. They don't even know how to be a normal human being anymore. It's like TPTB are trying to make them all autistic on purpose.

Even in Japan they knew that you cannot learn from someone wearing a mask. The children can't read the teacher's lips, expressions, etc. They become isolated and never learn proper socialization even when they are in the classroom.

So by doing this, in the name of "safety"--for a disease with better than a 99.999% survivability, which mostly affects the elderly with pre-existing conditions and rarely affects children--TPTB have thoroughly destroyed the educations of all American children over the past few years. It's all over TikTok, teachers talking about how virtually all students are now special needs.

This has devastated the future of our country if not the world. Those of us who are internet savvy can indeed now find information about this issue, but you cannot force a human to think any more than you can force a horse to drink. I grew up in an echo chamber and I fell for the lie. You seem to have been fortunate to grow up in a different time and place. But you seem to think that I had a choice when I was uninformed and the gatekeepers still held all of the cards.

I'm not even going to go into birth certificates or the banks or how screwed up the judicial system is. You're just going to continue to call me hyperbolic, I'm sure. But let me boil it all down to one little TL;DR for you so you can maybe under an iota of what I have gone through in my life.

When the people in power control the information, the education system, the health system, the food, and the government, choice becomes an illusion.

You're right, I wasn't merely forced. I was coerced.

[marsdave]

Capitalism is the bad guy: a TAZ Graduation prediction/analysis

Still super sleepy but I made a promise so here's my analysis of the economic history of TAZ Graduation I guess. Again, there are only two episodes out so there is a large chance that most of this essay is going to be, in a word, wrong. However, I've got a lot of things to say about what's already been set up in the first two episodes and trailer for TAZ Graduation.

For the purposes of ease, I'm going to be focusing mainly on Balance and Graduation because they take place in similar universes. Amnesty is a little more down to earth because it, you know, takes place on earth. Amnesty's focus on money is minimal and its economic system is, well... ours (Or at least the USA's, I'm not actually sure where you live, but I understand that a lot of economic discussions on tumblr are very USA-centric, and not every TAZ fan is American)

In any case, I'm much more interested in the fictional societies of Faerun and... the world of Wiggenstaff's (Wiggenworld?)

The economic impacts of anything have been largely ignored in Balance. Off the top of my head, I can remember Goldcliff being a prosperous city, Taako's gold-stealing habit, fantasy costco, and Lup's 15 dollar bill (which, by the way I am writing a musical about, check it out if you want), as examples of money playing any role in TAZ Balance.

While hilarious, the moments of bargaining for items in the Fantasy Costco in Balance aren't monetarily accurate by earth standards, you dont haggle at a Costco, they price their items that way for a reason. A magically multiplying 15 dollar bill would cause mass amounts of inflation, especially in the hands of a crime boss like Greg F. Grimaldis and used to create cash reserves in a casino. There is a reason that printing money is illegal.

Balance's relationship with money isn't really a relationship at all, it's an acquaintance-ship. It's friends-with-benefits, except the benefits are goofs. It's the relationship that the class clown has with an easy-to make-fun-of-kid. In TAZ Balance, money is a joke. And that works!

Money doesn't play a huge role in Balance because it doesnt have to! Hell, that works in its favor! The main ideas explored in balance are People, Love, Choosing Joy, and The Unbreakable Bonds Of Chosen Family, if money was inserted into that equation, Balance would be way less impactful.

This ties into what I mean by "ultimate evil". The ultimate evil of Balance was not The Hunger, it was forgetting those you love. The ultimate evil of Amnesty was not the Aliens or The Quell, it was ignorance. The strength of the adventure zone is it's ability to create big, spectacular epics that are still ultimately character driven, and that comes from how it pairs its strong external conflicts (Hey guys, let's fight this sentient storm) with equally strong internal conflicts (Hey guys, let's build a beautiful found family). The Big Evil is the external, the ultimate evil is the internal.

Now let's talk about Graduation.

Graduation takes place in a pseudo-college setting. Maybe it's just me, but college immediately reminds me of money, it's just an instant association. (Again, I'd like to acknowledge that this is coming from a U.S. pov and for me, the link between money and college is tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition and financially crippling student loans. I know).

Here are some other money-related elements of TAZ Graduation in the FIRST TWO EPISODES:

Argo's financial situation

The commune that [Redacted] comes from

The high reliance on/hero worship of accountants and accounting

The organization that can forcibly retire the heroes and villains of Wiggenworld when their costs outweigh their benefits

Travis McElroy essentially gave us Wiggenworld's economic history on a silver platter. It started out with unfettered, unregulated capitalism, which resulted in wars and a minority of people recklessly wasting the majority of Wiggenworld's resources. Then something really interesting happened.

The economy was regulated, but not by the government, by the people themselves, more specifically, the fantasy accountants. This is what I'm going to call the Rise Of Accounting.

After that, and the Hero/Villain industry rose to fill the void that the entertainment of the wars left.

So in my previous post, I alluded to the fact that capitalism would be the ultimate evil this season. That's not exactly what I meant. The real ultimate evil will be The Commodification of Individuals.

Heroes and villains are not treated as people in this universe, they're companies. Hell, you could even say that they're products. Once they cost more money than they earn, they're forcibly retired, unable to find another job as a hero/villain and at most institutions, barred from teaching.

This is a double edged sword, because besides robbing heroes/villains of their humanity, it forces them to walk the ever-thinning line between "interesting and new enough to keep people coming back and turn a profit" and "safe and careful enough not to cost their patron town too much" and if they falter (which they eventually will, because no hero/villain can stay both safe and interesting forever) then the failure is pinned on them rather than the broken system. There's also the matter of how sidekicks/henchpeople are treated compared to heroes/villains, but that's a whole different post.

The hero/villain occupation is an unsustainable one by design, it's a dangerous and temporary job, but hey, it pays well, and that's what it's all about in a capitalist system.

So yeah, with the way things are set up, this season is inextricable from the concept of money (and honestly kudos to Travis McElroy for setting it up so perfectly and concisely in these two episodes), and I can't wait to see what happens next.

[dirtyrottensocialist]

America Has A Compromise Problem

Compromising is important, especially if you want to get anything done. Like any give and take situation, the deal has to be appealing to both sides. This can be difficult enough when the two sides are somewhat close together already, but what if they aren’t? What if one side wants something that is indisputably harmful to the other side? America’s compromises as of late aren’t really compromises at all.

I’m going to talk for a moment about the Overton window. From Wikipedia: “The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.” America’s current Overton window, at least when you watch any kind of news or professionally published widespread media, is somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. That’s what the media covers, it’s what is discussed as acceptable in many circles, and it is vastly different from most other developed countries.

The idea that universal healthcare is a “far left” idea is absolutely laughable in places like Denmark or Germany or New Zealand. It’s even laughable for many members of America’s younger generations. America’s hyper-capitalistic ideals have pushed the Overton window so far right that it’s considered “centrist” to think that antifa (the position of being against fascism - you know, the thing that Nazis did) is just as bad as being a Nazi. Basically someone is saying “we should kill all the Jews,” someone else is saying, “actually we should not kill any Jews” and the centrist says “wait, wait, wait, what if we compromise and only kill some of the Jews?” as if that’s an acceptable answer.

Media in America is largely owned by corporations. As such, the owners of most of these media outlets are actively invested in making sure the Overton window in America never skews far enough left so that they will lose profits. The ultra rich control the narrative, not allowing for anything on the actual left to see the light of day for discussion. 

The reality is that there is a large portion of Americans, particularly in the Millennial and Gen Z ages, that are considerably to the left of the Overton window. You can see it in the protests that are happening all over America (and yes, they ARE still happening). These protests are largely led by young people who are tired of being dealt a bad hand by the economy, racism, climate change, exploitative healthcare, and many other systemic problems. Media has softened the demands to defund the police by saying, “no one actually wants to abolish police” even though that’s exactly what many people on the left want. There are real leftists living in your communities. Socialists. Anarchists. Communists. People who believe that the workers should own the means of production (no private companies). People who believe in all housing being free (eliminating landlords). People who believe money as a concept should not exist because it leads to haves and have-nots (only resource-based economy). People who believe there should be no president, no nations, completely open borders (as much as centrists will tell you that no one believes this, there are real people who whole-heartedly do believe in open borders). The growing left movement in America has grown very tired of agreeing to compromises that don’t actually do anything for their agendas or beliefs.

So now it comes to election season and we are faced with some serious choices. Decades of voting for the lesser evil has gotten us to this point. Skyrocketing unemployment, billionaires increasing their wealth by 50% profiting off of a pandemic, price gauging life saving drugs, a minimum wage that has been stagnant for more than a decade, college and housing costs pricing more and more people out of homes and education, not to mention a pandemic that threatens to be the deadliest disease we have ever seen because people are more concerned with making sure billionaires don’t lose money than making sure that everyone survives. America is a pit of despair right now. There are popular jokes about 2020 apocalypse bingo cards because of the increasing absurdity of circumstances in every passing month. 

But here we are. Election season. It’s shaping up to be a showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Overton window tells us that Joe Biden is the obvious compromise candidate, somewhere between Sanders and Trump. But that alienates an entire large group of people and potential voters, mostly those under 40. Joe Biden, the man who crafted the 1994 crime bill is not an appealing compromise for those who want to abolish police. Joe Biden, the man who has been credibly accused of rape, is not an appealing compromise for those who have experienced sexual assault and become physically sick at the thought of another abuser (see Brett Kavanaugh) being put in a high position of power. Joe Biden, the man who has said he would veto Medicare for All if it came across his desk, is not an appealing compromise for those who have been rationing insulin trying to pay the bills, eat, and also afford life giving medicine. Joe Biden is not an appealing compromise for those of us for whom Bernie Sanders WAS the compromise.

For many people my age, the only America we have known is the America that does nothing but benefit the most wealthy. We have seen countless black Americans murdered by a violent state. We have seen thousands upon thousands of people declare bankruptcy due to medical bills, and many more die because they could not afford care. We have seen our country refuse to do anything meaningful about climate change because the government is essentially owned by oil companies and their lobbyists. We have seen and experienced a massive student debt crisis that is making it almost impossible to get ahead. We’ve attempted to mitigate these travesties by voting “blue,” for the lesser evil, for the person with slightly less terrible policies. We’re tired of compromises that don’t concede anything to us at all. We’re tired of electoral politics that force us to choose between Voldemort and Darth Sidious. For many leftists, Bernie Sanders was our last hope for electoral politics.

One of my favorite Democrats once said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” I would advise the DNC to consider this heavily when selecting their platform this year. It’s time to try a compromise that’s actually in the middle of the electorate for a change. If we are unable to do this, the guillotine jokes may end up not being jokes anymore.

[atheistforhumanity]

An Example of How Bill O’Reilly Ruined A Generation With Mass Manipulation

Now, you might be thinking, “who the fuck is Bill O’Reilly, and why do I care?” That’s a valid question. Lovable Bill, is the predecessor of Tucker Carlson. He was the shining star of Fox News for most of my life, and he captures the hearts of minds of my parents generation with low brow commentary, manipulative opinions, and dog whistle racism. Bill pretended to be a regular class working Joe that spoke up for the little guy. Tucker Carlson outed his gimmick years ago before he would take Bill’s place, and take on the same fake persona.

So, how did Bill O’Reilly ruin a generation? It’s pretty simple really. Bill O’Reilly was born into the upper class and eventually took a place as an opinion show host pretending to be news, that spouted populist rhetoric in a way that always redirected opinions and anger away from the real perpetrators. Bill is literally one the most dishonest people to ever be on mainstream media, and for over a decade he delivered alternative facts to fox viewers, down played anything anti-capatalist, anti-conservative, and anti-racist. His motto has always been “no spin,” but I’ve never seen him present the whole truth in an accurate way my whole life. Bill is a more well spoken Donald Trump, who uses people’s prejudices, preconceptions, and complete unwillingness to research anything to manipulate people’s minds for a capitalist agenda.

But how does he do this, Ryan? I wish you would be more specific instead of making accusations. Well, it happens that I just came across a band new article written on Bill’s blog, where he tries to continue the glory of yesteryear before he was fired for sexually harassing several women in the work place.

If you take two minutes to read the article linked above, you’ll see that Bill is arguing that bad parenting is the real cause of income inequality. His argument is quite literally, people aren’t raised right and that’s why they can’t succeed financially. He says specifically that it’s not capitalism's fault.

Before I address specifics, let me point out what is generally manipulative about this argument. Bill has touched on a topic that literally any generation of conservatives can get fired up about, and will have built in bias to agree with. Remember, conservatism is literally resistance to change and an affinity for tradition. This also means that every generation bitches and complains about how the next generation raises kids. Remember when your parents told you that you would go to hell for watching Elvis shake his hips? Remember when there were no changing tables in men’s bathrooms? Remember when kids in school used to play “beat the fag” and then they cried victim when we said that was wrong? Yea...

The point is that he’s using a prevalent belief that many different people(but mostly conservatives) can tap into for different (mostly) unspecified reasons. Then he is attributing that common cultural division as responsible for income inequality. We’ll come back to that.

Second, is that Bill makes a point that on some level makes sense, but doesn’t support his larger claim. Are there a lot of bad parents out there? Sure. Do they have a negative effect on the child’s life as he suggests? Of course. Now we could argue all day about what makes a bad parent exactly or the prevalence of bad parents, but it’s irrelevant, because Bill hasn’t given us any solid reason to accept that this alone (or at all) is the cause of income inequality! It’s an outrageously dishonest argument. That doesn’t matter though, because this is how Bill’s followers respond...

Okay, I was going to screen shot some positive responses to Bill tweeting this article but I didn’t see any. Let’s just move on.

Now, let’s take a look at the substance of Bill’s piece.

Education: “If a young child is not exposed to learning by age two, that innocent, helpless person is already at risk in a competitive society.  If there are no books in the home, no awareness-building games, no fun dialogue with the parents, the child may not develop a curiosity about life.”

That’s interesting, Bill, because public education and programs like Pre-K are socialist inspired initiatives supplied by the government for the benefit of everyone. Head start programs were first installed by LBJ, but the Black Panthers had actually initiated similar programs in inner cities to feed children breakfast before school.

To say that capitalism has no role in this issue is delusional. Capitalism accepts and even encourages inequality. Betsy Devos is the champion of capitalist education, where attendance is not guaranteed and any difficult or low performing students can be weeded out to create the appearance of success, under no public oversight.

The fight is always the same, liberals want to increase educational funding and conservatives don’t. This is why red states have teacher strikes all over the country and Republicans are fighting against publicly funded college.

If access to education from an early age is so important then we cannot withhold education and then blame those stuck in the cycle of poverty for their own inequity.

Environment/Work Ethic:

Here’s an old and tired argument from the right. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough. But, Bill, how could that be? The average unemployment rate in America is between 3-4%, and the worst is in Alaska with 6.4%. Clearly most Americans are working, you’re always bragging about how great this economy is. Republicans tell people who need assistance to get jobs, but surprise they already have them! We know people aren’t struggling to live because they’re not working, because we have clear numbers that show people are working full-time, but not earning enough to pay basic bills. It’s crazy, it’s almost like the cost of living just keep rising, but the amount people get paid doesn’t. All of this is happening despite the fact that corporate profits have soared, but it never translates into better wages. 

While Bill drones on in his article about derelict parents, he never once actually looks at income. He sure doesn’t mention that the amount people are paid is literally up to the people at the top of the economic latter. They can choose to pay workers more or they can stash away more profit in their bank accounts. Guess which one they choose? Despite the fact that we have clear data that shows those who choose how much to pay workers are raising their own profits, the rich like Bill O’Reilly continually berate people as lazy. The entire argument is completely disingenuous because workers are at the mercy of employers.

And if you’re thinking, why doesn’t everyone just get a better job, you’re not thinking that statement through. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many jobs in the market pay minimum wage or less, and that’s roughly 2.3%.(Nearly 2 million people) You think, great, people can just get a better job. No, not really, because a large number of jobs pay just above the minimum wage and are not included in this figure. Even most retail jobs pay $1 above minimum at least. Pew Research wondered this too, and in 2004 they found that roughly 30% of all hourly workers were making more than minimum wage (7.25 at the time) and less than $10. Guess what, nearly 59% of the entire US workforce are hourly workers, and a third of them are were making $10 or less. I make 13$ an hour, live with a roommate, and am just able to live with no savings in 2019. If I had a wife making the same amount, we would drowned trying to raise even two kids. That’s a travesty.

Roughly 35% of all jobs require a college degree, which is a significant debt due to increases in education and cost of living. Education is very important, but unfortunately most people who are born poor, historically, don’t get to go to college. What does capitalism say about this? Well, again, in a free market system there is no mechanism to correct the disadvantage people are born into, and generally no desire among conservatives to do so. Conservatism is stuck in the past where the poor and uneducated make perfect laborers, but labor as a staple job market is dead in the 21st century. Hence the push toward service jobs, which is all an uneducated person do.

The numbers tell the real story. People are working, but not being paid enough. The people controlling the pay are increasing their own pay. Cost of living is rising faster than worker pay. Funding for education has been stagnant and the cost of higher education rising. All this and I haven’t even gotten into the politics that effect this issue.

How did Bill O’Reilly destroy a generation? By feeding them ignorant, pandering garbage like this article every night for years. By completely ignoring the real facts of any issue and directing your attention to a manipulative hot button, tailored to the bias of conservatives.

The sad thing is that Bill is completely representative of everyone championed by the right wing. They are unintelligent, malicious, racist, greedy, and completely dishonest.

[nursingstudentsblr-blog]

Healthcare in the United States

credit: https://henrykotula.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/cartoon-us-healthcare-policy.jpg

As the leader in the global economy, you could reasonably expect that the United States would also rank high in terms of health care, but it instead sits somewhat uncomfortably at number 37 on the World Health Organization’s list of global healthcare systems. Some of those countries that beat us on that list are perhaps predictable like France (#1), Italy (#2), Spain (#7), others for whatever reason were a little less obvious to me, like Saudi Arabia (#26) and the United Arab Emerats (27) and a few of the countries that outrank us I’m not embarrassed to admit I’ve never even heard of. San Marino anyone? Number #3. Am I the only one who’s never heard of the great country of Andorra? They’re number 4 on the list. 

To complicate matters, the United States is  #1 in terms of healthcare spending per capita according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in fact spending over twice as much per person as its competitors. Yet a 2014 study by the Commonwealth Fund found this country to rank last in a group of 11 industrialized countries in terms of health measures like life expectancy, mortality from preventable conditions and infant mortality. And, we sit at #30 on a list of life expectancy by the Center for Disease Control, with Americans on average living to 78.6 years old, a number which has been on a decline for the past four years- largely attributed to suicide and drug overdose, likely from the opioid epidemic. 

How is it that the richest country in the world that spends the most per capita on healthcare ranks so low in terms of quality and life expectancy? If not towards the health of the populace… where is the money going? 

credit: https://iroon.com/irtn/cartoon/2855/us-health-care-system/

Although our current president apparently did not know that healthcare could be so complicated- we, as a group of nursing students, have a fairly reasonable grasp on the notion and are not attempting to exhaustively report on the state of healthcare systems around the globe. Instead, we want to explore who pays for what in different countries, how public versus private systems work and are organized, and how these different setups benefit citizens in terms of relative measures of health like life expectancy, infant mortality, relative availability of medical care. 

How Healthcare in the United States is Organized 

In the United States there is a decentralized system of health insurance, meaning that no single entity finances medical expenditures. Instead, financing of things like regular doctor visits for preventive care, hospital stays, and prescription medication comes from a mixture of governmental sources on the federal, state and local levels, privatized insurance companies and individuals. Most people rely on their employers to pay for their health insurance, and public assistance like Medicare provides for citizens over 65 years old and the disabled, and Medicaid which covers people with low income. According to the Census Bureau, private insurance policies covered over half of Americans (56%), followed by Medicaid, Medicare, direct purchase policies covered, and then military benefits- leaving 25.6 million Americans without health insurance in 2017- a number that jumped to 27.5 million in 2018 and is expected to rise in 2019. 

Delivery of healthcare services is also decentralized, lacking any kind of regulation in terms of dispersal of medical facilities. Physicians are authorized to practice individually and the trend in the past has been to set up solo practices, although multi-physician facilities are also found. And hospital services are provided by a mix of government funding, private for profit and not for profit organizations. Both doctors offices and hospitals are established at the discretion of their organizations, and being for profit endeavors, naturally gravitate towards more populated, more able to pay geographies which can cause problems for those in rural and inner city areas. 

How Healthcare Dollars in the United States are Spent 

These two charts detail the money trail in the US, who’s paying for what kinds of services in the healthcare industry. 

credit: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/PieChartSourcesExpenditures.pdf 

credit: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/PieChartSourcesExpenditures.pdf 

Now that we have an idea of where the money is coming from and how it is spent, let’s look at the value of those dollars and circle back to that question: How is it that the richest country in the world that spends the most per capita on healthcare rank so low globally in terms of quality of healthcare provided? 

A lot of people think Americans are just wasteful. They blame the huge amount of GDP spent on healthcare on too many people getting a frivolous amount of medical services, and a huge network of specialists driving a huge amount of medical appointments in lieu of preventive care type actions. But, a major study of the US compared to ten other industrialized countries shows that in terms of utilization, proportion of specialists, and medical services spending compared to spending on other social services/preventative care, we actually come out in the middle of the pack. 

  The problem instead seems to be that everything in this country just COSTS more. Medical school is expensive and therefore our doctors are expensive, the pharmaceutical industry is unregulated and therefore prescription drugs are more expensive. Not to mention the fact that pharmaceutical advertising is legal in this country, and advertising is expensive- the costs of which get passed down to the consumer. And moreover, the privatized insurance industry adds layers of cost simply by nature of being for-profit- they too spend consumer dollars on marketing and advertising, and have margins built into their costs for… well, profit. 

Our system is also incredibly inefficient and complex. For example, I didn’t realize that we have separate healthcare systems for “seniors, veterans, military personnel, Native Americans, end stage renal care, under 16 in a poor family, over 16 in a poor family, and working for the federal government”- according to T.D. Reid who wrote a book about this topic. And, because the system is so complicated, there’s a whole industry of people called “compilers” who aggregate medical bills and shuttle them through the complicated payment and reimbursement process. 

Also, the fact that there is no governmental regulation on the healthcare industry means that for profit physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc. can charge essentially unlimited amounts for services. And they’re free to compete in the free market for real estate in profitable areas without any mandate to provide necessary services to people in low income or rural areas- causing a huge gap in care that can probably explain why our average life expectancy is so low and rates of obesity and heart disease are so high. 

credit: https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?catref=hscn3887

I fell through the cracks of our healthcare system personally in years right after college when I was freelancing and made too much money to qualify for Medicare or any governmental health benefits but not enough money to pay for health insurance out of pocket because it’s outrageously expensive. Even when Obamacare passed in 2010 I knew plenty of people who still couldn’t afford the premiums, and then were fined for failing to secure healthcare coverage later. I think the move towards a Medicare for All single-payer government regulated healthcare system is necessary to fill in the kinds of gaps we’ve talked about here- helping to insure that Americans in all parts of the country have access to a high standard of healthcare, that nobody is lacking in local emergency services, and that people can afford their prescription medications, and that people are free from being at the mercy of for profit insurance and medical corporations for essential life saving services. I’m really interested to see what other healthcare systems are like in countries around the world, and curious if there are other privatized systems that better serve its citizens or if government regulated healthcare is the best way to go. 

credit: https://thecomicnews.com/edtoons/2012/0711/health/04.php 

[thunderfeather-blog]

What is Macro Economics? Macro Economics Explained

What are macroeconomics and how do you win 100 bucks Bitcoin Cash? Stick around, I’ll tell you.

What is going on crypto family, so today I’m gonna be doing a quick and dirty post, and to be quite honest with you, a gross oversimplification of what a macroeconomics are.

Macroeconomics can be summed up as basically a study of the collection and overall commercial input-output and health of nations. It includes analysis of factors like unemployment, inflation, economic growth and interest rates. Using macroeconomics some people think they can predict where and when the booms and busts of economies will occur, but is that even possible? Can you really build a macro trends model accurate enough to establish when and where to invest to gain a profit?

To answer this question there are a number of factors to consider. First of all, in today’s worldwide economy everything is intertwined, there are numerous variables, a number of unknown factors and a ton of unpredictable relations and reactions that no economist can possibly know. In fact, one opinion on the subject is that gathering all the information needed to make accurate predictions is simply impossible. But is it? Right before the global crisis of 2007 and 2008 thanks to certain markers a handful of people had foreseen the collapse coming and managed to bid against the real estate market making millions of dollars while everyone else was losing everything. Stories like this, they suck but they’re fascinating with perjurer as case studies but they are not the norm. Riding the waves of the market without falling and drowning is mostly dependent on dumb luck, and that’s not a variable that multi-million dollar companies like to include in their business plan.

That being said, even if microeconomics isn’t necessarily a reliable compass, keeping an eye on the horizon to spot an approaching storm is better than burying our heads under the sand and hoping for the Sun. For many, macroeconomics is not a betting tool, it is simply an instrument of stability and planning that aims to give a better understanding of a whole economic echo system. Two examples of factors that are taken into account forming this kind of study are GDP and the unemployment rate. GDP stands for the gross domestic products and can be summed up as all the monetary value of goods and services bought and sold on the market in a certain period of time. GDP can be used to compare national economies to the international market or a measure of living standards between nations. However, it doesn’t consider parameters like environment, education and personal freedoms. When comparing GDPs of different years it’s important to consider variations in currencies value.

If the GDP of a country doubles over 20 years but in the meantime, inflation has reduced the value of money in half, what looks like major growth, in reality, is just a stable situation. The unemployment rate, on the other hand, is a perceptual value obtained by dividing the total number of unemployed workers, you know, those who qualify to be included in reporting, by the total of the labor force and then multiplying the result by 100. It gives you an idea of how many people can’t get a job in their country even if they really wanted one.

In the context of the unemployment rate, an unemployed worker is defined by those who are actively seeking for a job and haven’t found one yet. Those without a job and not looking to get one, like a college student, simply don’t qualify in those numbers. In the same manner, in the grand total of the labor force not reported it also includes children and retired folks.

Some other things macroeconomics covers are inflation and the Consumer Price Index, the overall fiscal and monetary policies of a country and how it all ties together. A funny thing about microeconomics is that when evaluating a market, it doesn’t really care that much about the economic model in use. Capitalism, communism, socialism, in a sense all become equal under the lens of macroeconomics and are ultimately judged only by the results, not by the philosophy behind the numbers.

So to sum everything up and with all the considerations on the table, I’d like to leave you with what one of the most influential investors in the world thinks about economists.

I don’t pay any attention to what economists say, frankly. ~ Warren Buffet, 2016 CNBC interview.

Well, think about it, you have all these economists with 160 IQs that spend all their life studying it, can you name me one super-wealthy economist that has ever made money out of securities? No. Warren Buffet is famous for considering many economists and microeconomics a silly thing, and he’s not alone. According to some of the other big players as well, trying to predict where the market is going is like chasing the wind. Good luck with that.

So in closing, I hope that this super quick and dirty post on macroeconomics has brought you some value, hopefully, at the very least you have a better understanding of all the things that go into making economies work. So please also let me know in the comments below what your thoughts are and what you want me to cover next.

And for the people that want the win the 100 dollars of Bitcoin Cash, go to the YouTube video, like, subscribe and post a comment with your public Bitcoin Cash (ABC) address. Come back on the live stream on Sunday or Monday on the Crypto Beadles YouTube channel to hang out with us and post with the same Bitcoin Cash (ABC) address in the chat. If you have not done all the steps another winner will be chosen, no exceptions. Crypto Beadles may or may not use the above method to pick a winner as well. He may randomly change the requirements on the fly and just choose someone based off an on-air task as well. If you’re not ok with this, don’t participate. In the meantime, we also did a quick and dirty video and post on how economies work. Why don’t you go check out that video or post, I’ll meet you there. God bless you, I love you and I’ll see you over here on market economies.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

MY THREE PARTNERS AND I RUN A SEED STAGE INVESTMENT FIRM CALLED Y COMBINATOR

I thought I'd already been cured of caring about that. It would be easy to do better. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badly. Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones and becoming simply an economic exchange. A year after the founding of Apple, Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP. But I know my motives aren't virtuous. But if you control the whole system. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and he pointed out that operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix syntax. The best notebooks I've found are made by a company called Miquelrius. A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups.

ITA presumably does, you can fix it yourself. You can't say precisely what the miracle will be, or even for sure that one will happen. The electronic parts distributors are trying to squash them to keep their monopoly pricing. Work in small groups. It's arguably an instance of scamming a scammer. In some countries this is the preferred way to solve the problem in a different way, but to surpass it. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. I doubt they could do it yet either. We're not hearing about these languages because people are using them to write Windows apps, but because it's the same company as before, plus it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are better than either of them? There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. It's easy to let the days rush by.

Actors and directors are fired at the end of last year. A founder leaving doesn't necessarily kill a startup, so don't compromise there. He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it. They're a product of unusual circumstances. Software should be written in C. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. Not because making money is unimportant. Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not great. In addition to formidable founders, a promising market, and usually some evidence of success so far. Palo Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the number of users and the other half are going to die if they didn't get their money.

The secret to writing on such narrow pages is to break words only when you run out of apartments. So it's not surprising that we've found the relative prestige of different colleges useless in judging individuals. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be the best supplier, but doesn't bid because they can't spare the effort to get verified. Your target market has to be designed to be better, for certain problems, than others. Good does not mean being a pushover. Once you start to get the first commitment, because much of the difficulty comes from this external force. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Did it alarm some potential acquirers that we used Lisp?

And I think that's what we should tell kids. But if you look at the problem from the other end. The world market in programmers seems to be becoming dramatically more liquid. This bites you twice: in addition to the power of the forces at work here. You don't have to prove you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. A couple weeks ago I finally figured it out. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in America, because the harder it is to sell something to you, especially if you deserve them. And you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. Much was changed, but there was still that Apple coolness in the air, that feeling that the show was being run by someone who really cared, instead of comparing each character.

Too little money means not enough to make it, and that assumption turns out to be 13: Pick good cofounders. Singapore would face a similar problem. You have to assume it takes some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to school. You can start to ask other interesting questions. Bob's going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have trouble hiring hackers on that scale. Barring some cataclysm, it will always be true that most people who are genuinely good. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it. In the more common case, where founders and investors are very sensitive to it. What we mean by a programming language is something we use to tell a computer what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer.

Really Scared of Prefix Syntax? What did he say to do? If you win the users, everything else will follow. What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if you don't let people into it. There are just two or three to one would be enough to guarantee that you'd always be behind. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There's room not merely to equal Silicon Valley, but to surpass it. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses.

As for libraries, their importance also depends on the application. These things don't get discovered that often. In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd written years before that might say something I needed to remember, if I was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It also means no one university will be good enough to act as a mecca, attracting talent from abroad and causing startups to form around it. N; public int call int i; public static Inttoint foo final int n return new Inttoint int s n; public int call int i s s i; return s;; This falls short of the spec because it only works for integers. Economies are made out of people, and most people have. You might have fewer libraries at your disposal. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that assumption turns out to be a cost, and send them looking for it. You see it in Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light and two thousand years later in Feynman breaking into safes at Los Alamos. Maybe. I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. It has for me.

[dmitrilyalikov]

Why do America’s generations keep getting dumber?

America is the global symbol of individual liberty and opportunity. Defined by capitalism and democracy, the very concepts that have made the U.S. the hallmark in innovative thinking and societal development. With arguably the best ‘system’ in the world able to work at great scale, American renegades have been the frontrunners in many aspects of society many countries wish they could compete with. Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, all American icons for creative thinking and execution. Creative, intelligent men that any company would love to have on their team if they could convince them to come. They’ve accomplished things that some would believe to be impossible, and not only that, they all dropped out of college. The education system failed them. 

The current American educational system was first introduced in the 1910′s during the industrial era to create a scaled up version of a youth knowledge assembly line. Children are crammed into large classrooms and are taught general knowledge to enter the next level of education. The strict regimen of be quiet, listen, and regurgitate what you have heard onto a standardized exam to get a letter grade has been used for over a century. This practice is nowhere near teaching a child to think and solve problems. Tests do not work. They do not represent any more than words on a paper. Example, the Chinese Box Experiment. In short, a Chinese professor inserts a test of different Mandarin characters that a robot on the other side of the door must answer. The robot identified every character correctly and returned the paper. The Professor says “Wow, this pupil understands Mandarin very well!”. She is unaware the answers came from a machine programmed by humans. The robot does not actually understand what is going on, it is simply responding with what it’s been told to do. Understanding is using memory to create predictions. However, this is exactly how school teaches children in America. They program children to respond to an input with a correct output, and those that compute such information correctly, are deemed the brightest. If we are programming children to act as robots, robots will win every time, bar none. The only way to fundamentally beat a robot is to be more human. Humans have creativity, emotional intelligence, morals, historical and societal awareness. Schools are essentially building kids like robots in an assembly line. They are writing code in our brains on how to think, act, and behave in many situations. The smartest natural child can be nurtured in such an environment to become average. 

The most beautiful aspect of a child is its sense of curiosity and creativity. Left to its own, many will fantasize about spaceships and rockets and trains. They will dance on couches, spill their parent’s coffee on the rug, They ask naive questions about complex issues. I was lucky enough as a child as my father would make me understand how any toy or tool worked when I used it. I was made to inquire about the world around me. How does a car engine work? What could make it better? Why do planes not fall from the sky? I was then sent to day school and would be told to shut up and listen to the teacher, because he is smarter than you. What does it mean to be smart then? To know more information and algorithms downloaded into the hippocampus? Memory is not intelligence. Intelligence and consciousness are manifested in the neocortex. The part of the brain that operates high level thought. Children in American society are suppressed and told to remember things to graduate. After a certain point of indoctrinated thinking, children lose their sense of curiosity and are more focused on execution then the process of learning and solving the problem itself. The most commonly asked question in American schools is “Will this be on the test next week?”.

So how can we make this better? This epidemic starts on the very system of education itself. The end goal of school is to obtain a degree, a rough representation of what college taught you, or maybe you were just wily enough to cheat (which is highly incentivized in the ends justify the means environment.). School’s are not obligated to innovate. Colleges are businesses. They force 18 year old children to take on 200 thousand dollar debt decisions. They don't need all that money. The books that cost hundreds of dollars for students, cost 6$ to make. NO INDUSTRY IN THE WORLD HAS A MONOPOLY THAT BOASTS SUCH GREAT PROFIT MARGINS. Colleges have young generations on a string with the rhetoric that a degree is worth such money. Millions of kids cry joyfully over getting into a school, just to give them money that is taken from loans to enslave them once they get out with a degree. College is enslavement. It is a monopolistic business. It is a shame to see such an important factor to human development being exploited for profit. They pay zero taxes on the profits they make. They teach general knowledge in a lecture style. Is that worth it? Why do kids want this? Why do parents make them do this? Because they did it when they were kids? We are in a new age. 

Fast forward over a century later, the digital age. Children have smartphones, smartphones with all the information they need. Why sit in a room listening to someone lecture when you can just look something up? Children are put in classrooms that are part of a school, that are part of a district, that is part of a school board. These scaled up versions of education pump out millions of children with a broad range of general knowledge, or at least that is the intent. Now most of these kids go to college, work a 9-5 job, and start a family and the cycle goes on with their children. That is not fulfillment, that is not happiness for most. The average school tuition has increased by more than 200% while the average salary of college graduates has plateaued since the start of mass schooling. We live in an era of economies of “unscale”. With artificial intelligence and cloud computing, vertically integrated corporations with huge factories and inventory cannot compete with lean, agile startups that rent cloud storage on Amazon Web Services, outsource manufacturing to Chinese factories, and utilize open source Machine Learning algorithms instead of spending great capital to build it all individually. This gives power to creative, niche startups that can effectively run a business from their basement. Think back to the 1990′s. The internet had just gone mainstream, thousands of employees quit their jobs to create internet companies during the Dot-Com Boom before it crashed. They would plan their IPO before even incorporating, this new technology was a home run in their eyes. How does this relate to education? The rapid evolution of technology can be attributed to new platforms. Telecommunications created a global platform for information to be spread from Boston to Australia in an instant, the internet has revolutionized virtually every industry. My generation is growing up in the advent of the AI and cloud computing platform. Essentially, the innovation of big tech platforms should equate to radically different education. However, because school systems have no incentive to change and make less profit, they are still preparing kids for an industrial era to be interchangeable pieces working for large corporations rather than agile startups and small to medium companies. 

Artificial Intelligence will radically change education. Harvard, Stanford, and a few other large brand schools have noticed this trend and created online courses already that use machine learning engines to tailor a course to a students understanding. AI can use big data to understand how a pupil learns, what he/she is struggling in, and create a report on their level of thought that is a perfect representation on what they can do, rather than a vague degree. Many companies such as Microsoft and Google are receptive to this and an increasing number of developers enter the software field with no degrees. Because there is no system that could exemplify a student’s intelligence in the past, an expensive degree was the next best thing and college became a booming business but quite an enslaving process for the children utilizing it. AI can guide a student while virtual classrooms and teachers can connect to children across the globe for real organic conversation. Now, the physical classroom is very important for social development and should still be used to an extent. Perhaps we Americans should look towards Finland, the country with the best ranked educational system in the world. Their primary and secondary schools are incredibly different. School days are 3 hours long, there is no homework, and there are no private schools. The philosophy is that kids should be emancipated from the institutions and be left to be kids and develop intuitiveness organically through real world social experiences. There are no private schools so that rich families send their kids to public schools and those parents make sure the school is up to par with what they can afford.This forces schools nationwide to keep a standard that is universal, much unlike the U.S. with many inner city public schools without internet while capitalistic private and public district schools spend money on football field renovations. 

To create a more productive generation of students, we must “unscale” education, remove private schools, reduce length of school hours, ban or at least regulate student loan firms, set a price ceiling on all college tuitions and utilize the platform of Artificial Intelligence to create a market of one for all students starting from Kindergarten to beyond college. Hiring more teachers and building would effectively make the problem worse. Teachers can be the greatest minds on the planet, but under such a restrictive there is little hope to save a whole generation. Khan Academy has implemented an unscaled online system, leading the way for more personalized education programs. There is little chance this can happen unless this is derived from the Federal Government, which is famously bureaucratic and slow to act especially with education. Changes are needed. This will make children more excited to learn, ask questions and solve the great global issues that are long overdue to be solved. Kids will strengthen critical thinking skills and experience freedom of thought that will create a wave of further technological development and accelerate American education to new heights. 

[imagitory]

If you were President of the U.S., what would you do? I would give the U.S. more economic freedom similar to most European countries (we're #17 for God's sakes), end the War On Drugs, end corporate welfare and lobbying, make victimless crimes a thing of the past, make our healthcare system similar to that of France, and millions more things that I can't mention XD Basically make our government smaller (not too small mind you) and try to mimic other countries like we should be doing.

Oh geez – pressure! Um…well, as I’ve said to you previously, I would never, ever want to be a politician, let alone president. I don’t have the expertise needed, and I don’t have the temperament for it either. But in a highly hypothetical scenario, my interests would be:

+Taxing corporations. Sorry, if they’re considered “people” according to the Supreme Court (and, believe me, if I had the power to shape the courts, I would deal with that ruling forth-with) and they can put so much money into our election process (which, again, I’d have something to say about), they need to pay taxes like people do. And closing loopholes to keep their profits in the U.S. would be a good idea too.

+Raising taxes on the 1%. No one should have as much money as those people do, when there are so many other people who can’t afford to make ends meet. Capitalism may be our system, but many of the people who have that much money didn’t earn it – they oftentimes inherited a good portion of it, meaning they didn’t put in the work needed to justify it. And our society needs the funds to take care of all of its citizens, the 1% included, and those 1% have the money needed to fund such projects – infrastructure, military spending, health care, national parks – those are things that help everyone. There’s no reason to squeeze blood out of a stone by trying to get our funding mainly through middle-class and working-class people…not when the wealthiest among us aren’t even paying tax rates close to what they were paying in the 1950′s (you know, when the middle class was booming?).

+Championing LGBT rights, most significantly adding LGBT protections to the Civil Rights Act so that it is a federal crime to show prejudice against someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity

+Tying the minimum wage country-wide to the cost of living, making it automatically rise to keep up with any changes to the economy. That way it doesn’t have to be voted on over and over and over and it doesn’t become outdated.

+Working with the Food and Drug Administration to develop new programs meant to better regulate pharmaceuticals and help fund professional, government-funded drug treatment centers, so as to put an end to for-profit drug rehab centers that require no certification.

+Working with the Department of Education to develop new programs specifically designed to help struggling college students with their finances: namely, to help reduce the amount of loans they’ll have to take out, give them a path toward paying them back effectively, assist with financial aid, and even provide complete learning materials online to save on the cost of expensive textbooks. Also, creating new federal standards for sex education in public schools, so as to help lower teen pregnancy rates.

+Creating a public option for health care, which would be the equivalent of our public school system: something both easily affordable and accessible that provides everything one needs to be healthy, while health care businesses pick up the slack with “plusher” options. This would make it so, like with our schooling, everyone has access to health care, no ifs, ands, or buts.

+Funding infrastructure and housing projects, which would not only help with creating jobs and boosting our economy, but would help us invest in our future.

+Providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and Dreamers.

+Proposing an amendment abolishing the Electoral College, so that elections are only determined by the popular vote. The system is beyond outdated and it has been used several times now to give the loser of an election the presidency he didn’t earn.

+Advocating for term limits for Congressmen and Senators. If we need to check the president, we must also check people in Congress the same way. And while we’re on the subject, adjusting the privileges members of Congress receive. If the government is shut down, those members of Congress should not get paid, any more than other government employees do. They should receive no better health care benefits than their constituents – otherwise, how can they dare have a leg to stand on complaining about the practicality of government health care, when they’re all on government health care?

+Accept refugees from foreign countries seeking asylum, regardless of where they’re from.

+De-escalating our military endeavors and favoring a more diplomat-centric course for foreign policy. We have more than enough expenditures to take care of at home: a good chunk of our ridiculously sized military budget should be spent on dealing with issues at home. We can take care of security without wasting so much – we spend more on our military than China, Russia, the U.K., India, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and France, combined. No one country needs to waste that much money, particularly if we disentangle ourselves from many of the military conflicts we’ve crammed ourselves into. If we must use military force, we must do it intelligently and in conjunction with our foreign allies.

+Appointing a new task force within the VA specifically targeted on updating the system we use to keep track of veterans and their benefits.

+Regulating guns nation-wide. My ideal goal would be a licensing system not unlike what we have for cars, as well as regulation on who can legally sell firearms and what kind. NO ONE IN THIS COUNTRY NEEDS AN AK-47, I’m sorry.

+Working with the FEC on voting reforms, such as online voting, which would help working-class people (many of whom must work on federal holidays) vote more easily. I would also want to create new guidelines regarding felony disenfranchisement, making it so those convicted of non-violent felonies would be able to vote again once their sentence is completed, as well as investigate ways to help homeless Americans exercise their right to vote. I can speak from first-hand experience that when you’re homeless, voting is very difficult, because you don’t have an address that anyone can send ballots to. Many homeless people use the shelters they stay in as an address, but those shelters are only accessible to people who aren’t working: if you’re working and homeless, you’re basically stuck in this horrible no-man’s land where you make too much to live in a shelter, but are too poor to afford your own place. Because you have no address, you basically don’t exist to the government, and that means you have no one who will speak up for your interests, not only because your voice has been silenced, but because the world makes you think you don’t matter. This doesn’t even touch the issue of transportation that many homeless people face. It would definitely take some investigation into how to deal with this, but there are many people in this country who deserve to be able to speak for themselves that can’t, all because of their bad fortune.

+Offering statehood or (in the cases of those territories that we acquired through colonialism) national freedom to Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands. The second-class status they’re in is just not fair by any metric. They either deserve full representation in our government, or they deserve the ability to represent themselves. They deserve the right to vote for their leaders. They deserve a healthy economy. They deserve access to good health care and services, and they deserve to be treated as the U.S. citizens they are. If we can’t give them that, and/or those territories are done with waiting for us to give them that, then we don’t have any right to continue taking advantage of them. For D.C. in particular, the people who live there deserve a government outside of federal lawmakers to help them deal with local issues: a government with lawmakers they choose, rather than are foisted upon them.

Wow, that got longer than I expected…but a lot of things just came to mind. I would not have interest in making government smaller, exactly, but I would be very interested in bringing more people on board to not only introduce fresh ideas, but also to help us tackle the astounding workload we have to deal with regarding these issues. We need fresh minds and expert hands, ready to work hard. Naturally we wouldn’t want to completely put our heads in the sand in regards to foreign policy, but we would still want to put more focus on being the best country we can be, so that we can better help others. If our country is prosperous, then it gives us more leverage and power in promoting prosperity elsewhere. If we’re united, then we will more easily be able to stand against injustices abroad. If we take care of our own people, then we can more easily provide aid to other countries.

As I said, though, I have no interest in being a politician and I profess no great expertise in any of these matters, so one can take all of this with a grain of salt. This is just one American citizen’s flight of fancy in response to a friend’s question.

[orbemnews]

He’s a Dogecoin Millionaire. And He’s Not Selling. Last February, when Glauber Contessoto decided to invest his life savings in Dogecoin, his friends had concerns. “They were all like, you’re crazy,” he said. “It’s a joke coin. It’s a meme. It’s going to crash.” Their skepticism was warranted. After all, Dogecoin is a joke — a digital currency started in 2013 by a pair of programmers who decided to spoof the cryptocurrency craze by creating their own virtual money based on a meme about Doge, a talking Shiba Inu puppy. And investing money in obscure cryptocurrencies has, historically, been akin to tossing it onto a bonfire. But Mr. Contessoto, 33, who works at a Los Angeles hip-hop media company, is no ordinary buy-and-hold investor. He is among the many thrill-seeking amateurs who have leapt headfirst into the markets in recent months, using stock-trading apps like Robinhood to chase outsize gains on risky, speculative bets. In February, after reading a Reddit thread about Dogecoin’s potential, Mr. Contessoto decided to go all in. He maxed out his credit cards, borrowed money using Robinhood’s margin trading feature and spent everything he had on the digital currency — investing about $250,000 in all. Then, he watched his phone obsessively as Dogecoin became an internet phenomenon whose value eclipsed that of blue-chip companies like Twitter and General Motors. The value of his Dogecoin holdings today? Roughly $2 million. On the surface, Mr. Contessoto — who dropped out of college and has no formal financial training — seems no different from a lucky gambler who walks into a casino, bets all his chips on a single roulette spin and walks out a millionaire. But he is also emblematic of a new kind of hyper-online investor who is winning by applying the skills of the digital attention economy — sharing memes, cultivating buzz, producing endless streams of content for social media — to the financial markets. These investors, mostly young men, don’t behave rationally in the old-fashioned, Homo economicus sense. They pick investments not based on their underlying fundamentals or the estimates of Wall Street analysts, but on looser criteria, such as how funny they are, how futuristic they seem or how many celebrities are tweeting about them. Their philosophy is that in today’s media-saturated world, attention is the most valuable commodity of all, and that anything that is attracting a great deal of it must be worth something. “Memes are the language of the millennials,” Mr. Contessoto said. “Now we’re going to have a meme matched with a currency.” Mr. Contessoto, an affable, bearded hip-hop fan who goes by the nickname Jaysn Prolifiq, is a first-generation immigrant whose parents came to the United States from Brazil when he was 6. As a child in suburban Maryland, he saw his family struggling with money, and he vowed to become rich. He discovered a love of hip-hop music as a teenager, and after school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job making $36,000 a year as an entry-level video editor while trying to book gigs for an up-and-coming rapper he knew. His dream was to save up enough money to buy a house — one where he and his hip-hop friends could live while making music together. But that kind of cash was elusive, and he spent several years crashing on couches while trying to save enough for a down payment. In 2019, he started buying stocks on Robinhood, the commission-free trading app. He stuck to big, well-known companies like Tesla and Uber, and when those trades made money, he bought more. And in January 2021, he watched in fascination as a group of traders on Reddit successfully boosted the stock price of GameStop, squeezing the hedge funds that had bet against the video game retailer and making millions for themselves in the process. (He tried to get in on the GameStop trade but he was too late, and he ended up losing most of his stake.) Shortly after the GameStop saga, Mr. Contessoto was browsing Reddit when he saw a post about Dogecoin. He’d heard of the currency before. (Elon Musk, who is to Dogecoin fans roughly what Pope Francis is to Catholics, had called it the “people’s crypto.”) But as he did more research, he became convinced that Dogecoin’s jokey, approachable image might make it the next GameStop. “Dogecoin has the best branding of all cryptocurrency,” he said. “If you put in front of me all the symbols of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin — everything just looks super high tech and futuristic. And Dogecoin just looks like: Hey, guys, what’s up?” He imagines that newbies investing in cryptocurrency for the first time might gravitate toward something fun and recognizable, and that Dogecoin might eventually become a kind of on-ramp to the larger world of virtual money. “I feel like eventually we’re all going to be buying and selling things with memes, and Dogecoin is going to lead the way,” he said. Strange as his investment thesis might seem, it’s hard to argue with the results. Even after a recent crash following Mr. Musk’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” (in which he joked about Dogecoin being a “hustle”), Dogecoin remains a very lucrative trade. A dollar invested in Dogecoin on Jan. 1 would be worth $203 today — much more than a comparable investment in Bitcoin, Ethereum or any stock in the S&P 500. Dogecoin’s stratospheric rise has also fueled plenty of grumbling among cryptocurrency buffs, who see it as a tacky sideshow that overshadows more serious uses of cryptocurrency. One of Dogecoin’s original creators has disavowed the coin, and even Mr. Musk has warned investors not to over-speculate in cryptocurrency. (Mr. Musk recently sent the crypto markets into upheaval again, after he announced that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin.) What explains Dogecoin’s durability, then? There’s no doubt that Dogecoin mania, like GameStop mania before it, is at least partly attributable to some combination of pandemic-era boredom and the eternal appeal of get-rich-quick schemes. But there may be more structural forces at work. Over the past few years, soaring housing costs, record student loan debt and historically low interest rates have made it harder for some young people to imagine achieving financial stability by slowly working their way up the career ladder and saving money paycheck by paycheck, the way their parents did. Instead of ladders, these people are looking for trampolines — risky, volatile investments that could either result in a life-changing windfall or send them right back to where they started. Mr. Contessoto is a prime case study. He makes $60,000 a year at his job now — a decent living, but nowhere near enough to afford a home in Los Angeles, where the median home costs nearly $1 million. He drives a beat-up Toyota, and spent years living frugally. But in his 30s, still with no house to his name, he decided to go looking for something that could change his fortunes overnight, and ended up at Dogecoin’s door. When Mr. Contessoto recalls the way he used to pursue wealth — working hard, cutting back on expenses, saving some money from every paycheck — he sees evidence of a system that is rigged against regular people. “I feel like those experts on TV, the older generation of old money and wealth, they try to scare people into staying safe so nobody gets too rich,” he told me. His new motto, he said, is “scared money don’t make money.” Many things about Mr. Contessoto’s investing philosophy would turn a traditional financial adviser’s stomach. But wildest of all is that despite his spectacular gains, he has not yet cashed out his Dogecoin millions. He thinks the currency’s price will continue to rise, and he doesn’t want to miss out on future profits by selling too soon. (He does plan to sell 10 percent of his stake next year, once his earnings will be classified as long-term capital gains and taxed at a lower rate.) Instead, he is branding himself as a Dogecoin expert, adopting nicknames like “the Dogefather” and “Slumdoge Millionaire” and making YouTube videos promoting Dogecoin to others. “I’m bullish as they come in the Dogecoin community,” he said. “If this exceeded my expectations of Dogecoin, and I only hit it in two months, imagine where it’ll be in a year.” Of course, as with any volatile investment, there is a real chance that Mr. Contessoto’s Dogecoin holdings could lose most or all of their value, and that his dream of homeownership could again be out of reach. Already, the price of Dogecoin has fallen nearly 50 percent from its all-time high, shaving hundreds of thousands of dollars off Mr. Contessoto’s portfolio. But gamblers rarely leave the table the first time they lose, and Mr. Contessoto’s commitment to “HODLing” — an acronym favored by cryptocurrency traders that stands for “hold on for dear life” — is buoying him through the recent market turbulence. Earlier this week, he posted a screenshot of his cryptocurrency trading app, showing that he’d bought more. And on Thursday, when the value of his Dogecoin holdings fell to $1.5 million, roughly half what it was at the peak, he posted another screenshot of his account on Reddit. “If I can hodl, you can HODL!” the caption read. Source link Orbem News #Dogecoin #hes #Millionaire #Selling