Guess that’s one way to measure the calories of a cracker.

Exactly.

People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.

Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is “impulse” or “deriving a momentary pleasure from buying” are the latter kind of thing.

So best change your investment strategy, then.

If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.

Agreed.

One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.

My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.

“Western Values”!

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.

Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless “instant gratification” impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.

Not the other things, though.

I suspect that to some level this reflects how varied one’s path through life has been.

Certainly my own varied collection of mugs and cups is mainly the product of having lived in many different places and having picked new mugs up along the way. Also I’ll keep old mugs around even after they’re chipped because they’re associated with my memories of places I lived in before.

That said, maybe a varied life and a hodge-podge collection of mugs are correlated and have a common cause, rather than having a causal relation - it makes sense that the kind of people comfortable with moving to places were they don’t know anybody (and even with different cultures, if they change countries) would also be comfortable with a less than perfect collection of cups and mugs.

Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as “stamp of approval from higher education institution” so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.

That said, if a candidate doesn’t have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually pass their exams and graduate, is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It’s only fair that if you haven’t invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you’re not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.

It’s only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that’s colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy “know somebody who knows somebody” systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it’s done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, thus cheaper or even free).

Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs.

I’m in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job.

Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you’ve had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that’s generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can’t judge skill like that and instead will go for “formal stamp of approval” shit such as college diplomas.

That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it’s one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won’t work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types - if a company is hiring people for mid and above expertise levels based on which college they’ve attended, that place is going to be a political shithole of incompetence better avoided by those who aren’t skilled at or interested in progressing their career through social games.

Wasn’t that just in the UK?

That’s some serious envious Loser energy!

Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.

That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.

I’ve pieced together a lot of knowledge I read about with understanding I gained from the inside of the Finance Industry (such as their way of valuing future money as well as things like fair value and fundamentals when it comes to markets), but the assembled thing as a whole is my own theory.

That said, my money is were my mouth is, and I’ve been highly invested in Gold (known as the ultimate safe asset) since 2012, and that has so far returned 500% on the original investment during that period, thus so far I seem to be at least partially right about the direction things are going (some kind over overall devaluation of traditional strong currencies and near-stagflation getting worse as the inherent disfunctionalities of the current value allocation system make it harder and harder for it to keep going as is), though that doesn’t mean I’m right on the Why.

PS: Recommended books to read - “This Time is Different” for an Historical perspective on Economic Crashes and “Freakonomics” for a look of on human decision making in an Economics context (which turns out to be very different from the homo economicus human behaviour model that underpins Free Market Economics theories) from Behaviour Economics which is the only part of Economics that actually conducts experiments.

The British version of Rule Of Law!

Mainly the poorer owe that to the richer.

Also the richer owe that to each other.

The last part could sorta be unwound in a more or less peaceful way (though very interventionist and the amounts involved are so large that we would see an explosion of corruption as the wealthy tried to extract gains from it by hook and by crook), but the first part would require a Revolution that tore down all existing ownership structures.

Just remember that every year the World’s Economy has to grow enough to cover the interest rate payments in all outstanding debt (or money itself has to inflate away fast enough to offset it, and since interest rates are naturally set up to be above inflation - otherwise Financial Institutions would be losing money - that’s unlikely)

There are two ways to offset this:

• Reduce the amount of outstanding debt.
• Lower interest rates (which is what was done after the 2008 Crash, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash in at least a century) so that for the same amount of debt there is less interest to pay.

Overall debt is increasing as per the article.

Interest rates are below historical average since what was done after 2008 which was supposed to be temporary wasn’t fully wound back, so there’s a lot less room there for central banks to do something about it.

Actually solving the underlying problems behind the 2008 Crash was pushed to the Future with some interest rate engineering, and it looks a lot like The Future Is Today, and this time around rather than just an over-indebtness plus Finance overextension problem, we seem to have over-indebtness, a massive Tech bubble (like in 2000) AND asset price bubbles in all manner of asset classes, from economically peripheral things like crypto to core things like housing.

I’ve been expecting a massive crash since I saw what passed for a “solution” back in 2009-12, but shit is turning up to be way worse than I expected due to all the additional resource malallocation and mispriceing in the Economy.

That’s a very good point.

An “Income From Work” report would show far better how most people are being impacted.

Young one, my first “recorder” was a 3 1/4 floppy disk drive.

Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.

Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.

What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner’s Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!