My sources tell me that UCF is planning to announce today that it is claiming the Amazon world HQ championship regardless of which site is selected

Good to know the Salvadorians we deport will be sent into virtual slavery

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/0...083136308.html

Part of the problem is that most of the normie investment industry is also a huge scam (of the shearing rather than skinning variety), so it's understandable that people get disillusioned with them.

You know I wonder if modern capitalism perhaps has some inherent problems worth thinking about here -- if seemingly bizarre and self-destructive behaviors like crypto currency bubbles are being incentivized due to our social context (things like the entirety of the investment industry actually being a huge scam).

Rather than inherently or solely due to human greed and folly, say.

Investment is all about information.

Has anyone ever started up a state lottery mutual find? An idea I have been toying with.

Related, **** memes from Facebook and the like:



Capitalism is way better, because we always have grocery stores with food, except when we don't:

'Entire aisles are empty': Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages



THIS IS YOUR WHOLE FOODS STORE ON CAPITALISM ANY QUESTIONS!?!?!

Empty capitalist food shelves are better because we can always buy Amazon stock with our capital and share in the profits driven from cost cutting due to artificial quotas and logistics methodologies.

I think "get rich quick" is just ingrained in humans, but even more so in Americans. We have tons of examples of guys who supposedly "got rich quick", like Mark Cuban. You hear it all the time, "he just put radio on the internet and bam, he's a billionaire", but they don't talk about the countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes.

BTC seems to be the next perfect vehicle for get rich quick scams. I think the fact that a majority of people can't even explain what a "bitcoin" is just adds to the mystery and illusion of it all. Arguably, that veil of mystery makes it easier for the RP's of the world to hawk it to morons, since they barely even understand it either.

It’s really odd that they picked arguably the most pro-socialism town in arguably the most pro-socialism state to represent capitalism.

Yeah, I dunno. "My broker overcharges on fees so I'm going to blow my retirement on Dogecoins" doesn't seem like a reasonable reaction.

Clearly it's not rational or smart. It's psychologically comprehensible though, that if you learn that your trusted financial advisor is primarily out to take as much of your retirement money as he can in fees and commissions and kickbacks, that you would subsequently be vulnerable to yootoob scams that purport to disintermediate the crooks (who really exist) via the blockchain.

It's basically how people get radicalized into ISIS, but with 12b-1 fees in place of a yawning absence of spirituality in modern society and fiery youtube rants about fiat currency in place of fiery youtube rants about the caliphate.

When you start thinking too big you get into 'woah but dude just think' territory but honestly whoa dude just think isn't everyone kinda getting high on their own supply just less obviously than the bitbros because we're in the middle of it (fish have no word for water).

Our entire economy/society seems to be based on debt and backed by solely by the faith that it's all going to keep going forever. I work at a company that is a middleman in the process of selling people garbage that they really have no need for. We're "creating wealth" in the classical sense because we make it far more efficient to get the garbage that you'll never need but we only "create value" because people believe (as falsely as bitbros) that the crap we sell is valuable. In reality we're facilitating taking finitie resources adding finite oil (for production transport etc) and turning them into uneeded rubbish.

1. Listen to a broker who overcharges on fees and is part of an industry that a history of selling me **** that they don't actually believe is a good investment or even better are actively betting against.

2. Listen to a bunch of 2p2ers who preface every scalding take with a disclaimer that they haven't looked into any of this too deeply but that doesn't stop them from writing paragraph after paragraph asserting that a developing technology with hundreds of millions of dollars of worldwide institutional investment is useless.

3. Do my own research which may include going to a website that makes videos for faster/easier consumption of content. Some of those videos will be made by dumb people but some will be made by smart people as well, and I will have to try to discern which ones are worth listening to.

Option 3 seems pretty damn reasonable to me but what do I know.

@tom and Bobo: Feels like a hillbilly elegy sort of take. Dumb people fall for scams because they're dumbasses, not because they're reacting to legitimate structural problems with modern capitalism.

What interesting to me is whether the people who saw this play out during the dotcom boom were any wiser, or if you really can fool some of the people all of the time.

Worth reiterating that legitimate structural problems with modern capitalism are why people are a mix of paranoid, skeptical about mainstream financial advice, and wedded to get rich quick schemes that they can see for themselves are extremely volatile. If people just wanted to get rich quick, it might look a little like Beanie Babies or other bubbles. If they were *just* stupid, they'd fall for random pyramid schemes and scams.

Cryptos are like the perfect mix if tech fetishism, anti-establishment posturing, and the promise of astronomical returns. It's the perfectly appropriately bubble for our generation, the right thing at the right time.

Information about *what* you're investing in - not information about *how* to invest or keep your investment from getting stolen. The latter is about 90% of crypto chatter from what I've seen.

But beyond that I even take issue with normies "researching" stocks - like they're going to find a market inefficiency that the sharps have missed. "Hmmm honey, I really like Yahoo's P/E ratio, and I feel like their recent R&D expenditures are going to start yielding dividends. I think I'm going to pull the trigger." "Ok, dear."

Either day trade and try to stay one step ahead of the other gamblers - or just put your money in index funds and forget it. Anything inbetween is silly imo.

Expanding the powers of rapists over their victims has always been something of a political hot potato. I applaud Senator Chase's bravery in standing up for their rights.

I guess another thing I'd point out is that these guys dress themselves up like traditional institutional investors by aping the language and the style of the investment industry. You have "ICOs" and investment reports and market research and such that's deliberately designed to imitate the "legitimate" industry players, which is weird if everyone is distrustful of the whole industry.

To wit: if everyone thinks IRAs are one big scam, why is Ron Paul hocking his Bitcoin IRA prospectus?

I mean the rest of the post tries to put a positive spin on it, but cutting union dues and making it prohibitive to have union representation pretty much ends the possibility of unions having any real presence in the labor market in any real sense

https://thinkprogress.org/supreme-co...-f1dc972f8c51/

For all intents and purposes unions have been dead in the private sector for a number of years. The only sector of the US economy with even modest rates of union membership now is government employment. I doubt this will end up even being a blip on the radar for most folks, unfortunately.

I get your point, but the whole Yahoo P/E with some real understanding of its business (well, not Yahoo, but real, boring businesses) and its balance sheet, understanding one or two levels deeper, is one way real investing is done. But, as you suggest, doing it well is difficult and reqires time, specialized knowledge, good judgement, and capital to act. The rest of us fish can get an index fund or real estate and hope.

Here's the thing, however. I really think that many markets are inefficient in the real world, but that humans are generally dumb and lazy herd animals. Henry Markopolis, a socially awkward dude who knew his accouting and investing, could recognize Madoff as a scam with just some attention to detail, and Madoff had billions invested in his fund. The guys in the Big Short weren't wrong, but it's surprising there aren't more such people earlier. But even among investment pros, many seem to be running semi-scams or fooling themselves. I mean one of the great investment ideas of the last few years is that Herbalife is a scam. No ****, of course it is.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

This is how quackery and pseudo science work usually too. That is: making ersatz copies is not distinct from distrust.

The paranoid and the wary, those who feel they've been cheated by institutional and mainstream investment industry assume control is vested in the research, in the pedantry, in byzantine acronyms and charts. It's what the paranoid fell for initially themselves, or where they think the scam is, where they think the tricks are.

In some cases you should research the *how*. Which type of stock or bond to purchase when there's multiple choices when you have decided to put money behind a company.

To me this falls under the “try to stay one step ahead of the other gamblers” category. Which absolutely can be done. But it’s all about reading group psychology and zero about becoming a mini Warren Buffet.

A lot of people I know seem sort of stuck in the middle - trying to read group psychology, but also caught up in it at the same time.

When Trump had sense