Cryptos are inherently volatile because they’re natural Ponzi-schemes with no oversight hence no crack-downs by the Law, and have low liquidity - they pull ill all manner of greedy types, suckers and swindlers and naturally end up with boom/hope-bust/fear cycles which have large movements due to the low liquidity of them as an asset. They’re also far easier to manipulate with very little investment, especially the smaller ones (exactly the ones that you claim aren’t as volatile).

The Tech per se doesn’t make so, it’s what it allows crossed with human nature that makes it so.

Tradeable essential goods are not supposed to be currency, they’re supposed to be for consumption and bartering if shit really hits the fan. I was responding to your point on using cryptos for wealth protection and now you’ve moved the goalposts to “currency”. Yeah. barteable goods aren’t good currencies, which is why we have currencies for trading rather than bartering as was was done before currencies were created.

As for the S&P 500 dying, how do you expect crypto would survive a scenario that causes that outcome, considering that the companies that hold and maintain the Internet infrastructure, from consumer ISPs all the way up to LVL1 providers are almost all publicly traded companies? If the S&P 500 dies that means companies are going bust left and right and in that kind of situation the networks needed for crypto would simply stop working (plus a lot of other infrastructure too, but the most complex and interconnected stuff would go first) and people would be down to hard cash and bartering.

The Internet might have originally been designed as ARPANET, a network supposed to survive nuclear war, but the modern Internet is a completely different beast and even ARPANET wasn’t capable of maintaining connectivity to consumer homes in the event of a catastrophe, it was only supposed to keep an small number of nodes connected.

Crypto is massively dependent on modern high-tech infrastructure and would collapse well before any currency that still has notes and coins.

As for the not quite so bad stuff, the worst crash of the S&P 500 ever had less price movement from top to bottom (which might take months or even years to fully play) than any normal month for Bitcoin.

Finally, indeed Diversification can include crypto, my point was that for wealth protection purposes you can simply diversify with traditional assets to create a robust wealth protection mechanism - just as I protected myself from the 2008 crash by merely spreading my assets across different banks in different countries - (unless, that is, you’re trying to protect yourself from something so bad the S&P 500 dies, in which case as I explained above and in my previous post, it’s down to stuff like hard cash, gold and bartering) and crypto won’t actually add any security to a diversified wealth protection portfolio, quite the contrary since it’s too infrastructure dependent to work in the worst situations and too volatile to maintain a steady value in normal times and mild to bad situations.

Compared to “traditional” Finance assets, crypto’s wealth protection ability is somewhere between Stocks and Derivatives and the latter are generally not sold to customers who aren’t considered sophisticated exactly because Derivatives can be very very risky (worse than Crypto, even, if we’re talking about stuff like Futures).

I had my money - which at the time include the proceedings of working a few years in Finance - spread over 3 bank accounts in 3 countries back then and came through it all with no loss whatsoever.

Further, crypto is so stupidly volatile that even stocks are better at protecting your wealth because you’re actually less likely to see half its value gone in a week with stocks (incredibly unlikely, even, if you get a tracker fund on a major index).

And don’t get me started on the ultimate most conservative (literally capable of surviving the collapse of modern civilization) wealth protection thing around - gold.

The point being that unless you expect the collapse of modern civilization (in which case you might try gold or, even better, tradeable essential needs like the kind of food that doesn’t spoil easily such as dried pulses), the best way to safekeep your wealth is as usual Diversification, with a focus on things with a stable value, which crypto is definitely not.

Except that it’s so incredibly volatile that from one months to the next you literally don’t know if your crypto wealth will be worth twice as much or half as much.

If what you’re trying to protect yourself from is runs on banks, you’de be better of with gold, works of art, even stocks (which are less volatile than crypto) or, even simpler, spread your money over several banks, ideally in more than one country.

I’ve had fewer problems with GoG + Lutris in Linux than I’ve had with Steam in Linux, to the point that I had to pirate one of my Steam games in order to be able to run it in Linux (the pirate version runs just fine).

Mind you, I get the impression that older AAA games are the most problematic ones, thought that’s maybe because I don’t run anything with Kernel Anti-Cheat and nowadays don’t really do online gaming (in fact all my games in Lutris are run inside a firejail sandbox with network access disabled).

Recently I’ve been playing Airline Tycoon Deluxe, Sims 3, Battle Brothers, Kerbal Space Program and Prey.

I think the newest is Prey, from 2018.

Airline Tycoon Deluxe is from 1998 and still fun (at the beginning, eventually you just make tons of money, use it to do more of the same to make even more money and it stops being fun). It helps that it’s a 2D game and the fun is in the management mechanics rather than related to anything visual.

By the way, they all run on Linux, though I had to literally pirate the Sims 3 to get it to work even though I own the game.

Nowadays, there are really only two classes:

• The Owners class, which is people who live off the money that’s made by the assets they own.
• The Worker class, which is people who live off the money they get from selling their work.

What was called “Middle Class” generally are just workers who earn a bit more, though the older Middle Class did at times manage to save enough to buy enough assets that they could start living of the income from those assets and not have to work anymore. That’s not the case for young people nowadays who would qualify as Middle Class due to their level of formal education and the kind of work they do because it’s way harder for them to save and asset prices are through the roof.

They forgot that the main criteria for ending up in the “rich” group is “be born rich”.

Work hard and die young, but at least your produced lots of shareholder value.

The whole “work hard” being a moral dictum really depends on the country.

I’ve worked in Portugal, Britain and The Netherlands for about a decade each and whilst the Brits have the “work hard” not just in the sense of long hours but also the bloody slogan and moral commandment, and the Portuguese too have the long hours but “work hard” really doesn’t add up to a moral commandment, the Dutch have neither and in fact it’s considered a bad thing if people are still at the office after 6 PM (many even come in earlier to leave at 4.30 PM) to the point that a manager is considered a bad manager if their people are still there at that hour (because it means they didn’t plan the project properly), quite the opposite of the other two countries were the “bumms on seats” after 6PM are seen as a good think.

Interestingly, of all 3, the Dutch are the most productive, by far - you do a lot more in term of actual results delivered in 8h/day in The Netherlands than you do in 10-12h/day in Portugal or Britain.

Having worked in various countries of Europe with various different work cultures, I can guarantee you that at least in Software Development the productivity of working more than 8h a day regularly (you can get away with doing it for a week or two, but no further) is so much less than in with 8h/day or less, that you’re literally producing less results with your work in a whole long-hours day of work than you do in an 8h day.

In simple terms, tired people do negative work and people working long hours regularly end up chronically tired.

Maybe it works differently for people doing stuff that’s all about salesmanship (like Business Angel) for whom more hours means more “meets”, but in my personal experience it definitelly works as I described for people actually doing heavy thinking work that has to actually work rather than merelly doing talkie-talkie with hard to compare results and where efficiency is near impossible to measure.

One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

Well, it’s that kind of awareness that I would like to see more here.

A lot of people here that just a week ago were making Vance + Couch memes and mindlessly repeating the “Not voting is the same as voting Trump” slogan whilst their candidate wouldn’t move a muscle to make herself appealing to the working class are now raging about how the 14 million who didn’t vote are to blame rather than the person they uncritically supported and of whom they demanded nothing at all, who was making no effort at all to appeal to anybody but the hard right.

It’s those I feel are disconnected from the wider reality of being somebody who is living salary to salary and sees no way out of that for themselves or their children.

The people being squeezed extra hard are ready to grab anything that looks anywhere like a lifebuoy and plenty of those are ignorant and gullible so easily swayed by snake oil peddlers like Trump whilst the ones who are not gullible are probably as distrusting of the Democrats as they are of Trump (and probably thing something along the lines of “they’re all liars”).

My point is that these are not the people whom a candidate from a party who mainly does what’s good for the rich will convince to vote for her solely on the slogan “Not voting for me is voting for Trump” and saying that “Transsexuals will be in danger if Trump is elected” all the while cozying with the hard right in her party like Dick Cheney and claiming to be anti-racist whilst supporting and extremely racist Genocide in Palestine (even if people don’t personally care that much about Palestinians, they’re still reading the character of the candidate and saying one thing whilst doing the opposite in quite an extreme way is hardly going to make the candidate be trusted when she makes any promises).

(From my own personal political experience, the biggest blindspot of the typical party member - who are generally very tribalist - is the expectation that, as they themselves trust their party leaders completely and hence immediately believe anything those leaders say without even a minimum amount of analysis and checking for logic and consistency, so does everybody else, thus in the absence of a deep down understanding that other people are not starting from a position of unquestionable trust of that party’s leader, they’re totally lost as to why the party doesn’t perform as expected and people aren’t as supportive of it as they should given all those great things the leader says).

Lots of people here expect that all those people out there value the same things as they do, feel as they do about various subjects and trust one candidate and distrust the other as as much as they do themselves, hence “logically” (on top of such ridiculous and wholly disconnected axioms) the loss is all the fault of those people for not voting, not of their party’s candidate for not trying to appeal to them or of themselves for uncritically supporting a candidate that is not doing do what is needed to win (at times quite the opposite) even though it was right there in front of her and wasn’t even that much of a risk.

Unsurprisingly and judging by the results, this was less a Trump win than it was a Democrat loss.

True, I might be projecting what I’ve seen in my own country as a member of a small left-wing party whilst observing the younger generation in the party who are almost all middle class children of the middle class and who, unlike me, did not experience how it is to grow up in the poor working class (and hearing stories of crushing poverty from my parents who both came from very poor countryside families).

Whilst, thanks to my country being far more fair and equal than the US, I had the opportunity to get a degree from a good University and theoretically am now middle class, all I need to do to remind me of how the working class thinks is talk to the vast cohort of uncles and aunts I have (the younger generation are mainly like me and got degrees) and all I need to do to understand how it is to grow up without my own room in a house in bad state were people counted every cent is to remember my earlier childhood.

But yeah, maybe the truly poor (rather than the recently squeezed types who grew up in middle class families in a proper house and not having to sleep in the living room) in the US are amazingly different from those in my home country and hence my experience and observations are not applicable.

Says the one putting a cross next to the name of a confirmed and active Genocide supporter that even refuses to face Palestinian families all the whilst claiming like an hypocrite that she’s anti-racist.

How does complicity in the murder of 17 pages worth of babies less than 1 year old feel?

Did you masturbate yourself when those 2000lb bombs (that the US Military refuses to use themselves because of their massive collateral damage) that Biden sent to Israel whilst you supported him got used to blow up Lebanese neighborhoods killing hundreds of civilian, or was the pleasure of supporting the leader of your tribe no matter what he did enough to give you maximum pleasure?

You know what would have done the most to stop the Holocaust in Palestine? If people like you had turned hard against Biden and the DNC a year ago (with time enough to force him to change his actions well before the election or be replaced by somebody who was different) instead of being subservient little bootlikers to Biden and the DNC guarateing the inevitable Democrat defeat on top of hundreds of thousands of dead with your support.

Keep up preaching your moral superiority from the top of that pile of children’s bones - built with the bombs the party leadership you supported like a “good boy” sent to Israel - you think is a moral high-ground.

You would disgust me if I didn’t pitty you so much.

You are making crazy assumptions about me.

“I shall never support evil-doers” is a pretty strong drive in my world.

I guess that’s not the case in your own world, leading you to expect that it won’t happen in large numbers that people will refuse to vote for either racist bully (which is how Arab-Americans probably saw the Democrat Leadership and Trump both) or calous sociopathic supporters of mass murder for the sake of political and economic convenince (which is how the University students risking their degrees to demonstrate against the Genocide all the while being called anti-semitic by Biden probably saw both).

I would say that the 14 million votes’ worth of evidence towards it tend indicate that I’m at least partially right.

Well, that’s the thing: that’s just your character and your opinion.

Clearly other people feel and think differently and a “Trump is Evil vote Harris to stop him” message didn’t work with them, otherwise the Democrat Party wouldn’t have lost 14 million voters with their strategy of being as bad as Trump in some areas and not much less so in others whilst selling themselves as the “Not Trump” option.

I’ve had these talks well before the election and indeed back them people might have been right (and me wrong) in their expectation that most people would put “Keep Trump out” above pretty much everything else, including their principles, and vote for a no-hope-offered candidate just to stop Trump.

Turns out that 14 million people clearly didn’t got convinced to go vote for a party that offered no actual positive policies, only “We’re Not Trump” a characteristic which, as I pointed out above, would only convince to vote Democrat solely to stop him those who think Trump is trully the most horrible thing in existence.

I suppose that outside the bubble in places like Lemmy a lot of people either did not fear Trump anywhere as much as a certain well-off middle class that hangs around here does or thought the Democrats were about as evil as he is (which is were the Palestine situation comes in: in my opinion it convinced a lot of people that the Democrats too are Evil, since it’s a pretty natural thing to conclude of those who activelly support the mass murder of children).

The impact of the Democrat choices in Gaza wasn’t just about concern with Palestinians, it was also about what it told of the character and morals of the Democrats leadership, which in turn impacts the trust in them and in what they say, which is especially bad for a party with a tradition of lying with half-truths and other such forms of deceit using dialetics trickeries (I suspect with would impact less those using the “just saying anything that comes to his mind independently of it being true or not” technique such as Trump).

A platform of “we’re the most moral choice” doesn’t work all that well when you’re activelly supporting and giving weapons to a genocidal regime mass murdering civilians for their race, including tends of thousands of children and thousands of babies.

Certainly the results don’t seem to indicate that “More people like Trump”, rather they indicate that even in the face of Trump, fewer people could bring themselves to vote Democrat, which is IMHO a horrible indictment of the Democrat Party.

There aren’t 2 major sides in the US, there are 3.

The 3rd side never does any formal campaigning (though there is some grassroots self-organised spreading of its message), often wins as it did this time and yet never controls any power because of how the electoral system works.

One might call the 3rd side the Not Voting Party.

The entire Democrats campaign was negative campaigning against the Republican Party, something which did nothing to take “votes” from the Not Voting Party and then specifically on Palestine, their actions, whilst if one judges them relative to the Republican Party were neutral, very strongly helped the Not Voting Party whose appeal on this was that a “vote” for Not Voting is a vote that doesn’t support mass murder of children.

So if you look at it as a 3-sided contest, suddently the Democrat result is easilly explainable: they didn’t as much lost to the Republicans as they lost to the Not Voting Party, and in that loss Palestine probably weighed heavilly, both because the Democrats broke some pretty strong principles for a lot of people (there aren’t much strongers principles than being against the mass murder of children) thus convincing them to go “Not Voting” and because they, while raging about how Trump was a Fascist, were activelly supporting ethno-Fascists in Israel (the worst kind of Fascism there is) in the middle of a Genocide, they looked like evil hypocrites and weakened their only message trying to capture votes from Not Voting - the whole “Not voting at all is like voting for a Fascist” thing: calling the other guy evil and dangerous hardly helps convince the unconvinced when the people saying it are active supporters of an extremelly violent ethno-Fascism that has already killed thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children.

I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

For avoidance of confusion, I’m talking about New Labour, not traditional Labour.