They can be used to launder money though.

That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder, because it’s the value is so arbitrary.

What’s baffling is I meet people my own age, who make like 200K a year who also think this exact same way. They think their life right now is impoverished and they deserve to be a billionaire one day. Half my first dates the past couple of years tell me how ‘difficult’ their life is because they can’t afford first class plane tickets.

It’s mind-blowing to me.

because everyone thinks they are middle-class, and everyone aspires to be rich.

very few people think improving the conditions of the working class is a worthwhile goal… the goal is to get out of the working class and feel superior to them.

i grew up a white working class town. Everyone in my town played the lottery and complained about immigrants. They did very little to actually try and improve their town lives… they thought doing so was ‘gay’. They wanted to send their kids to college, but then complained how college ‘corrupted’ us all and turned us into homos, especially when we moved away and got good jobs and had better lives.

Good policy is boring. Good government is boring. A company with moderate growth targets is boring.

Well-informed, articulate, and smart opinions… are boring.

They aren’t designed to do that.

They are designed to give people what they want. People want division and hate. It fuels their attention.

In the 1980s the people who had the longest listening times to Howard Stern were the people who claimed to hate him. The outraged fueled their attention such that they could not turn away because they wanted to see if he got more outrageous and offensive.

People are like kids in an candy store when it comes to negative content. They cannot get enough. They get addicted to the intense feelings the outrageous content provides.

Before algos things were random and they had to try really hard to go find that stuff. The algos spoonfed it to them and they lapped it up eagerly. Back when IG was just my friends, I saw one angry rant every few weeks, today it’s 20 angry rants and 20 ads, and my friends content about their kid or cat being cute is buried by 50 other posts which I can’t get rid of.