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There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

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Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#341

Post by michaelrpeskin »

nostrademons wrote: post #334
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you've read Graeber. Great book and changed my views on a lot of things, particularly how much of our "common sense" understanding/education on topics relies on "just so" assumptions made by some aristocratic scholar a couple centuries ago. Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a…

> It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies. Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Et…

Yeah. That’s a great way to describe it! It’s like a differential equation where the fundamental function is the change and you have to integrate it to find the state. Traversing the blockchain is like integration.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#342

Post by heartbeats »

Animats wrote: post #193

The NFT thing is interesting. Some things to note: - It's inherent in NFTs that they are thinly traded. If each thing is unique, there is no overall market price. Price quotes are anecdotal. There are "indexes" which list prices for transactions, but that doesn't mean you can sell at that price. - Liquidity is very limited. This works like collectables. Try to unload a million dollars worth of Beanie Babies. It may p…

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission does not regulate commodities, only commodity futures (and swaps, and options, and other derivatives).

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#343

Post by meowkit »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #318

> In an era defined by slow growth and flatlined productivity (if not outright economic stagnation) and marked by widening inequality and underemployment, “money” feels at once deadly serious and stupidly silly. Seen from this viewpoint, the pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where “getting rich…

Both points of view here are off imo.

Growth based on real productivity is slowing (stagnate even), but it should be noted maybe growth is moving linearly, but we expect non-linear improvements (100 -> 110 is 10% growth, 1000 -> 1010 is 1% growth). As you point out, growth via financial instruments is all fine and dandy. Better than ever even. But the stock market is a model of the economy, but it doesn’t represent individual experiences.

But distribution in ownership of capital very much follows a power law. So while people in the market are making great paper gains, there are many who are left out.

We are growing, but relative inequality is growing faster. Psychologically, people can handle absolute differences in comparisons of wealth, but relative ones are what cause much of the views and behaviors we see today. Such as “woe is us”.

Of course this is all my synthetic anecdotal speculation.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#344

Post by throwaway_4253 »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #47
diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

What skills can you guarantee (or at least say with high confidence) will be valuable in 20 years? I can't really think of any except maybe "soft skills" and whatever skills allow you to build a large network.

Maybe this is a bit out of the spirit of the question, but I think of a lot of "domestic" skills this way, like cooking, cleaning and home maintenance, and knowing specialized dressing and hygiene. This stuff requires considerable time and effort to be good at, and you wind up paying a lot to get someone else to do it for you. Covid has forced me to actually live in my apartment (instead of just sleeping and showering here) and I've increasingly learned that the housewives of yore were actually a lot like managers and process engineers - they constantly need to take inventory and think ahead in order to efficiently keep ahead of all the entropy added in regular life.

It might also be considered a "soft skill", but there are some communication skills I think are really valuable in a technical space; like knowing which diagram to make which will most effectively summarize the complexity of your system and is appropriate for your audience. The tools for constructing that drawing will change, but the activity of sketching for communication isn't going anywhere.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#345

Post by lisper »

randomsearch wrote: post #337
tcbawo wrote: post #8

Money is stored wealth, the ability to buy goods and services in the future. The problem seems to be that we live in a time of societal upheaval. The future of stored wealth becomes cloudier and more uncertain the further you go out in time. So, what is the best place to store wealth? Will my wealth be eroded by inflation? Will the companies I invest in become obsolete by technology or market-manipulating nation stat…

My take was always that money is a medium of exchange. A mechanism by which you can buy or sell things. Wealth is something that people want. Lawnmowers or a movie stream. One consequence of this distinction is that if money fails as a medium of exchange (eg everyone loses confidence in the dollar) then those dollars are now useless. But no wealth has been destroyed. So I conclude money is not a store of wealth.

> But no wealth has been destroyed.

No, that's not true. One of the things that people want is the ability to easily acquire new things that they need. If there is no universally accepted medium of exchange, that adds friction to the economy which destroys actual wealth.

It's kind of like if you drain the oil out of your car. The value of the car goes down by more than the cost of the oil.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#347

Post by aabhay »

Tenoke wrote: post #272
LargeWu wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, although one can make a reasonable argument that arbitrage is not a value creating activity either, if the market is already reasonably efficient.

If the market is reasonably efficient there'd be no room for arbitrage in the first place.

That’s why it feels so unequal. The arbitrage doesn’t come from market inefficiency, it comes from regulation/government, ingrained asymmetries, and consumer ‘dumb’ money

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#349

Post by aabhay »

jpdus wrote: post #162
diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

What you call "corrosive" (appreciation of non-value-creating assets) is 1:1 applicable to Real Estate. Compared to the appreciation of worldwide real estate, the market value of crypto is only a drop in the ocean. And countless people got unbelievable rich due to rising prices and "crowding-out" in cities without creating any value for society at all (in the opposite, making life harder for everybody struggling to k…

In the grand scheme of history, land ownership by the larger public is essentially nonexistent. Land almost always was ‘owned’ by a government-supported aristocracy. For the vast majority of history, land ownership also meant sovereignty. As in, it’s yours if you can fight for it.

So yes, I agree that real estate ownership is not ‘value creation’ in the modern world. It’s speculation of a finite resource, but unlike Bitcoin that resource is essential to livelihood

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#350

Post by francisofascii »

jfengel wrote: post #17
jp555 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed how your cash is buying fewer items than it did a ~year ago? My daily item costs are WAY up, which is really just saying the value of the cash is WAY down.

Honestly, no, I haven't. My groceries are the same. My electric bill is stable. The watch I'm replacing today is the same price today as ten years ago when I got its predecessor. I don't know if it's because I buy different things from you, or if I live in a different place from you, or what. But my andecdote is that no, I'm not paying more for stuff than a year ago.

Clothing prices seem to be way up in the US, especially shoes. My suspicion is people are flush with cash from the stimulus checks and retailers can charge whatever and people are buying.
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