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Fintech dystopia

fintechdystopia.com

21–30 of 288 posts

Re: Fintech dystopia

#21
post #4

> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. T…

  > but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves.
I just finished introducing Avatar the Last Air Bender to my partner. I'm pretty sure you have a lot to learn from Iroh.

Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on

Re: Fintech dystopia

#23
post #7

I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer. These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological. Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career f…

> These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological. > Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at…

Sure, I agree that greed is the root of all problems. Regulations are a symptom of greed; people want to protect their interests and are willing to incrementally corrupt the system to achieve it; that's what a lot of regulations are.

But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.

I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.

As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#24
post #6
post #4

> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. T…

Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half m…

> For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out.

One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#25
post #12

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.

>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

> Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.

I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#28
post #26

[flagged]

All of the games that feature this mechanic are bad, empty, fintech husks. Often they feature same neon vaporwave artstyle, maybe with apes, and usually are transparently asset flips designed more to to feature on cryptocurrencies landing page then to be played. No good games include this ridiculous use case that I cannot imagine anyone who plays games even a little bit to want.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#29

> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full…

> I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.

In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.

Re: Fintech dystopia

#30

Beside Cryptocurrency and GNU Taler have there been anyother attempts at p2p digital currency?

How do you define “cryptocurrency” and “P2P digital currency”?

US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences... Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
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