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The Ponzi Career

drorpoleg.com

191–200 of 310 posts

Re: The Ponzi Career

#191

Hey, Alex Masmej here. Just wanted to say that I had no choice because I had no money in the bank. During the start of COVID, I lost my only (and very first) source income at the time, and I lost all my savings in crypto (DeFi is dangerous even to crypto people like me). Financially, this ISA freed me instantly, and gave me a newfound legitimacy as a crypto innovator. This was by far the best way I could find to brea…

Glad I scrolled down far enough to see this! Need to upvote this to float it to the top...

Re: The Ponzi Career

#192
post #116

> "By letting other people invest in you, you are incentivizing them to promote your own story and do their best to increase your tokens' value." In 1946, the US Supreme Court established the so-called Howey Test to determine if an investment opportunity is a security offering. These are the Howey criteria: "Under the Howey Test, a transaction is an investment contract if: "It is an investment of money; "There is an…

It’s also worth noting that Alex Masmej, the person mentioned in the article, has commented in this thread.

And every time I see the acronym IANAL I pronounce it as “I, ANAL”.

edit: Why would someone flag this??? It’s funny!

Re: The Ponzi Career

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue here is that you’ve tied a monetary value to honor, when honor is often tied to other things and occasionally explicitly the lack of a desire to maximize profit.

It's not monetarily valued. It's not societally valued, in any tangible sense. Power is not allocated to whomever has the most honor. So what good is it?

Some beliefs and values are personal, and thus, intangible. Try to recognize that not everything good in life has to be (or even can be) quantified.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#194
post #17

"Isn't this the same as traditional student debt or, worse, indentured servitude? Not really" Saying "not really" doesn't make something so. This is, literary indentured servitude. By definition.

Thank you. The indentured servitude character of this stuff is most clear when we look at the $ALEX example. Selling off a chunk of future autonomy and income in order to finance migration to a place with more economic opportunity is exactly what poor folks did circa the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps we should look at the history of how that went before replicating it.

My understanding is that economically it was usually a mutually beneficial arrangement, and servants often ended up better off than a normal immigrant. The second-class status of servants is somewhat hard to stomach by modern standards, but honestly it is not much different than the way members of the military are treated (source: I served five years enlisted in the US Navy).

Re: The Ponzi Career

#195

A couple thoughts if we were to "scale" the income-sharing contract concept beyond a novelty: 1. If there is, say, a hundred or even ten possible candidates to pick from, due diligence becomes brutal. Health information, full social media dumps, detailed financial disclosures etc. Also rampant discrimination. If it is unregulated, it's basically what insurance companies would like to be doing but with no limits. 2. I…

Indeed, due diligence is inherently not scalable. The world of finance has done everything in its power to overcome this constraint—basically all forms of risk pooling—but if nobody actually does the due diligence then you get stuff like NINJA mortgages repackaged into CDOs with AAA ratings on the senior tranche.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#196
post #120
post #34

is this suppose to be good? this sounds awful. it just reads like finance and tech have eaten literally everything, down to a person's life I guess there is more "freedom"? but that seems to come at the cost of stability and more winner take all scenarios like a lot of this stuff isn't new, but the degree to which is seems prevalent reads dystopic

This is simply an example of an ecomonic/political system creating problems (in this case lack of capital needed to start a career), then creating "solutions" to those problems (debt, commodification of people as investments) that reinforce the system and enrich its key stakeholders.

Yes, when you speak in broad enough generalities then you can make almost any statement unfalsifiable.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll offer to write a check for the debt in return for a negotiated percentage of their income from now on. Silence ensues. Writing someone a check in exchange for their future earnings "from now on" is a terrible deal. You're essentially offering a loan that can never be paid back, yet requires payments forever . Loans are a good deal because the terms are known ahead of time, payments end when the principle is pa…

> What you're describing is just facetious and condescending to those with six-figure medical debt. The point is that medical debt is a very good deal for the reasons you point out and because the doctor cartel in the US has forced prices up to dizzying heights. Yet people bitching and moaning about having borrowed $300k at reasonable interest rates for the right to earn many millions with almost no risk (when was th…

FWIW, garden-variety West Coast ER doc here. Right now, I'm an independent contractor who makes ~$200/h. In a few months when my small company gets acquired, I'll be a W-2 who for various reasons will make ~$160/h before CA taxes.

So, clearly not starving, and maybe even undeserving to be in the top 10--15% after working just ~24--36h/wk in night shifts. But won't make $$MILLIONS$$ and won't get as much as your average Googler with equivalent career experience to mine, I reckon. And also never made more than ~$50k in my life until my mid-30s.

Doctor pay is facing a whole lot of downward pressure from health insurers, private equity, and other FIRE people recently. Part of the C-suites' strategy has been to open self-funded residencies where they pay their residents much less than they would have to pay the equivalent lifelong salaried PA. This, then, creates an "oversupply" (from docs' perspective) of trained docs and forces pay down.

Personally I have no sentiment for the profession and do see how this could ultimately be good for patients. Unfortunately, in reality the FIRE people seem to just take all that cash for themselves and the patient is left paying the same amount or more than they did 20 years ago (via insurance or whatever you want to call it).

Re: The Ponzi Career

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a character flaw or lack of skills in not being able to "sell yourself". It's a sense of dignity and pride as a working person. You are not a commodity, you are a human being. You may look like a commodity to a business owner, but you refuse to allow yourself to become one. Honesty and honor are worth more than money. There is money to be made in making yourself into a sort of corporate dog, but it will leav…

Can you eat honor? Can you sell it? What is the worth of a man besides his ability to profit? Seeing endless people of honor scrape out meagre existences while those who exploit others endlessly become billionaires is more enlightening to the worth of honor than our useless platitudes.

Can you eat profit? What is the worth of a man besides his honor? What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, but loseth his soul?

Re: The Ponzi Career

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue here is that you’ve tied a monetary value to honor, when honor is often tied to other things and occasionally explicitly the lack of a desire to maximize profit.

It's not monetarily valued. It's not societally valued, in any tangible sense. Power is not allocated to whomever has the most honor. So what good is it?

This implies that power is the only good, which is a hell of a way to look at the world.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#200
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there's a ton of money floating around / frothiness, but what's inherently wrong or ill-advised about investing in future cashflows of a person. Assuming you diversify across a bunch of people in a bunch of fields, this actually sounds better than some of the stuff people are investing in in the stock market.

Because having a share in an individual sounds very much like slavery?

So does usury.

You loan someone $40000 @ 5% APR and he spends it on education. If the loan is to be paid back in a decade, he has to cough up $416 per month. Unlike a mortgage, he can't foreclose on his education.

Since he doesn't have any assets to sell, and is by law unable to get out of them through bankruptcy, his only choice is to work some amount of hours every month to pay off the loans.

If that is not slavery, then surely ISAs are fine too? And if that is slavery, then how are ISAs any worse?

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