There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble • Hacker News Board

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#281

Post by fullshark » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

w0de0 wrote: post #195

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…

> Our job in life is to engage in value creation. That's grim! It's not my job in life.

That's how the gov't views you, as an economic unit = labor production.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#282

Post by waynesonfire » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

mytherin wrote: post #119

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2% of the world's wealth is tied up in crypto (and it's growing quickly). If it does implode, that'll make The Great Financial Crisis look like blip. At this point, I can't imagine financial regulators doing anything to stop it.

What will actually happen if the crypto coins collapse in price? What tangible effects will there be? Very few people's salaries are paid in crypto, crypto isn't backing people's mortgages, and outside of the rare (and newsworthy) cases, people are not investing extreme amounts of money into crypto that they cannot possibly afford to lose. I have a hard time imagining what actual tangible disasters will happen if cry…

there is this concept termed "too big to fail" -- we're seeing crypto start to find it's way into ETFs.. and then 401Ks.. and then ops.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/a-new-crypto-etf-is-here-yo...

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#283

Post by disabled » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #78

Financial elites have been gambling for decades. They seem to be really upset that the plebs now can also do it. When brokers did it it was OK, when algorithms did it in milliseconds (when common people can only operate with delays of hours and days, and with deterrent fees) it was OK, but now that there are platforms that allow more or less anyone to speculate, we start publishing moralistic pieces in the media and…

It should be noted that gambling needs to be viewed as nothing more than a form of entertainment. Back in the day, formal engineering schools offered elective courses on the mathematics of gambling. Just know that if you partake in the activity in short stints long-term, they have it so rigged that it is mathematically impossible to yield net gains long-term.

Personally, I think gambling is an atrocious activity. I am not religious in any way, either. I just think it is a horrible activity from a moral standpoint. Also, people who have gambling addiction do actually have one of the worst and self-destructive addictions out there.

There are other ways to gamble in life without actually gambling.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#284

Post by cambrianentropy » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

sixstringtheory wrote: post #151

bondarchuk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices... The existence of a financial elite hinges on the existence of a non-elite that actually does the work. If workers are putting 25% of their paychecks in an index fund and retire a few years earlier, instead of paying off their too-expensive car loan or something, it will be bad for the current financial eli…

> In the end money is just an abstraction to determine who has to do back-breaking work all day, and who doesn't. Maybe, but are you insinuating that no back breaking work would need to be done if money weren’t to exist? Pretty sure the introduction of money reduces the total amount of backbreaking work to be done. Instead of hauling grain to trade for axe heads and carrying those back to your farm, you carry coins,…

Barter economies have never existed. Myth starts with Smith.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#285

Post by alert0 » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

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…

Comparing cryptocurrency to real estate is laughable. With real estate you have either a place to live, reducing a real world expense (rent), or an income producing property. No matter how much you dress up cryptocurrencies as stocks, by using terms like market cap, you are not buying a share of an income producing asset. You're speculating on a digital collectible. You can speculate on real estate and stocks, but you can also invest in them.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#286

Post by anonporridge » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #239

Aunche wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If workers are putting 25% of their paychecks in an index fund and retire a few years earlier, instead of paying off their too-expensive car loan or something, it will be bad for the current financial elite. Nobody is complaining about people placing their paychecks in index funds though. Index funds are a reasonably good proxy for the future health of the economy, so your gains from it will likely represent real g…

Amazingly, some people are complaining about index funds. It’s a pretty fringe position, but it comes up frequently enough that “should index funds be illegal?” is one of the recurring headings of Matt Levine’s newsletter. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/the-autopi...

Index funds being illegal just means they're illegal for the poor and middle class. Any person with sufficient wealth could construct a personal index fund manually by buying the individual stocks. You would probably need millions to make this a worthwhile exercise.

Somewhat related, I really want to see someone offer some kind of customizable index fund. Let me start with a base index, and then exclude or include companies at will. e.g. start with the S&P 500, kick out companies like Exxon and Facebook and add in Tesla (pre inclusion), while the service auto weights investments appropriately.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#287

Post by anonporridge » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

bondarchuk wrote: post #115

jayd16 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Financial elites have been gambling for decades. They seem to be really upset that the plebs now can also do it. I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices...but putting that aside... I think the emphasis is more about how there's no other game in town that can compete, not that gambling is new. Interest rates are so low that there isn't a simple/safe…

> I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices... The existence of a financial elite hinges on the existence of a non-elite that actually does the work. If workers are putting 25% of their paychecks in an index fund and retire a few years earlier, instead of paying off their too-expensive car loan or something, it will be bad for the current financial eli…

I do actually wonder if the FIRE movement will come under criticism in the coming years. Does the economy still work if too many people are checking out of their careers in their 30s and 40s?

But yeah, it's mostly the financial elite freaking out that their kids might actually have to be a wage slave for a living.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#288

Post by anonporridge » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #251

jayd16 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Financial elites have been gambling for decades. They seem to be really upset that the plebs now can also do it. I really don't understand this sentiment, as if a professional gambler would not gladly gamble with novices...but putting that aside... I think the emphasis is more about how there's no other game in town that can compete, not that gambling is new. Interest rates are so low that there isn't a simple/safe…

The problem is that the economy is being driven by rent seeking behavior and cantillion effects. This is great for the elites, but at the same time they can see how the ground is starting to crumble. As "the plebs" start to gamble they're working to blame any future collapse on the irresponsibility of the crowd. Shrinking responsibility for the fact that this is the system that they have lobbied for and created and t…

"We taxed work generated income greater than investment generated capital gains and now everyone is speculating! Why oh why would the plebs do this to us?!"

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#289

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #78

Financial elites have been gambling for decades. They seem to be really upset that the plebs now can also do it. When brokers did it it was OK, when algorithms did it in milliseconds (when common people can only operate with delays of hours and days, and with deterrent fees) it was OK, but now that there are platforms that allow more or less anyone to speculate, we start publishing moralistic pieces in the media and…

[deleted]

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#290

Post by owenversteeg » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #58

RugnirViking wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that arguably true? Where is the stuff? In the hands of increasingly few people, namely tech billionaires. Amazon for example is worth more than all but 18 of the entire world's sovereign nations' respective GDP. The economy has grown tremendously, in measurable terms, but that growth has almost exclusively gone to the 0.1%

True And also much of the 'stuff' is here, or converted to services. 25 yrs ago, approx no one had 55"+ tvs, internet connection was a minority, and media eas collections of CDs/Videotapes. Now 'net connections are near-universal, and it is all streaming. Cell phones were just beginning & expensive, now everyone has a powerful computer in their pocket. We don't have two houses, but the ones we have are worth twice as…

It's worth mentioning that houses are not only worth far more, they are also physically much larger while household sizes have gotten smaller. In 1850 households had on average nearly 6 people; in 1890 five, in the 1930s four, in the seventies three - and today, the average household in America has two and a half people. Meanwhile house sizes have almost tripled since the 50s: new single-family homes were an average of 983 square feet in 1950 (about 280 sqft per person); today they are around 2,600 square feet (around 1050 sqft per person.)

That is to say - not only are the houses almost three times larger, but the average American has nearly -four- times more personal space today vs in the 1950s.

The improvements in cars have been crazy - I wrote a comment about that recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26389885

Only 3.4% of jobs in America require very heavy strength according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the US employment rate at 56.8%, that's 1.9% of the population that has to do a very strenuous job.

Compared to even very recent generations, we live in palaces, we drive in luxury, we work cushy jobs, and we have endless entertainment.

>All of it needs to be more evenly spread.

Absolutely. Among the world, of course, but even within America the inequality is still huge. The fact that we live with this inequality while having the resources to fix it is a stain on our collective conscience.