And angry mobs should be sent to hunt swat teams

Listen someone has to and it sounds like you just volunteered

Please, the rich aren’t spending a dime.

The middle class is giving 100 and low income workers are on the hook for everything else.

Caffeinated spite crew checking in. Tell me I can’t, go on, tell me. I fucking will. Fuck you.

Next week on CNN, they’ll be reporting on the random missiles landing in Chicago as if the city fucking deserved it.

“A child who’s medical care would be completely free in every other developed nation, and a few underdeveloped ones too receives pocket change from a billionaire so that she doesn’t die under the crushing weight of the American medical system” just does not have the same ring to it for article headlines you know? We gotta get the current youth hyperfixation’s name in the headline for clicks, because we literally only exist to serve ads.

There are no billionaires without exploitation.

Maybe you should look in to the history of money. Gold has not been king for a long time. It never really was.

Silver has always been more common as a standard. Gold and silver were frequently used in conjunction with each other, and neither of them have served as a standard intentionally since 1971. Well before any crypto. Using gold and gold alone as the standard is actually quite rare, and one time happened by accident.

Fun fact, at one point the Spanish thought they’d found an incredible amount of silver only to discover halfway across the Atlantic that it was some other shiney silver metal. They proceeded to dump tons of worthless plantinum overboard so as to not pollute the silver supply.

On Yap Island, giant circular stones were used as a form of currency. Everyone kind of just agreed on who owned what stones. At one point one fell off a boat and sunk, but because everyone knew that stone was still there, they could still assign value to it, and so it still stood in as currency. This single example is the closest real world example to crypto you’re going to find. And even obscure rocks on a remote island are a better investment because pretending a giant rock has value doesn’t depend on the Internet continuing to exist.

Salt, in various forms, has been used as currency and a standard of value. This is literally the origin of the word Salary. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. In Ethiopia they used bars of it as recently as the 1900s. In West Africa they even used bottle caps when coinage was scarce.

As it happens, bottle caps are a pretty good currency. They’re scarce, labeled, not super common, light and easy to carry, and easy to count. Notably, they also do not require the infrastructure that created them to continue to exist to retain value. None of the currencies I’ve mentioned, and to be clear these were currencies not commodities, require any of the technology that created them to exist to retain value. Bracelets, bricks of tea, tally sticks, seashells, even fucking Parmesan cheese all have functioned as a form of standard currency and all of them were better currencies than any crypto ever has been.

Crypto is a commodity. Except it only has value within is existing infrastructure. It will be like never getting able to check a book out of the library. Quite honestly if you’re going to trade commodities, it’s one of the least monstrous commodities to trade. The exorbitant energy costs notwithstanding.

If you burn down a library do the books still have any value?

The thing is, if I have a pile of gold coins, and a bunch of crypto in a private wallet on a hard drive and the house those things are in burns down, I’ll still have the gold. It just won’t be in coins.

All of that is kind of pointless because again, both of these things are terrible investments. You’re quite astute to point out the flaws in gold but what’s incredible is that you fail to see those same flaws, using the same logic, apply to crypto only in a more exaggerated form.

If you’re worried about the dollar collapsing, crypto will not save you from that, any more than a pile of gold will. Do you think the banks will just lock their doors one day and everyone will still go to work in the morning? Do you expect that trade will still function in a normal, civilized way?

Crypto is built on so many dependant layers of technology that if the dollar collapses, crypto will be as valuable as a library on fire.

Gold over Bitcoin? Yes.

Gold is also a shitty investment. But it’s a slightly better investment than Bitcoin. It has tangible value.

You’d be much better off investing that money in your community and building a robust support network, a small co-op to grow food, and find a secure source of clean water. If the kind of collapse people are talking about in this thread happens, no amount of Bitcoin or gold is going to be worth anything. But grain and water will be priceless.

Fairy dust, don’t be ridiculous. It’s Pixie dust.

Let me ask you this. If the hard drive that contains the private keys for your wallet is melted down to a liquid and allowed to cool, what is the value of that hard drive?

What would be the value of a gold coin given the same treatment?

Well no shit. If your basis for understanding Bitcoin is arguing for it, then sure, you’ll never meet that person. You’ll have a bizarre definition of understanding that no one else will use, but at least your jimmies won’t be rustled.

I swear that 90% of the people that go vegan only do so to feel morally superior to others, and don’t actually care about animals as much as they care about feeding their own ego. It’s such a bizarre stance to take too.

Food that requires literal slave labor? That’s ok. Food that is an ecological and climate nightmare? Perfectly fine. Even when it deprives animals of their habitat and safe drinking water? Especially then.

Food that is produced naturally and voluntarily by bugs who would continue to do it in the absence of any human intervention? Animal cruelty.

I’ll grant you the meat industry has some fucking problems. But like, they’re not wholely different from the problems most agriculture has.

They also use silicon, platinum, copper, iron, cobalt, and glass, what’s your point?

I run a CNC mill every day that has aluminum wiring.

Gold as a unit of currency is only about 2500 years old. Prior to that it was used heavily in jewelry and adornments. Probably because it’s not good for much else and it happens to be fantastic as a jewelry material. It’s shiney, doesn’t tarnish, and is easy to work with hand tools.

The association with wealth probably came about as a result of being associated with expensive jewelry.

To be clear, modern historians do not look for piles of gold to determine relatively how wealthy a society was. They look at their ability to produce grain and other things that facilitated trade. Because gold is only valuable as a mechanism to facilitate trade. To a civilization more worried about feeding itself than foreign luxuries, it’s quite worthless.

I don’t even know how you’d deprogram just that one guy. They get to a point where thinking critically about the crazy bullshit they’re screaming about just isn’t possible anymore

Specifically it was stalagmite crystals and unipolar magnets. Those were probably in different systems but both were pretty heavily guarded. My home system was pretty much dry of basic materials, I think I had a handful of mines still going on one of the planets. But I couldn’t produce graviton lenses fast enough to keep up with the demand for raw materials.

I have a universe with the dark fog swarms turned on, and I’m at the point where to get to the most critical rare materials I need to eliminate them from around the stars they’re orbiting. I’m bottlenecked in producing the fleet to help me take them out because I don’t have any of the stuff on that planet. I got them 99% eliminated before I had to retreat but by the time I got back they were mostly rebuilt but I was still a ways off from fully resupplied.

So I gave up and went back to a peaceful universe. I found a planet tidally locked to its star and got to the point where I was literally just waiting while swarms and swarms of Dyson structure components launched. Like I literally left it running and watched a movie more than once.

So I stopped playing and am really in to planet crafter now but I’m getting towards the end of that. …I think. Honestly I thought I was towards the end more than once already.

I always turn the enemies off. I just want to automate. But the tech tree existing for weapons and being useless really bugged me so I got really in to Dyson Sphere program. But enemies have been added there too.

A guy I used to know, around 2016 started a weird descent in to conservative politics. It was understandable at the time, Clinton was genuinely an unlikable candidate and he was a morally dubious guy. So it at least made sense at the time. By 2017 he seemed to regret it and we all moved on.

Then in 2020, holy shit. It took literally nothing to bait him in to a political diatribe half a notch up from gibberish. He had invented so many straw men to argue with that the second you mentioned anything even conceivably political, he’d launch in to a bizarre assault on the left.

Thing is, he’d accuse me and others of loving Joe Biden even though x, y, z whatever nonsense he wanted to argue about. He’d even make up quotes. Things I’d supposedly said about Biden that proved I really liked the guy.

I’m so far to the left that Marx might think I go too far. I don’t, and never have, liked Joe Biden. Joe Biden handed Clarence Thomas a seat on the supreme Court and openly defended him against his sexual assault allegations. He went to bat for that guy in a way that really makes no fucking sense, politically or personally, unless Joe Biden had done it too.

I can’t name a Democrat I actually like.

So every time I see comments like this, I’m reminded that conservatives just have a forest of straw men they’re arguing with, and any opportunity the bullshit that lives inside their head can find to spill out in to the real world they’ll take. Regardless of how idiotic it makes them sound.