Fact checking is censorship apparently.

Dude read the room

The cognitive decline among older populations (50+) is absolutely appalling. It’s safe to say that the average 5th grader has better critical thinking skills than the average septuagenarian.

So… why the latter can vote but not the former is a mystery to me.

The average ACT score in Florida among college-bound seniors is about 18. To be clear, that is only slightly higher than my cat can score by guessing. It’s an astonishing result. They are actually illiterate. And again, that’s the average for the state (nationally it’s around 22), and half of them do worse.

If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with an average person… well, you can’t. There’s nothing to discuss except sports, since everything else is way too complicated. So now imagine a standard deviation lower.

Yes, because it would make the Mac worse. Nvidia GPUs are comically inefficient.

EDIT: tech illiterate shit-for-brains downvoted this comment.

We are so lucky Nintendo sells shitty video games instead of health insurance. It could always be worse, folks.

OpenAI has entered the chat^

Stealing from pension funds is violence. When we say nonviolent crimes we mean crimes that aren’t morally wrong, but are technically illegal. Like hacking corporate emails or shooting healthcare execs.

FOREX is explicitly the market that compares the strength of competing currencies.

I’m aware of how the bond market works. What is your problem with the bond market?

Christianity as practiced in the US isn’t a real religion either. They reject every tenet stipulated by their own holy book. Fake anti-Jesus cultists, the whole lot of them.

Since we are discussing dollars and not houses, that would be the FOREX market. The dollar is very strong at the moment.

The thing is… the market disagrees with you. For now. But hey, put your money where your mouth is! I’ll give you a hundred rubles for a hundred dollars. If you really think the US government is impotent and on the verge of collapse…

That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.

Absolutely. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. No options (until 1973), no stock buybacks (until 1982), even the rules for short selling were different.

Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.

The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.

Exactly. Now they’ve metastasized into our government. Fucking orcs.

You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.

Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.

Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.

Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.

Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.