In Australia one of the most common paths to wealth outside of owning property is literally taking up a trade as an apprentice, then after a couple of years beginning your own plumbing/electrician/brick laying/etc business.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
Europe is obviously full of sole proprietor tradesmen, shop and restaurant owners etc. It's completely orthogonal to the apparent shortage of VC-funded startup unicorn hustle culture.
This is something you talk to people about that are in the western world but outside of the US (which includes me) but whenever I have the conversation people just can't grasp it.
The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.
I also found most US startup opportunities to be practically enabled by shitty service provided by the incumbents, whether it is the state or the banks or the healthcare system.
Take Cost Plus Drugs, for instance. Or companies enabling faster cash transfers over the internet, like Paypal. Or healthcare insurance plans from Oscar Health or prescriptions from Truepill. Or videos made by Khan Academy, which are currently in use in many schools across the US.
> Anyone know if there's a way out that doesn't require this?
Honestly, I see this as a way for the powers that be to force explicit KYC. You want those coins? You prove they're yours, you stick your name on that wallet and all the liability that comes along with it. Otherwise the government (some government) holds onto them until you can definitively prove they're yours. I dont think this scenario is likely, but I can see it being something that is proposed or tried.
This time you'll have hundreds of billions of BTC that will be hacked by someone who will probably instantly unload it. In that scenario it's hard to see the price of it not dropping >90%, so you'd have to think people would prefer a roll back.
That said, I don't know how you could even do a roll back, you're not rolling back to a 'safe' state since the keys aren't safe at that point.
However in terms of the hack, Bitcoin is slow - most exchanges require a few confirmations so it's 30+ minutes to land a deposit in Coinbase/Binance at minimum, and a transfer that huge would instantly set off alarms. Seems unlikely that they would be able to unload that much.
Coinbase would definitely go into buy-only mode during a major crash but that just means people would scream while they watch futures/perps go to zero.
"If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking."
Yes and no. I'm no expert, but there's two things that don't make it nearly as dangerous as it is for BTC.
The first is the fact that many things are centralized. Things like Signal already have quantum-resistant encryption, and if they don't, they're able to implement it relatively quickly because it's centralized. BTC is not centralized and needs to jump through a bunch of hoops to get anything done.
The second is that because those things are centralized or close to, you can roll back changes with ease. For instance, if you hack a bank and steal a bunch of money from an account you're far more likely to be able to freeze those funds and get other banks to help stop everything before they're gone forever. You can't do that with BTC.
What I find funny about this is that stories have been floating around for *years* about HFT/quant firms specifically hiring quants to work out what the lowest they can pay people in the firm is, and still keep them.
I definitely don't think it's a case of more market resiliency but rather a case of central banks willing to act much more aggressively to respond to these things. This is often what Ben Bernanke argues, given he wrote his thesis on the '29 crash, and how he handled the '08 crisis.
> I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
This is the key point a lot of people miss, the vast majority of equipment needed to actually use renewables requires Chinese products. If you go 100% renewables, you're only replacing one form of dependence (oil) for another,
Once you get NREs set up you don't need a constant uninterrupted supply of replacements as fossil fuels do (we burn them after all).
We'd need replacements as old infrastructure ages out but it seems much easier to wait out a supply disruption compared to oil since this just means using old equipment while the supply is cut; sure some might break after a while but electricity production wouldn't fall immediately.
I can't believe they made an account for that comment. Like each action carries the same weight. Renewables, esp solar are super low maintenance. When you buy panels, barring some manufacturing defect, you buy them for the life of the project, not the panel.
Once you have a sane people in charge of policy the building out of renewables quickly using Chinese panels and turbines can be accompanied by incentives do build up domestic manufacturing for them.
Solar and wind equipment lasts a long time so it is OK if it takes a decade or two to ramp up domestic production to the point that it can handle all our needs.
That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).
Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.
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