Opt_Out_Fed_IRS

Doesn't management and C-suite executives lose the respect of technical people in the company when they do media appearences and sign off this sort of overtly-optimistic PR pieces?

ouch! My butt hurts just looking at it.

Violence rates don't lie!

Interpersonal violence and confidence in yourself go hand in hand at the societal level.

Places where interpersonal violence abounds has people being so arrogant and believing in themselves that they have no qualms attacking others, because they KNOW that they can't possibly lose. This is Africa

Places where interpersonal violence is low has people being very conservative and avoiding confrontations because they are scared of losing or succumbing to them: this is clearly Asia and Europe to a certain degree

The US is in a sweet spot, actually it was in a sweet spot in the 80s, now it has abandoned it and moving towards European type society. Still it's the closest place to a sweet spot it once occupied and still benefiting from the time it spent in that sweet spot

My understanding of life as a young professional in China or Korea is that the competition is almost unbelievable to someone from North America.

South Korea and China competition is "working harder". In the US it's all about "working smarter"

Also with all due respect for South Korea and China...very risk averse.

The big jumps happen when you take a risk and beat the odds, not the endless grinding which goes on in Asian societies.

Asian societies lack the arrogance of the creator/founder, which abounds in the West, especially American Jews.

Imagining something new and having the arrogance to think that it will be a great success and you'll be the one bringing it into the world. This is the trademark American Jew mindset.

Zuck turned down 1 Billion for Facebook...Larry and Sergey 1 million for Google. It takes guts and arrogance to think you'll beat the odds and say "no thanks" to 1 billion (and to 1 million too! considering it was back in the 90s and it was a very good deal for the effort they put into it)

Ideally the turnover of businesses should be really high

Meaning outflow from business bank accounts older than 5 years should be really high and inflow in business bank account younger than 1 year should be high as well (all as % of GDP)

As much as people like Bezos claim "it's always day one" they won't risk the company on moonshots like they did back in the days.

Partially because they feel they can't win as if the big bet were to be successful then you can't cash on it because the antitrust would immediately dissolve a 5 trillion dollar company.

The only crazy coked dude out there still pushing is Musk, but he has a taste for picking industries which make terrible businesses, and I think will retire before any of his companies generates positive FCF

This sadly means that people aren't betting on themselves anymore.

When assets skyrocket, usually business formation and funding goes down.

Banks have better data but anecdotally this is what is happening

Ideally if somebody in here works for the big boys such as JPMorgan , Wells Fargo or Barclays and wanted to decipher such phenomenon you'd look at something like:

(Turnover in business bank account opened in the past year - outgoing payments to insiders,beneficial owners and companies controlled by insiders and beneficial owners) / GDP

Yet another metric of risk taking:

No. of hires + no. of people who quit. This gives you an idea of how confident business are in their growth and how confident people are in their personal growth.

Of course stuff like the stimulus and paying people to stay home distort stuff so much that such data can't be compared to say 2005

Ok but you have to do it immediately or you lose the ability to re-play the audio

Because nature tells us :

"Women are saying that a guy had an interaction with them"

So all our brain emergency signals flare up. That's because somebody who is not ourselves having interactions with women triggers an immediate response...that guy is, in fact, an enemy from a reproductive standpoint. Deeply rooted in our brains there is the idea that WE should be interacting with those women and that we must destroy that guy because he's ahead in the reproductive race

This happens subcounciously.

Even standup guys like Bill Gates aren't immune to it, if you want to hurt a guy reputation and you have nothing, absolutely nothing on him...well just say that he's a playboy and a philanderer.

If you claim those things you immediately ruin his reputation with women and with smart/family men. All he's left with the approval of less smart men who are no use for guys who have ambitious goals such as Bill Gates or even the Pasquale VC of the main article. They'd have lost so much "approval rating" among smart men, as well as men who are capable of reading the room and don't want to be associated with a guy who is under attack by the mob.

He should have sent vocals which cannot be screenshot

But the important thing is that clueless buyers didn't put together the above reasoning

Or think somehow blockchain and AI can be used the amazing technoutopian future™ to combat piracy (including piracy of the image or video of the NFT they bought it)

US Dollars in one's bank account are used by people to measure their self worth.

Unfortunately they are also the tool which the Fed uses to stabilize the financial system and to inject liquidity.

6.5 trillion dollars printed, people feel that the Fed is effectively diluting their self-worth... and they are scared as hell about it, that's the reason why BTC is flying .

> Even if you do good for self-glorification and to remind everyone how awesome you are

Bill Gates behaves like a politician because he was violently attacked by the government first. That's mostly because he didn't engage with politicians or didn't act like one.

He seeks to be in the public eye because that's the only way of preventing people gang up against you like it happened in 1999 when the DOJ decided to violently attack Microsoft just because Gates was so extremely rich.

His only problem is that he's very socially incompetent and will appear for like 30 minutes on prime time tv and the average person will hear a monotonal voice talking about concepts way above thier heads. He doesn't use typical politician tactics such as US v THEM, doesn't use empathizing phrases. It's only a matter of time until everybody sees the uncannyness and think this guy is an enemy. Which is exaclty the reason why all conspiracy theories are around against him, and seems to me you bought into them as well.

Bezos is the Seattle billionaire 2.0 , although his company had a rougher trajectory compared to Microsoft and the initial vision wasn't as ambitious and profitable as Microsoft, then AWS came along and changed the game..

Bezos is much more socially competent than Gates, and if he decides to follow Gates path he won't repeat his same mistakes. He'll use USvTHEM and all the social tactics to make sure that he doesn't become a scrapegoat for all humanity problems like it has happened with Gates

The subtle utility of existing in the real world.

It never stops to amaze me how of all places people in here are so blind to it.

Game should recognize game, especially on HN. The way Musk operates and Tesla finances scream that this is not unlike your run of the mill startup whose survival is 50:50...but of course the founder and CEO is doing media blitz after media blitz to promote the company and get a better valuation for the inevitable equity raise.

The notion that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps with enough hard work and determination is simply not true for most people.

And? Once you go to the polls and elect politicians which represent your interests...what else can you do?

Might as well focus on yourself once you are done voting.

Talking about stuff is very lame and unproductive. You are not better off financially after you are done talking politics with other people

Meaning they had lots of them?

Trump finances were really bad in 2000 and then the financial crisis hit.

Had he managed to run in 2000 he'd have been a regular President. He'd have gone down as 43(D)

It's not Trump who changed from 2000 to 2016, society did and now the walk-in closet of what's socially acceptable is much smaller

Thanks! By the way if we are talking about people who got a hold of the problem Brin and Dalio are the first who did mention it in a public way but I am sure there are others.

Similarly I have to stress that what is happening with Musk right now is not normal, those are the type of exagerations and grotesque situations which happen when the stagflation and stasis is really inflicting its toll.

Richest man in the world can't be the CEO of a company on the constant edge of going under. In a world were everybody takes risks, the public would have not been captured by the rarity of such all-in endevours and the stock would have never propelled to 800B

Did Naval steal this from Frank Underwood?

"Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after ten years. Power (or status) is the old stone building that stands for centuries"

It's the same thing he's saying here, but like the guy Frank Underwood was talking to, Naval doesn't recognize that financial wealth is only more secure and fungible than social status if you can manage to move said financial wealth around before stuff hits the fan. So many examples to cite, ranging from Venezuela, to Zimbawe to Cyprus.

And mind...stuff inevitably always hits the fan, when stuff hits the fan you want to have loyalists who'd defend you against your enemies.

The whole reason why all investigation relating to Trump will end in a nothing burger. He has 75m people who follow him and the political cost of doing anything to him is simply too high.

Also same reason why Musk can't be touched even though he violates the law every day, he has a huge cult following and the political cost of doing anything to him is again simply too high.

Ideally you make money by lying low, then diversify (unless you are a hedge fund manager, in that case you are already diversified), then use money to build a following.

I say ideally because you need smart people around to make money and smart people tend to be repulsed by people who are hyperfocused on building a cult following and a great social status (exhibit A : the turnover rate at Tesla)

This sort of pessimistic attitude is, in my opinion, the reason why we have economic stagflation. The entire history of humanity can be summarized with:

"People arrogant and self-confident enough to think they'd be the one and they could do no wrong and who'd hold little to no regards for the status quo and the concept of opportunity cost"

The self-confidence of people is dropping at an ever increasing rate ever since the turn of the millennium, concurrently the awareness of the concept of opportunity cost is skyrocketing. People blamed the Financial Crisis but I think it's the other way around. The financial crisis happened because people self-confidence and risk-taking suddenly collapsed (it's not going fast that kills you, becoming immediately stationary does).

Economists claim that the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' are taxation or the taking care of the environment or public parks.

In reality the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' is people not having the confidence to try out whatever crazy idea they have in mind with regards to the natural world or the entrepreneurial world or the industrial world etc.

It's like we know it's a tragedy of the commons because we encourage (or at least we did) people to follow their dreams, but in the dark of our office with the curtains closed we play it safe .

We need to try a lot of crazy ideas, some of them will stick and we could go back at having 10% YoY real growth...but we are afraid to do so ourselves because we don't want to try and fail, we want to try and win! And get the accolades and status which goes with it.

At the same time who knows if other people are trying themselves or they are playing it safe? Maybe in the dark of their office with the curtains closed, just relentlessly buying the S&P and index funds in awe of their preacher John Boogle....the similarities with tax avoidance/climate/public good care is again there to be seen.

I think it's a known problem outside of academia.

Ray Dalio mentions it very often [1] and Sergey Brin [2] dedicated a couple of minutes to this problem in a talk he gave at Davos (I guess if you follow your dream long enough that's where you end up!) and thinks the Internet is at fault for this pessimistic attitude

The internet might have complicated things even further, people were already becoming more and more risk averse, now they have a projection of all the things which could go wrong as well as rapid access to the info about the #1 person in that domain so they can compare themselves against their accomplishments. They become stuck in a "play it safe" and "analysis paralysis" mode for a very long time before actually experimenting.

Other than the internet I guess the only other reason could be the ever diminishing levels of testosterone in the median male (of all age groups and ethnicity). Testosterone has been declining and nobody knows why.

It makes sense in theory, Testosterone is correlated with risk-taking, might also explain societal changes and the constant level of stress which is put nowadays on security, safety, financial stability. In one word Stasis. Might also be the reason why a President like Trump is not acceptable whereas John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who were exactly the same personality and all around the same persona were elevated as heroes (initially by the left but also nationally)

There is some hopes though, people who take shots have a much less crowded trade so to speak. There is also the reason why I should remember myself that a guy like Musk extracting his richest man in the world wealth and status from Tesla before the company is even out of the woods of bankruptcy and insolvency would have earned him the title of scam artist and fraudster a while ago. Today people are so adamant and desire to see somebody take a shot that would elevate him and praise him, because in a world where nobody tries , he does.

[1] https://youtu.be/XTKXrojiCrA?t=235

[2] https://youtu.be/ffvu6Mr1SVc?t=1630

It means that you are not interested when a politician or a work based group with political ideas (official or unofficial) tries to "recruit" you and join their cause telling you that they are fighting to elevate your rights and status.

You'll simply decline knowing full well that you can elevate yourself just as much (actually way more) solely with your hard work and performance.

This comment is the best summary of the issue.

I'd also 2 other elements.

1) The avg. American is much less arrogant and confident in their capabilities compared to 20 or even 10 years ago . So it's natural that they are coming to terms with the fact that they might have to explore any avenue of possible social ladder climbing. Climbing the social ladder via group association was much more frowned upon 20 or even just 10 years ago. Now people happily strap and go for the ride

2) None of this BS would be happening if the economy was growing at 7% Real GDP on a constant basis. You mentioned Maslow, well America is pretty high on the Maslow pyramid, considering the hedonistic treadmill and the law of diminishing returns you need a 7% YoY just to mantain the level of happiness and satisfaction

Society would be better off glorifying entrepreneurs than instagram celebrities.

How about that happens after they retire at 80? That would be a good balance. You glorify an entrepreneur and soon enough he'd be pushing BS vaporware products or using his cult of personality to raise endless equity at absurd valuation or outright scamming the government (Musk cough cough...conman cough cough)

Even saying you don’t have a position is tacit endorsement of the status quo.

No it's not. It's a statement that your goal is to elevate yourself as an individual not via group association

Because duh you delegate the group elevation part to the representatives you select when casting your vote

That's the whole point. Delegate group elevation so you can take care of business with regards to your own individual social elevation

This sort of stuff happens when society reaches a level of prosperity so high that it starts worrying about nonsense

None of this happens in Mexico

The US needs to import fresh blood and fresh brains if it wants to survive.

Less people studying social trends and more studying consumer trends.