• zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    My brother, if you own even a single Bitcoin at current market rates you have more money pocketed than one American in five.

    I dabbled in Crypto and got fucked. I know a few people who went big on Crypto and got fucked. At the end of the day, we've all got professional jobs with enough standing income to get by. A guy like this isn't poor. He's just bad at financial planning.

    And I'm sympathetic - abstractly - to people in this situation, because it is incredibly cruel to build a big casino around the professional workforce and force everyone to gamble on retirement. But when I'm sitting at the roulette table, hoping I hit the Pass line enough times to exit the workforce in my 60s, and some yahoo is shouting "Let it Ride! Pappa Elon said bet on 2s!" for the seventh consecutive throw before crapping out, my sympathies run thin.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Just because someone is well-off doesn’t mean they’re immune to exploitation.

        Sure. Even the petite bourgeois child of car dealership owners is subject to the ravages of alienation and exploitation under Capitalism. Even billionaires can be laid low by a cartel of savvier rivals. No one is truly safe.

        But this is a story of pure hubris. It deserves to be mocked because it is valuable to remember that every risen billionaire leaves ten thousand of these dorks in their wake. Its a lesson in humility.

        This isn't "the poor mistakenly violate their sense of moral puritanism". Its a story of a PMC stoogie who got too high on his own protestant work ethic supply. The proverbial miser who has spent his whole life building up a great lump of gold, only to find it vanished beneath his rump.

        They’re dealing with the same issues as us

        I'm also a business professional, so probably. But that's why I have the least amount of sympathy for him. I can see what he's giving up and why. He's sacrificing social relationships and sabotaging immediate satisfaction in pursuit of a higher score. He's not poor. He's not wanting for anything that isn't self-inflicted. He's simply up his own asshole and finally noticing the stink.