For me the most frequent and glaring Cassandra moment of the last decade or so has been the staggering number of "not political, no political agenda, just teaching self improvement" talking heads like :up-yours-woke-moralists: , Joe "JUST TAKE DMT BRO DONT BE A (slur) BRO" BROgan, and even :my-hero: because of the "he's just a better human that wants to save humanity and make humans an interplanetary species and make us all better humans" :soypoint-1: talking points from his fandom. I'd even include scientism cranks like Sam Harris as well as capital-R "Rationalists" in this category because of their own pretenses of being the "grey tribe" and proclaiming that "politics is the mind killer" :very-intelligent: while finding more and more sophistic reasons to bootlick the rich and perpetuate colonialism.
I remember the origins of almost every right wing grifter coming across that way at first, and how I had to push uphill each and every time to say obvious stuff like ":jordan-eboy-peterson: calling feeemales 'sacred' then stating that they are 'chaos dragons' that need to be subjugated for the sake of civiliation is misogynistic ideology even if your cult leader says it isn't."
I've known some people personally that bought into such "nonpolitical" grifters and when the politics became obvious they were like :surprised-pika: and I was like :i-told-you-dog: and depending on whether they still followed the grifter or not they'd either pretend they never bought in or they'd claim that their specific grifter was forced to "get political" because "everything is so divisive these days and everyone has an agenda and a narrative." :morshupls:
I even remember when "NoFap" on :reddit-logo: was aggressively pushed as a wholesome self improvement fellowship that sought magic powers from secular puritanism and that totally wasn't a political movement no matter how misogynistic and MAGA-associated its power users became and it wasn't a cult either because they said so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aOHQ-sMCps
I really raelly really really regret not having like self confidence in my decisionmaking when I was 18 because I had a bunch of money as a graduation gift and I literally wanted to dump all of it into bitcoin when it was worth fractions of a penny but instead of just doing that I asked everybody I knew "do you think this is a good idea" but everybody told me to buy a guitar instead
now I have a guitar I don't play
if spent the guitar money on bitcoin it would have been so many bitcoins that at peak value I would be like Rockefeller rich, minus whatever sold before that point :yea: \
but hey in this timeline I'm a sexy himbo communist instead of a libertarian coinlord so that's a plus, I tell myself as I barely scrape by
I don't gamble, as a rule, because this narrative is so tempting. In hindsight, having seen how everything played out, I think "Damn, why didn't I buy some bitcoin back when all my friends were talking about it?" A lot of them cashed out a few thousand dollars years ago.
But then I think about all the other schemes and scams that didn't pan out, all the people who lost their life savings and their homes and their kid's college funds and any other asset they had, the people made destitute, and I remind myself that the house always wins in the end.
If you're going to gamble never gamble more than you can afford to lose, and preferably do it with someone else's money.
you can't view the market in retrospect. You made what was a sensible market decision given the information you had at the time
I knew it would end up like this though, or like, I saw which way it was gonna go. It was so obvious. But i literally could not make a decision on anything without the input of others at this point in my life :bawllin-sad:
If I ever get transported back in time to a pre-bitcoin version of myself I've long decided that I'd buy a bunch of Bitcoin, cash out at peak with that handy dandy hindsight (does it become foresight if the thing you saw in hindsight are no longer in the past??) and use the resulting money to fund communist movements globally
I remember thinking the Black Lotus was overpriced at $400.
i got a very nice flamenco guitar after my teacher said "don't get a flamenco guitar" but then he said it was a very nice guitar for classical stuff too :soviet-huff: