Ha, I can only wish. Maybe true if you live in NYC, SF, Berlin or London.
But most of these don't exist or help with socializing and making new connections where I live (medium sized European university city).
Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it. Any other available events are either for college students or lonely retirees but nothing in between.
> Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it.
If you can get a few people from 2 of these groups together more than once, you've started solving this problem. Of course keeping it going for a long time is a challenge, and you want to avoid always being in the situation where you are doing all the work and others aren't contributing, but it gets easier and better with experience.
Except that if you're not anyone's family and not in university anymore then you're shit out of luck as people in their 30s already have their social circles already completed and don't have space, time and energy to add new strangers when they barely have free time to hang out with their existing clique.
There are also private group chats open only to selected elite and wealthy people. When you see several prominent people suddenly make similar public statements on a particular issue there's a good chance they used those group chats behind the scenes to coordinate messaging.
> For when AT&T, Comcast, TimeWarner, et. al. have succeeded in their plan to make the interweb a toll-road. "Oh, you want your packets to go to reddit.com? That will be $0.00015/per."
> It's really difficult to build agentic applications on top of Bitcoin.
That's because brain power is being corralled around entities that seek to maintain their control as toll keepers of financial transactions. They have to modernize and they must do it through centralized blockchains to maintain their control.
Low interest environments exist because liquidity is growing in the financial system. As that liquidity escapes into the consumer system, which it always does, it causes inflation.
Then how would you explain ultra low interest rate for 10+ years without associated inflation spike? It was only until double/triple whammy of supply chain disruption/ government handing out cash/ opptunistic price gouging that inflation really took hold
It is interesting that you include "stock market" in your list. Can you pick a period where the stock market went up (or down) for an extended period that was not "asset inflation (or deflation)"? To be clear, yes, financing rates will always impact financial assets (stocks, bonds, traded commodities) in the short term, but not over a ten year period. You need real earnings growth in the underlying stocks to see sustained stock market growth.
Crypto is gambling to me, so let's ignore that for my post.
Housing is mostly about debt financing (the same is true for commercial real estate). It is always true that financing rates have a large impact on valuations. People mostly buy homes on the monthly payment (cars too). If rates rise, they monthly payments rise. Most people will elect to buy a cheaper home, or wait for prices to fall.
low interest rates are not always the result of loose monetary policy; given that the low rates didn't result in inflation, they likely reflected lower real growth expectations or other demand side factors.
Supply chain disruption and opportunistic price gouging are actually SIGNS of inflation, not causes of it. In a socialist country I grew up in the opportunistic price gouging was illegal, so supply chain was ALWAYS disrupted…
So, in your list the only true cause of inflation remains.
Our government starting giving away money long before Covid lockdowns.
What is inflation? It’s prices going up. Or quality of service going down while priced the same. What is “supply chain disruption”, now? It is: you should pay more for the same delivery service, or if you refuse - your delivery will be delayed. “It’s not inflation, it’s just supply chain disruption” - was a political slogan then. No need to repeat it now: inflation is officially here already.
Right because once the public has real economic power the rich do not so they juice their prices, and meddle in other ways to deflate the buying power; aka inflate prices.
$200k in the 80s would be $600k buying power now. But it’s barely middle class.
Our society is entirely a wealth preservation scheme for people who cannot prove they did the work, they just have political documents of power.
Lighntning, also known as not-Bitcoin. Lightning does away with Bitcoin's guarantees, unless you close the channel after each transaction, at which point it costs more than sending BTC directly.
And something like CashApp is even worse - it only uses BTC as a way to circumvent banking regulations, and for name recognition. Otherwise, it could just as easily work on top of regular banking, or do away with BTC entirely and simply work with their own centralized ledger.
This first paragraph is simply untrue. You are always holding a valid signature to spend the latest funds.
The additional assumption vs simply holding your own funds is a throughput requirement: that miners not censor your transactions for some (up-front-chosen) period of time.
With normal funds there is a non-censoring requirement, but it's more vague since the miners may have to censor you forever to make your funds useless.
It is not. If we have an open channel and I send a payment to you and confirm that you have received it (and perhaps that you sent some good my way), I can then close my channel on the BTC network claiming that no transaction happened. Lightning does allow you to punish this, but only if you find out in time - otherwise, the transaction is essentially rolled back - but the goods you sent are obviously not. This way, I can double-spend my BTC and roll back arbitrarily late into the future (assuming the channel stays open).
And related to censorship, I'm not sure what is the point you are trying to make. Still, censoring forever is not hard (you just add some wallet address in a list, and look those up before choosing which transactions to include in a block), and is completely equivalent to how payments censorship works in regular banks as well.
I don't use E2E encryption to evade my government. I use E2E encryption to protect myself from criminals and malicious actors. Oh, government == malicious actors ??
But inconveniently long after savings accounts started being demand deposits due to online bill pay, atms and easy access to electronic funds transfers.
If you are going to complain about changing the definitions you should complain that they did it too late.
Membership organizations - country clubs, professional associations, alumni networks, charitable boards
Personal introductions and referrals - being introduced through mutual acquaintances
Cultural and civic participation - involvement in local institutions, community organizations, religious groups