Young People Need Another Gold Rush | Hacker News Reader

Young People Need Another Gold Rush

bloomberg.com

73 pointspdog104 comments

> This lack of opportunities could create more pessimism and disaffection than economic conditions warrant. An increasing body of economic research shows that people tend to form extrapolative expectations -- they expect recent trends to continue forever. Overoptimism is also a common psychological bias. Booms make a lot of young, energetic Americans believe that they’re going to get rich. On the one hand, this causes inevitable disappointment when the froth dissipates. But as long as there’s a gold rush somewhere in the economy, big dreamers can dream big.

So America needs another slot machine we can present to our youth to appease their cognitive biases?

Perhaps we should find ways of making them feel good about living in tent cities?

There has to be some middle ground between these ideas, surely.

It seems to me a crime to tell a young, vibrant person "don't get too excited" and manage their expectations for life way down.

Same as you'll never get me to give up delicious food by handing me a bottle of Soylent.

No, I totally agree with that sentiment. Things have changed for our younger generation and sadly in most cases, not for the best. It blows my mind sometimes to think of my grandfather working a factory job with my grandmother not working while raising 8 children. Oh, and they owned their own home which was a nice middle-class abode and also drove decent (but not luxury) cars. Grandfather retired at 58. Grandmother died at 86, some money still in the bank.

So yes, things have changed for many reasons. Our middle class, outside of those in a few booming sectors is struggling, if not outright choking. College is becoming a no-win proposition for some and at 33, I certainly am not expecting a life like that of my grandparents or great-grandparents, for better or worse. So I get it. I was just pointing out that there is a middle ground between those two viewpoints on either end, and perhaps, just perhaps a solution is somewhere in that terrain.

I'm not holding out hope though, as there are so many forces at work right now and...yeah our leadership is making me a bit nervous.

^These observations is all America-centric, I know that. I don't pretend to know how things are for every young person globally and don't want to act like I do.

You can still get close to that today, even outside of tech. Tradespeople make plenty of dough.

The problem though is survivorship bias: plenty of people in the '50s and '60s were poor, or didn't buy their own house, or etc... and likewise plenty of "kids today" are doing well.

Reasonably high density, pedestrian friendly, sense of community, what's not to like?

Eco-friendly! Tiny houses! Solar-powered!

Yeah, and you don't even own the 4 walls, nor the land. And companies like uber and others seek to extract the leftover and skirt employment regulations. And your stuff keeps failing as you try to fix it. And automation is an ever-present downward force that makes your degree into a $10/hr grind.

But, you know, progress?

Street food, no high buildings blocking the sky line, authentic social dynamics... It's the hipster dream, we could make bank with this.

Yeah, WTF, the dotcom and post financial meltdown recoveries were great, but, looking back at the 70s, the 80s and early 90s, I don't think people thought "optimism". If anything, we were in the midst of the full swing into rust belting of the Midwest, Detroit was under heavy attack and in debt fighting off foreign rivals, and the whole Wolf of Wall-Street 80s syndrome.

WTF, do today's kids just expect things to land on their laps?

That said, I know lots of people in near blue collar jobs who do work hard and don't take things for granted and don't carry a woe is me attitude. So, not everyone lacks resilience.

No kids ask for that. The journalist asks for that.

Current kids do what they can in an economy with less jobs, more expensive cost of living, more regulations, increasing state surveillance and the worst leaders we had for decades, controlled and dumbed downed news, culture promoting stupidity/violence/money/consumption... And the only map they get to navigate this is the old one from their parent's time were you could pay your college tuition with a side job and being a doctor was the solutions to all your problems.

This is so true. The younger generation got hosed because the older generation screwed up in a big way. Our country had a chance to clean house during the 2008 financial melt down. The big banks failing would have caused a horrible economy but we would've flushed Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, AIG, and a host of other leaches down the drain. Check out the historical prices of Goldman Sachs from 2007 to late 2008 if you don't believe me. The market was anticipating the bankruptcy of Goldman Sachs and this company is supposed to be the pillar of Wall Street.

Our economy would have recovered by now but we live in an even more distorted world. Risk is not priced correctly because interest rates are too low. Take Amazon for example. They can borrow at low rates to acquire an overpriced company in Whole Foods. Had Amazon borrowed at say 8% then the transaction is a lot riskier. This miss pricing of risk is radically distorting the economy throughout the country and there will be bad consequences. Those at the bottom of the economy will have the worst time and that includes recent high school and college graduates who will be looking for the few entry level positions.

The massive cost of the great financial crisis to everyone except the financial elite is deeply underappreciated by most people. High finance and central bank operations (QE etc) are generally perceived as both dauntingly incomprehensible and deathly boring so most people don't bother trying to understand them. Even more unfortunately, the effect of it all on everyone's day-to-day lives is sufficiently indirect and diffuse that most people do not connect the dots.

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin only helped me to start appreciating this. It is incomprehensible that lots of the same folks are still in leadership positions. Follow the money, indeed.

There is also the apparent complexity of the system and the discourse from people talking about it that you don't know what you are talking about. Then a lot of jargon to cover it all.

But the reality is, while it's true the internals of the finance system is complex, the big picture is not. You have a bunch of people trying to make money no matter the cost, and some other people helping them not paying the cost when it fails. And they are faster and more powerful than the people trying to prevent them.

They are not genius mastermind. They are not evil people neither. Just regular humans wanting more and caring less.

>WTF, do today's kids just expect things to land on their laps?

No, all these butthurt old people are creating a fantasy about young people so they don't feel bad about what they've created.

Wait for all those greybeards beeing in the street once the warming creates a global recession and theire pension funds collapse.

"Spare some change we can believe in Sir?"

"Not today, old Scooter, not today."

My thoughts exactly. You can't base a person/nation's health on extraordinary events. The article sounds a lot like saying "ohhh, I'm hangover, better drink more so that I don't suffer from it".

This is one of the things that are very wrong with a lot of people in charges: they want magical solutions, quick fixes for the next elections.

It's true the real solutions, the long term ones, the ones that matter most, are hard to set up right: education, research, building trust, leading by example...

And it's far easier to sell a new gold rush: people love those stories, it gives hope, it's fun and simple to comprehend. Even better, it puts the blame on the people instead of the leaders since if they don't live the great life, it's because they failed to grab the opportunity. The American dream in essence.

The fact that there can be only so many gold rushes, so many factions that will have the control of it (and the others can go to hell), and so many people from those factions that will actually benefit from those are not issues that will occur to the minds of the targets of this strategy. It's why it's such a good one.

I agree that "gold rushes" shouldn't absolve leaders of their responsibility in fixing (or trying to fix) some of the fundamental problems of our economy. But it is a fact that these gold rushes, which I'm assuming are events when entirely new markets are developed/open up, are a huge stimulus to the economy and young people in particular. The discovery of and refining of Oil set off a gold rush. So did the spread of the internet.

The problem with such kind of events in the future seems to be that the workers would require a high degree of education to participate. e.g. if there is an AI gold rush, the demand would seem to be mostly for people who know CS fundamentals, math and AI principles. But maybe I'm underestimating people; a lot of wildcatters started off as oil workers, learned skills and then moved up the chain.

> are a huge stimulus to the economy and young people in particular.

Sure a gold rush is always good.

However one's life should be based on the normal, not the exceptional. Otherwise it's completely unstable. You should definitely embrace the exceptional when it happens, you may even look for it or try to trigger it, but it should not be a sine qua non condition for you having a decent life.

> in the future seems to be that the workers would require a high degree of education to participate

It may be a good thing. Right now, society promote art and sports are mean to become rich. We communicate value about violence, sex, money, owning stuff, power...

If suddenly the media see a gold rush and promote "hey, to become rich, educate yourself and try to make a dent in the world." that would not be so bad. After all, the 2000 bubble did a HUGE service to all the nerds. We are way cooler than we used to be, and our life is way easier now.

As long as people have biases, we need to appease them, yes.

It is a concept as old as Ancient Rome itself -- bread and circuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Superficial means of appeasement, distractions, diversions, or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace. These things have been a staple of peace since time immemorial.

> This phrase originates from Rome in Satire X of the Roman satirical poet Juvenal (circa A.D. 100). In context, the Latin panem et circenses (bread and circuses) identifies the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which no longer cares for its historical birthright of political involvement. Here Juvenal displays his contempt for the declining heroism of contemporary Romans, using a range of different themes including lust for power and desire for old age to illustrate his argument.[5] Roman politicians passed laws in 140 B.C. to keep the votes of poorer citizens, by introducing a grain dole: giving out cheap food and entertainment, "bread and circuses", became the most effective way to rise to power.

Humanity generally waxes and wanes between bread and circuses and political involvement. One could feasibly say they are diametrically opposed, but suffice to say it should to be clear that the pendulum has swung from the former to the latter and it will be difficult to reverse it forcefully.

A lot of research shows that forcing yourself to smile makes you happier.

Penguins have a gland above their eyes that filters excess salt from their bloodstream, allowing them to drink salt water.

Wut?

More research showed that wasn't really true:

https://www.livescience.com/56740-facial-feedback-hypothesis...

This article should be titled 'almost all remaining economic opportunity has been systematically monopolized by large corporations'

Which is completely false, and have been said for ever from people not seeing opportunities or unwilling to pay the price for them.

I get a new business opportunity every month. The fact that I'm not a millionaire is not because of the lack of it, but because I failed in some way I could clearly see after the fact.

This is where the money went: http://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Without addressing this, millennials are right to think capitalism screwed them. Safe bet: someone here will say it's the fault of heavy handed government regulation.

I don't deny that, I just say it's not opportunity related.

My big "oh oh" moment was when I started to play the "return to your 10 years old self with your current mind" game. I realized I could have earned much more money than my parent's allowance, use much better my time and freedom, improved my health a lot, but couldn't see the opportunities.

It's the same now. We have opportunities everywhere. As long as people have problems, you have opportunities to solve them and charge for it.

That chart is interesting, but I'm not sure how to interpret it.

I think the authors are suggesting, "people are not being paid in line with what they produce."

I think the chart may show something else, which is "an increasing amount of work is being automated (and goods are produced by no one in particular), and this benefits owners rather than workers."

If I make widgets and you build a robotic cog factory, why should my wages go up?

Another issue: If you want to argue "we all deserve a share of productivity increases", then who is "we"?

Does the local community deserve to benefit from the automated cog factory? Does the state? Do all Americans? All humans? Those with coercive power?

It bugs me sometimes that you can argue "let's all share the wealth" but do it in a self-interested way by making a choice about who deserves what.

In a democracy it depends on what the people prefer.

This article claims that without some kind of vivid lottery capitalism that makes people think "I'm not being screwed, I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" people might become jaded regarding a US-style economy and choose a more socialized system that produces, for example, Germany-like income distribution rather than US-like income distribution.

Economies produce what they are designed to produce. The design and implementation of the US economy has been captured by capital, and produces results optimized toward the advantage of capital. That's a brittle situation, and a "gold rush" is a cynical response.

The graph is a consequence of statistical anomalies:

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where...

>Safe bet: someone here will say it's the fault of heavy handed government regulation.

And why would that position be inherently wrong?

I don't know about others, but growing up during the recession made me extremely defensive in terms of my risk taking and spending. I view risk as a luxury that is bought, buying the ability to mitigate the personal downsides. A gold rush is a bandaid, a lottery winners dream, to create the freedom to take risk.

I know, risk is something that is most easily taken by the young, the uninhibited, the unindentured, but many of us are indentured to loans, inhibited by our memories, and too busy trying to get old safely to act young.

Reads a little like "we need people to sell shovels and gold pans to, while simultanously keeping the young distracted enough to stay out of our politics".

"Keep Calm and Continue Sacrificing Your Young To Mammon"

When has that NOT been the case? :)

Until WW1, war was seen as a part of life, and for serving in the military was seen as brave, noble thing for young men to do. Even now, we expect most young people to start at the bottom and move up "through hard work" while the scions of the rich start at great positions and build a career without ever having to do minimum wage (exception is certain careers that require skills and are booming, such as technology).

And while the young people are struggling to meet ends meet, they have even less time for politics, participation etc.

If we're talking about America's youth, they need three things.

1) A functional healthcare system like any of the other half a dozen good alternative approaches in other developed nations.

2) For the government to stop inflating the cost of education by enabling universities to raise their prices outside of market forces (eg income growth) via perpetually greater government loan backing. Compare the median income vs median tuition costs, just from the late 1990s vs today, the government made that imbalance possible. For a century the US had very reasonably priced universities (40 years ago you could pay for an Ivy League education with a part-time job), that ended in the very early 2000s when the government inflation run took off (exactly in tandem with healthcare inflation and dollar debasement under the Bush Administration, which you can see represented in the commodity bubbles, housing, gold and the dollar GDP of every other nation soaring simultaneously from the year 2001 to 2008).

3) Significantly improved cities. More people from rural America need to be encouraged to move into urban centers, to resolve the opportunity & quality of life gap (such as falling life expectancy in rural US) that is widening between the two. That includes improving infrastructure, transportation, and available housing supply (entailing, among other things, pushing back against overly aggressive zoning laws used to restrict housing). Urban improvement / renewal, would benefit basically every demographic, including poor black communities that are being persistently hammered by extreme violence.

A possible #4 candidate, would be to continue ending the war on drugs, shifting to treating addiction as a health matter and decriminalizing or legalizing all drugs. Sentencing reform and police reform would also go with that item.

Doing these things would radically improve the circumstances for America's youth as a whole.

So bigger government is the solution? All of those are manifestations of a communist/socialist society.

sounds about right

So are roads, public schools, corporate subsidies, social security, medicare/medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, WIC, and federal student loans. Yet here we are, not collapsing under our already-heavy socialist burden. Also not collapsing under heavy socialist burden: most of Western Europe.

America has a long and proud socialist tradition. It'd be a shame to stop now.

Actually Western Europe is in serious trouble. This argument isnt worth having if we cant agree on that.

>This argument isnt worth having

Well at least we can agree on something.

Parts of western europe would be under water if it were not for 'socialist' projects such as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works

You want a communist resurgence? Because decoupling wages from productivity is how you get a communist resurgence.

When americans are discussing politics they are always missing the point. At least from the outside perspective.

It's like two parties arguing about football. One side is saying, we need to abolish referees, the players should sort problems out themselves. The other party is saying the referees need more power and instruments in order to better control the game.

The simple truth is, people need to make sure that the referees work for them and not for the individual players who hand them the most money.

That assumes the referee should be in control of private resources and decisions, instead of simply ensuring all parties are abiding by the rule of not violating each other's property rights and of fulfilling their contractual obligations. That IS a normative position that not everyone accepts.

1) The current insurance company-based system is held up by government regulation; altering it would likely reduce government intervention in the economy.

2) I don't understand how government reducing their backing of student loans is "bigger government". Could you explain that?

3) I agree that improving infrastructure is bigger government, but it is widely seen as an acceptable role for government, not "a manifestation of a communist/socialist society." On the other hand, "pushing back against overly aggressive zoning laws" is clearly the opposite of bigger government.

In addition to all this, your statement that "all of those are manifestations of a communist/socialist society" needs an explanation for why this matters. Why is it necessarily true that a manifestation of a socialist society is a bad thing?

"If we're talking about America's youth": 1 & 3 (to a lesser degree) are not about youth, but about elders... because young people don't need as much healthcare and their life expectancy isn't a problem until they age.

Young people don't need as much healthcare, but young people still pay for healthcare nonetheless. And people of all ages are less likely to take risks with their employment when their healthcare is tied to their current job.

I'm still pretty young and I need health care. I'm not sure why this myth keeps persisting. We all need regular cancer checkups, and you simply can't do that as a young person in America without health insurance.

What is a "regular cancer checkup" we all need? I don't think I have ever had one. Do you mean just the standard physical checkup? That should be around $100-$200 and not something you would need insurance for. Mammograms and colonoscopies are more for people over 50, not for the young (50 is the new 20?) and still don't cost that much.

I sounded like a fruitcake in the above comment, so let's try again.

https://www.reddit.com/r/drunk/comments/6wnp9r/last_night_of...

Cancer patients, both 33.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15022525

35.

The main issue is that when problems crop up, you're less likely to get them checked out if you're uninsured. Even $100-200 is 15% of a monthly rent payment. Many people end up taking a "Better ignore the symptoms and hope they go away" approach, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

I agree that "regular checkups" is a stretch, but think of it more like "on a regular basis, you need the ability to go see whether you have serious problems." We call that health insurance in the US, but it sucks for people who can't afford it.

I know where you are coming from but a growing body of evidence suggests that going to the hospital is really dangerous (lots of nasty bugs) and that a high level of testing and the invasive procedures they lead to may be causing higher injury and mortality (and definitely higher costs). I have Kaiser for my health care plan (calling it health insurance is a bit of a misnomer) and they don't even schedule regular check-ups until you are in your 50's. Your body cures itself for most problems. Knowing when a pain or ache is likely a serious problem is not easy and takes personal awareness and some education. Of course you won't always be right, but you should know how your body works better than your doctor ever could. Not sure how one would try to teach such information in, say, High School.

Good God what is a "regular cancer checkup"?

I'll be honest the only time I've heard the word "Strivers" it was being used to mock just the kind of patronizing mindset found in this article. I'm sure it would be lovely to rest on an economic boom created by a risky new venture filled with young "expendables'" in the same way that some people pine for a world war to stiffen up the economy; it borders on evil.

As a millennial, I have observed a few perceived 'gold rushes' for individuals in my age group (25) and younger. I am defining 'gold rush' as an exponential growth of capital:

-Creating a technology startup / business

-Becoming YouTube famous and selling 'your own brand'

-Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies

Yeah, I remember talking about the Ethereum boom that happened recently with my significant other and without even mentioning anything about it, she was interested in investing in it.

I personally didn't feel like it was a good idea so we didn't but it was like the Gold Rush. She was ready to rush into it.

The fledgling Marijuana industry might be one candidate.

I know a few different people who quit jobs in finance to go do a marijuana-related startup.

What a load of garbage. The world is awash in opportunity - biotech, genetics, AI, fledging nanotechnology, robotics/drones and other things that will transform us into posthumans in 50-100 years. The greatest fortunes in history will be created in this period.

Whiny idiots will complain though. As they always had.

How many people can realistically grasp those? Or even be worker drones in those industries? ~30% of people are unable to grasp material beyond Gr 8 math. There is a huge problem looming on the horizon - human obsolescence.

Are those people really unable to grasp math or did they just have bad teachers and a lack of parental help?

> But as long as there’s a gold rush somewhere in the economy, big dreamers can dream big.

As long as there’s a gold rush somewhere in the economy, people will focus on getting rich without thinking if they are doing is sustainable and long term positive for the economy, without thinking if structural changes are needed to secure their well-being, which is correlated to the general well-being.

There was a plastics gold rush in the '60s because of the massive investment in R&D and basic research made in the first part of the 20th century, due in no small part to the world wars. There was an internet gold rush in the 90s and the aughts because of the investment made by the US in programs at DARPA and Bell Labs, a public monopoly. You can't have these kinds of non-zero sum "gold rushes" without laying the groundwork through new understandings of the universe, or how to better organize society. Yet as a culture we glorify the Steve Jobses of the world that do the equivelant of carrying the letter from the mailbox to the house, forgetting that it was flown halfway around the world to be there in the first place.

Entrepreneurs don't create gold rushes. Scientists create gold rushes. Forward-looking politicians create gold rushes. Strange devils sitting alone in their rooms create gold rushes. But these rushes happen 20, 30, or 40 years after the initial investment is made.

So we're not going to see many gold rushes in the next few years. Sorry. Hope you have some rents to draw.

cryptocurrency is not enough like another gold rush already?

My perception is probably wrong but I see the cryptocurrency gold rush as already over. To mine bitcoins now is to already have lots of money on machinery or a botnet to steal the machinery to mine the bitcoins.

Do you feel that cryptocurrency is still available to the individual as a gold rush?

I might be the wrong person to ask, my personal opinion of cryptocurrency isn't a popular one. I have issues with the whole idea when I think about the power consumption to keep this 'alive'. And not to forget the 'early adopter' advantage.

But the trade, and the price fluctuations aren't over by long, new cryptocurrencies launched daily by respectable instances and companies. So in this way, I still see a lot of 'rush' potential, even today.

And like the goldrush, it was the people selling the shovels and things making the good steady profits. And there are also a lot of hardware things to change/improve on the cryptocurrency market.

There was an article I can't find now, but it breaks down the cost of bitcoin's energy use relative to the whole world. The conclusion was something like, if bitcoin reaches a trillion dollar GDP, the energy usage would only be around ~1.5% of our total. I think I'm getting that number wrong, but the point was that we spend way more energy for trivial purposes compared to a trillion dollar GDP.

By any chance would it be this site?

https://realtimebitcoin.info

Maybe this site?

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Yes, crypto trading. Nobody is into mining anymore.

$600 AMD RX 580s tell me that someone is definitely still into mining.

a lot of the altcoins are premined, so you don't really need to be mining

there's a lot of money being made in ICO's

Yes, there are tons of cryptocoins projects just right now besides of Bitcoin, even some of them almost reaching the level of Bitcoin (Ethereum) and with the ICO-hype trying to be next Kickstart/Sillicon-Valley on cryptocurrencies is basically like chasing digital gold. The question is what coin to mine, not what coin is popular right now... personally i made solid money with dogecoin, was able to buy 2 BTC's when mining that coin was super-cheap.

If you're willing to take risks, coins like NEO (antshares) would have been incredible investments as of a few weeks ago: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/neo/

$1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was raised in token sales in the first half of 2017 alone. While there are many opinions on the intrinsic value of this new sector, everyone agrees it's a gold rush.

It doesn't require any mining to create a token and raise funds. Just copy pasting token contract and crowdsale code (generally on Ethereum), and putting up a website with a whitepaper. The total market cap of tokens is now approximately $10 billion:

https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/

I feel the value of some coins, at least BTC and ETH stand to rise big time in the coming years. We're still in a phase of mostly early adopters (tech people), but slowly digital coins will become of use for 'normal' people. Banks are also starting to show an interest in digital coins. And at many online stores you can now pay with Bitcoin. In The Netherlands there are a few Bitcoin ATM's as well, though I have never used one.

Of course, for governments these digital coins are problematic. It's much more difficult to estimate someone's wealth if one keeps coins in more or less anonymous digital wallets. Also, digital coins make it easy to transfer wealth oversees without fees, which is probably something that banks won't like (the usually subtract a fee through the exchange rate), so banks might try to lobby against Bitcoin.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we don't use our conventional bank accounts anymore for payments, but use some ATM card connected to a digital wallet. Again, this would be bad for banks.

A few weeks ago I bought my first digital coins as well for around 12.000 EUR. I expect the value of these coins to still rise quickly over the coming years.

I'd say BTC, ETH, NEO and OMG are safe bets for now.

The gold rush analogy is perfect for cryptocurrency.

In the beginning, anyone with a pan/computer could go to a creek/their home PC and pull out gold/bitcoins.

But now, the money's in selling shovels/ICOs/exchanges.

You're not going to outmine a Chinese farm built at the bottom of a hydroelectric dam.

There's still plenty of opportunities in the space. You're not likely to ever be able to buy a full bitcoin for $4.00 ever again, but there's other coins that might also find success. Ethereum has gone up 35x since the announcement that it was being added to Coinbase right here on hacker news back in February 2017. Litecoin has gone up 3x since the announcement that it was added to Coinbase here on Hacker News since then. Neo has gone up 4x since the beginning of August, Monero has gone up almost 3x since two weeks ago. But not every alt-coin will be successful, and figuring out which ones will go up, and when, and how long they'll keep going up, is the tough bit.

And while it's hard to do, you could try riding the waves of bitcoin, sell when it reaches an all-time-high, and buy during the inevitable correction, slowly increasing how many coins you have without spending any extra money along the way. Bitcoin is volatile enough that it's difficult to time, though, and personally I just buy a little bit every week and hold.

But that's the same in a gold rush, not every person who went to California to pan for gold found anything worth a damn. It's risky as hell, but if you can afford a little risk, and are willing to immerse yourself in the world a bit so you can increase your chance that the risk you take will be a profitable one, you could still make a lot of money here.

And if you can build a service to wrap around cryptocurrency that doesn't already exist or has a bad solution, you could potentially make good money there too. (Sell the shovels, as it were). Coinbase makes a percent every time someone buys or sells coins on their service, no matter what the price is, they don't care, as long as people keep coming to them.

There's also alt-coins that are low enough on everyone's radar that you can mine them, and hope that at some point they catch on, or get targeted for a pump and dump (which I've seen happen for many coins). Just mine coins in it and keep an eye on it and wait until it shoots up in price and sell before it has a chance to drop again. I don't really recommend this, but it's an option.

And finally, ICOs are hot right now. Do your research, come up with an idea that could be funded with an ICO, and take a shot at building a company funded with your own ICO. Stupid risky, but yet another opportunity that clearly some people are taking advantage of and quickly getting a jumpstart on their companies with them.

Just because one opportunity is no longer feasible doesn't mean that all opportunities have disappeared. In fact, there's a lot more different approaches to finding success with cryptocurrencies than there was 6+ years ago, where you pretty much could only mine a bunch of coins and struggle to find anybody who would give you money for them.

Said a journalist working a 9-to-5 job by choice.

"Everything that can be invented already has been so soon the patent office can shut down"

The quote is apocryphal but sums up the article.

My high school physics teacher told me that during the first Internet bubble more students signed up for STEM electives and actually paid attention in class. Technical fields were exciting and lucrative. But when the crash hit students became disillusioned and lost interest in STEM again.

1. Launch adventurous Millennials into spaaaaaace!

2. ???

3. PROFIT!!!*

*For the companies that build rockets and launch them...

The young need something big to transfer relative wealth from the old. It is getting crazy. With rich people living into thier 90s those who inherit are generally already in thier 60s or even 70s. The family money is moving between retirement funds. Something like a gold rush would move that value into the hands of the 30 or 40-somethings where it might do something more.

It's called socialism, but it's anathema to American culture (by design). We're so bathed in delusions of our inherent affluence and power that we'll watch the wealthy suck actual blood from young people as we're surrounded by tent cities. And many still think they're "winning" because they can pay another rich person $3000 to live in a closet.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2017/aug/21/am...

To have another gold rush we have to slow down the flow of information. No longer can a man search for a better life, based on simple writings. Now, everything is validated or rejected before he can pack his bags and head west.

We are currently living in a gold rush.. Make something and sell it online. Or support those that do.

I was astounded to see that there is a perceived shorted of gold rushes.

"Filecoin Suspends ICO After Raising $186M in One Hour" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14988132

It may be a ways away, but I'm excited for the space rush.. once medium and small size companies can afford space ships to explore the solar system, finding asteroids made of gold. That will be glorious.

> The economy does best when talented risk-takers are driven by the chance to strike it rich.

Wha~~~t? Who says so?

There are interesting studies on young adults growing up in the boom vs recession time lines.

Young kids are busy at games, used to be the PC, game console, now adding cell phones and tablets.

Let's deal with this new mental-drug-war first before any Gold Rush suggestions, as the kids then young people ignore anything else, even traffic lights...their eyes are too busy on the screen these days.

That sounds like bad parenting and foolishness becoming more visible, rather than a new threat.

I don't know how much of this is really new. I spent my youth watching TV and playing Sega and computer games. By age 12 I had seen every episode of "All In The Family" at least twice. I stayed up watching TV on school nights until 1AM.

I also do believe I received bad parenting, but eventually I turned out OK.

I agree completely, and honestly I did something very similar with books. It doesn't really matter if you're staying up until 1 AM imagining things, watching TV, reading a book, or any other activity… The issue is that you're not asleep getting ready for school, perhaps not having done your homework.

The difference though is that somebody looking at a smart phone is seen as antisocial, where is someone buried in a book is not, although of course the person in the phone could be reading a book! Most of this is with the politicians call "optics" you know?

the nation now has more female college students(undergraduate and master and PhD at all levels) than male students, one reason I believe is that boys are more susceptible to games.

parenting is a profession without a degree and you have to learn by doing, and hard to get it totally right all the time. games are indeed a true headaches(if not the biggest headache) for many families, it is getting much worse because of the powerful smart phones and tablets these days, it is just the reality.

The male peers of those college students are more likely to be working.

The question is, what difference is there in incentives for those "boys" and "girls" to cause the difference in choice. What gains do young adult men get in getting a early income?

Said every parent for the past several generations... Even before Atari, kids have been given more opportunity to play games with each generation as they have not been required to work to feed their family as much as the prior generation.

Bread and circuses

Legal Cannabis.

Don't we already have *coin ?

Onto Mars!

... legal marijuana??!?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com