This entire thing has been some kind of bizarre politics induced self flagellation. Regardless of whether or not you think it is right or wrong, it has been no secret for decades that this conflict would be an outcome of Ukraine alignment with the west, yet the west continued to pursue it even after 2014, even with the huge increased dependency on Russian and Ukrainian resources while limiting domestic investment in energy because of ESG policies. And this is just the sprinkle on top of the inflation sundae that they have cooked up these last couple years.
Now everyone is in too deep with costs so high, there is limited ability to back out and save face and spin the story without it looking like the massive screw up with huge costs and limited benefit that it has been. At the end of the day, we are going to get a global recession and mass food insecurity and starvation in the global south for what?
It looks like they have the choice of saving the dollar or saving the economy, and it seems like in their attempt for both fixing inflation while having a "soft landing," they may get neither.
Under the context of industry impact, yes. If you wish to be pedantic, maybe I should have been clearer in saying that I consider everything past vanilla WoW to not be of the same caliber of the games that preceded it. Regardless, the point is that they are a shadow of their former self.
The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.
Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.
Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game has basically been stagnant for years, waiting for Overwatch 2 (which was recently teased and didn't appear to change much) while other games like Valorant or Apex have made it largely irrelevant in that space.
Blizzard is close to being a zombie company, the last game with true Blizzard pedigree was probably around 15 years ago, their last decent game was almost 10 years ago, they are milking the last few drops from the geriatric cash cow that is WoW, they have completely failed to capitalize on competitive games with Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm or even WoW arena, and they are all languishing, Diablo Immortal is a mobile p2w game, while all they have to look forward to is Overwatch 2 which is a glorified patch and if Diablo 4 isn't some smash success they have nothing else.
Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.
This stuff is so insidious. I remember the outrage when Bethesda came out with the golden horse dlc, and now we are at a stage where people willingly accept paying money just for the small chance of getting a golden horse. Games are a big business now, and significant developer resources are spent on this type of monetization now, for a lot of games (like mobile gacha games), the core game elements almost feel like they only exist to enable the lootbox gambling loop.
I think a lot of people knew it was coming soon, and that triggered the death spiral. Everyone knows 20%apy staking rewards can't last forever, and people on Reddit of all places (if Reddit knows then it is far from a secret) saw that reserves would run dry by June with the current trajectory, and they were adjusting rates way too slow to prevent any kind of shock. So people started to jump ship, which caused the initial depegging since people were selling both UST and LUNA to get out of the ecosystem entirely.
A huge part that is rarely discussed is the shift based on consumer demographics at the turn of the century. Academic/ salon paintings were extremely grand, time consuming and expensive, so they were out of reach for most people that weren't wealthy or royalty. The new growing middle class had an appetite for art but there was limited supply of things they could afford, also seen in the craft movement that was happening at the same time where consumers desired for something greater than soulless, mass produced factory goods. Art dealers filled the gap by adopting salon rejects which would in turn popularize the new impressionist styles that were counter to pieces you would see at salons. An academic painter like Bougereau would complete much fewer pieces over their career than someone like Picasso.
I think social media is like our generations tobacco, everyone uses it and it is considered fashionable and cool but eventually it will start to come to light how unhealthy and insidious all the data harvesting, time sinks and gamifying social interactions at scale can be, especially with children who have much of the spare time to dedicate to it.
I think it is actually kind of crazy how so many people here, a proverbial VC techbro hub, just love to get on their soapbox to preach sanctimoniously about the great cryptocurrency evil that is destroying the world with so much glee, without looking in the mirror and realizing that what is going on in cryptocurrencies isn't really that much different than what is going on in the valley or elsewhere in society.
The behavior exhibited by those insufferable cryptobros (who I am not a fan of either to be clear) isn't much different than that of techbros having some of the highest paying salaries in the world with a matching ego, working on some vaporware juice package squeezer or creating incredible amounts of social discord through social media and data harvesting, or the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets memestocks like amc or gme, or any of the pandemic stocks that are down 75-90% right now. People spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on jpgs is not much different than people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bananas taped to walls at Art Basel, I could go on and on.
A lot of the smugness and resentment comes from a response to human behavior which has not been exclusive to cryptocurrencies, so I don't get the fixation on this one thing, it isn't even like cryptocurrences are some ubiquitously salient thing, you can very easily filter it out from your life and social media feeds and hear next to nothing about it.
Like half of NASDAQ has lost ~50%, a quarter have lost ~75% and 5% have lost ~90% of their value from their highs. Coinbase is not an outlier, basically everything growth and risk on is getting dragged out behind the shed right now.
There was a study on online dating habits that said that even someone who was 5'8 would need to earn ~138k more than the same 6'0 person to be considered equivalent, controlling for everything else [1]. Of course it is just one study and I havent looked into it fully but nonetheless.
I am not really specifically making an argument on their salaries, I guess I am saying that Nurses are in the position where they have the least leverage in the system so they end up bearing a lot of the responsibilities that should be held elsewhere while having a disproportionate amount of resources allocated to them.
In healthcare I get the feeling that a lot of workers feel stuck in that there are many patients and people depending on them, and to leave would sort of be like abandoning them while increasing the burden on ex-cowoerkers.
I actually think that this is just one example of many across a ton of disciplines where people like Nurses basically are forced to deal with costs and responsibilities offloaded onto them from above the responsibility chain. Resources are eaten up at the top of the chain to their benefit and costs are offloaded down the chain until it reaches people like Nurses at the end of the line who have to deal with it because there is nobody else to offload it to. There is no shortage of people wanting to be nurses (in some places it is extremely competitive), and there is a huge demand for nurses based on shortages everywhere, but somehow we are in a situation where nurses are overworked because they are short staffed.
I look at academia which is rife with money sloshing around, and see undergraduate classes are taught by grad students who make ~30k a year who are basically the Nurses of the academic world and treated like garbage. The justice system is dysfunctional, courts systems are overwhelmed and understaffed so criminals just enter and exit like a revolving door, and police is basically useless because the best they can do is taxi criminals into the system that automatically spits them out again, while they take the brunt of public criticism for how they are forced to deal with a problem that is mostly beyond their scope.
In all of these cases it seems like the bottom if falling out of these institutions, and the responsibilities have fallen on their respective janitors to deal with it when the solutions need to come from places that have been incentivized to create the mess in the first place.
In my experience salmon is fairly consistently delicious, it is difficult to have a bad tasting piece, while tuna can vary from kind of gross fishy taste to amazing, with flavor more complex than any salmon sashimi I have ever had.
The concept of the Masterworks thing that they are talking about was tried previously with other collectables, notably Mythic Markets with Magic: the Gathering cards. You can do a quick google search to see how that turned out and the controversy that surrounded it.
I think Dalio is choosing to focus on what the individual can do to navigate change one cannot control, which is a lot easier for individuals to do compared to what systemic change could be done to make changes for the better, which often requires massive resources, coordination and political capital not available to the average person. That sort of stuff is outside of the scope of what the book is about it seems.
The video itself is a super condensed version of his book primarily aimed at the Youtube audience demographic, the book it is based on probably goes much further into depth.
It is like some people actually want him to commit self righteous suicide for no benefit to anyone besides some tweet saying nothing more than "Russia sucks lol" to satiate the selfish desires of outspoken protestors.
I wonder how many of those people would be virtuous enough to bear the costs in his place to allow him to speak out.
It depends on what your goals are. If you want to de-platform individuals it can be effective (but it isn't guaranteed since people like Trump have remained very popular in spite of it), but these individuals are just grifters who exploit an underlying sentiment, people who are de-platformed and forgotten are just replaced by someone else. Right wing populist sentiment which feeds it all is just as prominent as it has been before the censorship.
I don't even thing it is about right or wrong opinions either, since a lot of popular beliefs held on that site are inconsistent with each other. There is just some sort of orthodoxy that you have to follow or else you are downvoted or deleted.
It is across the country at this point. IIRC Gascón, the former DA in SF is now the DA in LA and pursuing similar policies, while there are similar policies implemented or being implemented in other cities like Chicago and New York.
People will blame the police, but I think this is a symptom of far greater issues in society, whose costs have been offloaded leaving the police to (poorly) manage it because that's probably the best they can do and everyone else is too busy avoiding culpability.
I am not saying the reason London in popular is only because of laundering, it is self evident that it is one of the major cosmopolitan metro areas in the world, but I am saying for launderers, London is a top destination. They have been the capital for the financial world for well over a century, you could even say the first globalized world with the Empire, with that there is a lot of money in the city, a lot of money in the city naturally creates the amenities, infrastructure, institutions and lifestyles that appeal and cater to that money over time (laundering being just one of those things), which in turn makes the city more attractive to people with money, creating a virtuous cycle. London exists at the intersection of new and old world globalism, no other city has even been in the game long enough to even compare.
It is a little bit of both influencing each other, but the system in London is definitely the killer app. My understanding of the history is that there are systems that have been entrenched in the London financial industry going back centuries due to the unique history of the City of London and how it administrates itself separately from the rest of England/ GB. It was the global hub during pax brittania, and remained the financial hub of the world after the war thanks to the Eurodollar. It was at this point that tax systems were devised involving their crown dependencies to obfuscate everything which made it a popular place to launder money. A lot of the opulence has developed along side over all these years.
So it was the case that London was the city of the world during the empire which made it the candidate for running the Eurodollar system to rebuild Europe which cemented its place as the financial capital of the world up until America financialized their economy in the late 70s, its colonies allowed for unique tax systems which made it even more popular.
I got most of this from the book entitled Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, and the documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8 that was inspired by it.
I don't think this is limited to Russian oligarchs, I thought that because of its trust and crown dependencies system, London is a popular place for people to hide this kind of stuff. Russian oligarchs and other unsavory individuals like corrupt leaders in Africa, the Middle East and the developing world all dump their ill gotten gains into the opaque system away from prying eyes. The stuff you can actually see, like mansions in Knightsbridge are probably just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, everything else is held in such opaque ways that nobody even knows who it actually belongs to. It is so blatant that you couldn't really call it a dirty secret.
I think it is the fate of companies that got big on innovation, but lost their edge because they got too far ahead and priorities shifted. They lose their ability to be innovative as others catch up so they have to find other ways to give shareholders value.