garybro

A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech.

Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water.

I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.

Yes.

I bought my parents five Dots for Christmas to use as intercoms. They live on a farm, with multiple outbuildings, so if something happened, they can yell at the Echo in the building they are in for help. Any other use they get out of it (my dad uses the music feature a lot) is just an added bonus.

I'll admit, I'm a gambler, so trading is kind of a rush.

I only post limit orders and pay 0% maker fee on GDAX. I've never paid to make a trade. If you do pay as a taker, BTC is 0.25% and LTC is 0.3%, but I set relatively conservative exits for my positions and haven't had much trouble making them.

You're not wrong. It very well could. I think there will be a major correction before (if) that happens, though.

Not a bit.

I know what I put in, and I know what my profit is, so I am going to report the net gain and pay the tax on that (ugh)

I've made about $110k profit this year in crypto on a $21k investment earlier this year, and I think this is all a giant bubble. I was at my parents' house for Thanksgiving and a commercial with Ron Paul talking about Bitcoin came on, which coincided with around the time it went to $10k, and it hit me really hard that this isn't going to last forever (and probably will hurt sooner rather than later). I liquidated everything and just entertain myself doing some day trading on GDAX. I don't hodl anymore.

The entire thing is absolutely stupid, and isn't going to last forever. People are way too bullish on it. People who have no business investing in it are taking on debt to do so, with no clear exit strategy other than "the moon." A lot of people who don't have any money are going to get absolutely toasted when the pendulum swings the other way. They're in it to get rich. They have no idea what blockchains are. They just think they're buying magic internet money people get rich from.

To put a little perspective on how ridiculous this all is: Last night after Coinbase came back from maintenance, there was the (expected) sell-off, so I figured I'd make a quick buck and bought 300 LTC for about $241 each, then sold it a few minutes later for $251 after the instant rebound and went to bed with a nice $3k profit. I woke up this morning and was astonished to see that LTC was about $380. This was in the course of about 5 hours. Had I not sold it last night, I would have made almost $40k. I'm a little annoyed about that, but again: this is a stupid, irrational bubble that makes absolutely no sense. It's entirely speculative.

I think crypto and blockchain has a future, but it has to solve a few problems first (transaction fees/time and anonymity). None of the big three currencies do that well enough yet. This bubble is going to pop soon and I'm worried that a lot of people are going to get impacted badly.

Tried my account. Says I'm a bot. My rating: incorrect.