Comment by taurath
1 day ago
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and are playing the game on the field.
Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
Hopefully that helps explain why there weren’t and wont be any consequences.
That's a fair point. But I'm not talking about the legitimacy (or not) of crypto. More that the president was (is?) running a pump and dump scheme. It should be profoundly embarrassing to supporters and it should be political suicide for the scammer. But it barely registered.
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It was extremely obviously not some intentional 500 IQ plot to keep crypto illegitimate...
> Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
This is worded like it's something negative, but I honestly fail to see what exactly. Tokens will be pushed to grey market, and? They are already fully utilizing grey and black markets, half of the worlds drug, arm and sanctioned oil trade is done in these shittokens. Cutting out the legal bridges and exchanges would reduce total amount of legal liquidity and on/off ramps and not not change grey and black markets much, since criminals are already operating there.
Instead it would cut a lot of the "legal" schemes by which country elites are laundering bribes and evade taxes. At least part of the schemes.
Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
Yeah the whole thing is absolutely scandalous. The president being anywhere near crypto is such a huge, blaring warning. Even more so if people are "investing" as a quid pro quo. But ~nobody cares. Scam economy
Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
Maybe we should just abandon the concept of "freedom" and embrace material values. Or is that too 19th-century progressive? Must we always ignore all discourse that happened after the bill of rights was scribbled?
Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
Hmmm...Defending yourself is literally the same as abortion and gender dysphoria.
No.
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When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
> When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid
In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.
Why do you see those two processes as orthagonal?
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It does both! There is no natural law which prevents the formation of a monopoly.
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Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years later.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
I read "scambling" recently and the word has stayed with me since.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
Are you saying this is specific to the US?
I think you would be hard pressed to find a country that didn’t get involved in some war that had nothing to do with defense.
nope, it's as old as war itself
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
I have bad news, I don't think we're that great at the free market either.
Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
Professor Cottom's a certified (McArthur) Genius, and she clocked this "scam culture" back in 2021:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-insti...
Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
Bro. You don't apply for the McArthur.
And why would you go out of your way to misspell her name? What do you gain by that aside from just looking petulant?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535377.
Americans: freedom to
Europe: freedom from
> “not even pretending to care about people they affect.”
“Not even pretending to care about the people they elect.”
There, I fixed it for you.
I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.
The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/part-tim...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/still-falling-short-on-hours...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
> The problem is capitalism
Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out.
Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
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> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
This is Reagan-era starve the beast propaganda [1][2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
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The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
Isn't it interesting that you can't tell!
Well, really, that's all countries.
Some dude was willing to resort to more depraved measures than his rivals, and made enough people do what he wanted in order to become the leader.
All of the greatest societies champion their defeat of and superiority from people exactly like that.
Very ahistorical view
Really? Show me one society that wasn't ruled by a class of people that didn't, at some point, operate a monopoly on violence, often with basically nothing that would count as "due process" today.
One.