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Comment by wseqyrku

13 hours ago

All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.

Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.

  • As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

    What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.

    Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.

    Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.

    • Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.

    • Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.

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One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.

It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.

  • You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.

  • Liminal places like 4chan are upstream to mainstream culture/sentiment.

    Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.

    • This needs to be taught in school. I’m shocked at how many people don’t get it. I’ve believed this forever which is why I follow the “strange” including weird cultural spaces, fringe para-stuff, whatever.

      What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.

      If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.

      It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.

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Pretty solidly false. Some have a thesis. Some have rules about what they will not invest in.

The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.

This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”

  • > Some have a thesis. Some have rules

    You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.

    Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.