OP is like: Even if you have highly-valuable skills, you can’t get ahead, because the game is stacked in favor of renting out your assets instead of delivering valuable labor.
Reply is like: Yeah, but have you considered renting out your assets though?
In this case, probably. I don’t think the world was asking for a Pinterest clone.
But the problem is, Google does this with everything.
Stadia had an incredibly successful moment with the Cyberpunk launch. Yet Google failed to hype it up, and then announced about two months later that they were laying off a bunch of devs.
At the same time, they restructured the monetization and improved the client, making it a really compelling service. And all the news was “Stadia is dead”. And then it was.
A government that’s just small enough to fit through your front door and rule your personal life.
Malcolm X put it well:
The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them.
But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.
That said, many people have a mistaken view of voting.
They think “I’m picking someone who represents who I am as a person, and so who I pick is a reflection of my very soul.”
Or at best, they think “I’m picking someone who will act in my best interests. I may not like them as a person, but the actions they take are at least a good approximation of the actions I want them to take.”
The reality is more like “I’m picking someone who will inevitably act in the interest of those in power. I need to pick someone who has the right vulnerabilities. They don’t have a good rapport with certain powerful entities, so they don’t mind pissing those ones off if it means they can score some votes as a result.”
You’re not picking someone to lead your side. You’re picking who you’d rather negotiate with from their side.
Millennial here.
I never got a participation trophy, but I did once get a 4th-place trophy. I threw it away, because it reminded me of failure. Kids aren’t as dumb as you think they are. Many of them probably feel neutral or negative about participation/failure trophies as well.
https://www.jasonfeifer.com/episode/everyone-is-wrong-about-participation-trophies/
Jason Feifer: In short, they are both successful, and they pursued paths that were very much their own despite having both received participation trophies. The world is unpredictable, it is impossible for us to know how one thing impacts another. But we, and here I speak generally, as in all of us, the royal we don’t like unpredictability. It makes us uncomfortable, not knowing what will happen next, or how to control our lives, or how to shape our kids lives. And so we often reject the premise entirely.
Jason Feifer: We say “No, no, no, no, no, the world is very predictable. A leads directly to B, which leads directly to C. I can point at this one thing over here and know exactly how it will impact that one thing over there.” And this, I think, is how we end up with debates like participation trophies. Because if the world is totally understandable than fixing it is easy. And oh, how appealing that is, how comfortable and rewarding that is. We can identify bad things and then backtrack to their origins and then eliminate those bad seeds. Simple as that. And isn’t that what Jeff Walz wants us to do?
Jeff Walz: What’s that teaching kids? It’s okay to lose. And unfortunately, it’s our society. It’s what we’re building for. And it’s not just in basketball, it’s in life.
Jason Feifer: But what if that’s not true? I mean, actually, let me rephrase that. It isn’t true. I am flat out telling you it isn’t true. The real truth is to paraphrase Walt Whitman, “We contain multitudes.” External things influence us but we also influence external things. One person’s insulting participation trophy is another person’s satisfying reward. In the case of Tori and Hilary, I would argue that we’re hearing the stories of two very different women who grew up, learned about themselves and then their self understandings shaped how they felt about the trophy. The participation trophy didn’t singularly shape them. A world of things shaped them and they also shaped themselves and that is the reality of life and then a little tiny part of that was reflected off the participation trophy’s, tiny, shiny surface.
Jason Feifer: What is the true lesson of the participation trophy? It is this: winning happens in many ways, and it always has and it always will. And if you think that a stupid, little trophy has anything to do with any of this, well, then I guess I will give you a participation trophy for trying, but it doesn’t mean much.
Can I get a Stable Infusion?
I’m not sure how to feel about the level of support shown for Bushnell, when previous self-immolators have been thoroughly ignored.
Part of me is glad that his death is not in vain, and his friends and family can take some solace in that fact.
But part of me is terrified that 20 more people are going to try similar stunts and achieve… less-than-nothing.
There are already too many martyrs. We need agitators. You can’t agitate if you’re dead or otherwise removed.
Please: If you’re considering Aaron Bushnell an inspiration, be inspired by the fact that he did something unusual, not that he did something self-destructive. Go throw some soup on a Van Gogh instead.
The funny thing is: You’re not wrong, you’re just talking about it at the wrong level.
Individually, if you don’t save and invest, you’re gonna be screwed due to unpredictable expenses, inflation, and lack of runway for retirement.
But if you zoom out and look at a whole population, it’s also true that tons of people are in such severe financial conditions that they can’t save and invest, so your advice is something like “buy a life jacket” to someone who’s already 10 feet underwater.
And if you zoom out even further, there’s no way that we’re going to solve severe wealth inequality through individual action. And especially not through investing, which helps you as an individual relative to other individuals, but also provides more options to the wealthy recipients/managers of the funds to extract wealth at a rate higher than your ROI, which accelerates the concentration of assets in the hands of people who already own a disproportionate amount of them.