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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason).

The Bitcoin Maxi case at this point is that it is digital gold. More fungible and easier to store, and readily convertible to whatever currency you need. I don't buy it all myself, but Bitcoins ongoing survival is proof of something.

And if you think a dollar collapse is pending, then BTC is probably where people flee to in at least the short term.

Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids.

I think I can make a case for NOT following certain paths, but as for actionable "Do this to prosper in the future" advice I am at a loss. Its not like you can just say "Plastics" and nudge them off in the direction of the next big technological gold rush.

10-15 years ago "learn to code" would have been SOLID advice. No longer. I'm increasingly reading that AI models are really good at various parts of the practice of medicine... and SUPPOSEDLY robot surgery is here. So the Med school investment looks a bit questionable.

And as for college funds... why should colleges even be a thing, at least with their current business model, when AIs are generally capable of teaching at the level of even the best professors, across any subject?

Yeah, for Gen Alpha, there is probably NO career advice that previous generations can offer them based on experience other than "wait and see."

Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.

I can imagine a world where the AI is doing all the knowledge work but keeps giving humans various tasks that it needs to complete in order to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Tasks that will seem completely nonsensical to the individual performing them but in the aggregate allow the AI to improve things, iteration after iteration, and thereby keep most humans 'employed' and paying them in some currency they can spend with other humans and thus the 'economy' chugs along but in effect everyone on earth is a 'gig worker' who gets tasks assigned to them as needed, and gets rewarded for performance.

A scarier version is that the AI requires you to be Neuralinked up to it so it can inject arbitrary commands into your brain as needed, but also rewards you handsomely for helping out.