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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   32107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Perhaps a silly metaobservation, but I am somewhat disappointed with a schlubby nerd like SBF being the villain of our time. Fraudsters in the past used to be a lot more charismatic and often partied with the jetset. Even Madoff was known as having a huge stash of cocaine, going to parties with supermodels etc. SBF bagged Caroline Ellison and did a bunch of weird nootropical experiments while playing video games like LoL.

I can't help but feel that our culture has regressed into becoming more boring - perhaps suitable for the hyperdigital age. I know it may sound weird, but I think who the bad guys are in any society says a lot about that culture. And I'm afraid SBF being our villain says a lot of bad things about ours.

This place needs to get out of its bubble I'm sociable and have talked with many different stratums of people since the FTX thing and literally zero of them have mentioned it. Tons of people talking about Musk, practically no one even knows who this guy is. SBF won't even be a footnote except maybe largest individual Crypto exit scam. It's not even still much news the in crypto circles I run in.

Wait till the Michael Lewis movie comes out.

Lewis has written 19 books. Three were made into movies.

I’m still waiting to see Ken Leung play Brad Katsuyama on screen.

Edit: …and only one of those three films is about not-sports.

I mean I'm sure /r/buttcoin is happy to have a new low effort meme and way to suppress the deep resentment that they knew about crypto when it was worth nothing and sneered at it instead of joining in. But /r/sneerclub being informed of every bad take from the Nrx crowd doesn't mean it's mainstream or that some Nrx rando is "the villian of our time". We live in the world where many thousands of people are dying because Putin wanted to bring glory to Russia, Xi is welding sick people into their homes to save face and there is a whole cast of other people in line for the top spot depending on your culture war perspective(Trump, Kavanaugh, Clinton, Soros, Musk, pick any leader in the middle east). Kim Jong-Un exists for god's sake. We get scams like FTX several times a decade. What's it huge compared to? WeWorks seemed to get more normie discussion than this.

I mean I'm sure /r/buttcoin is happy to have a new low effort meme and way to suppress the deep resentment that they knew about crypto when it was worth nothing and sneered at it instead of joining in.

This is very few people. Buttcoin is warning people to stay away; I don't think members there are motivated by envy or jealously, but see crypto as a 'net negative' on the world. Imho, crypto is too volatile and risky.

Most normies don't have an opinion on a thing like crypto beyond 'it's a thing that exists, wow someone got rich when they bought it when cheap'. FTX and SBF are things that get mentioned on a news site, a single headline for a single day, and then it's gone like all the rest.

i doubt it. Coinbase has 50+ million users , almost all from the US

so 1/7th or 14% of the US population assuming that 100% of all coinbase users are A) living in the US and B) bullish on crypto rather than looking to fleece some suckers. I don't think 50 million users proves nearly as much as you think it does.

You have to be at least 18 years old to have an account. Also, a single account is probably for a single household. And, this is just Coinbase. There are other services, too. By comparison, the 2021 NFL season averaged 17 million viewers.

The oft cited 17.1 million viewers figure is average viewers per game not for the season or league in total. Most estimates for the total number of NFL fans, based on the viewership of play-off and championship games, are upwards of 100 million, IE close to 1/3rd of the US population.

It's all over the news . Anyone who follows the news probably saw it . I think you'd have to be in a bubble to have not heard about it, than the other way around.

Really? Zero people have brought up musk with me, but two have mentioned SBF out of the blue on tangents from general "what to do with money/bloody banks" topics. Like "well just don't give it all to that Bankman guy"

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