swiley @swiley@social.cleverlibre.org

@icedquinn Maybe they're assuming it gets recycled somehow?

@finlaydag33k At least here in the US residential ISPs are all blocked from sending email.

@icedquinn Your body doesn't consume nitrogen though

@freemo My parent's house got struck once. It welded the weather vane to point one direction and we had to replace half the electronics.

@djsumdog @icedquinn It really makes more sense if you look at it as just another credit market.

@icedquinn The US isn't the first place where people in power robbed everyone else by changing the rules and it's also not the first place where something changing on paper made everything more expensive.

@freemo Etherium has been pretty disappointing lately. My biggest gains were in BAT. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I own some.

@icedquinn We survived hundreds of years without understanding the *theory* of the complex contracts everyone made, but we've had things like credit, options, futures, and insurance for a long time.

@icedquinn What?

@icedquinn It's just another form of credit. Without financial instruments everyone would have to deal with the inability to predict the future themselves and wouldn't be able to handle moderate surprises.

It's a lot like the insurance thing.

@finlaydag33k @fluffy You really have to have a VPS (or at least a business class ISP connection) anyway.

@icedquinn If you didn't have a market for them they wouldn't be worth anything (and because of the market you get speculation and financial instruments.)

@niconiconi Decade old chips are underrated. I have a phone with one and it runs fine as long as I'm not stupid with it.

Maybe it will be a good thing, electron will finally be unusable even on developer machines.

@icedquinn I've never looked closely at IPOs but I was under the impression that people who got shares during an IPO had involved themselves in some way with the formation of the company which is more or less the same thing.

@icedquinn

>They do nothing useful

The economic justification is that they're providing unsecured debt to finance improvements to businesses.
Also I think a slight majority of the trading (in the US anyway) is retail people like me who have a day job and just like getting drunk while clicking on all the buttons in the brokerage app.

@icedquinn I think the argument is that successful stock traders posses some kind of oracle that allows them to plan for the future and keep markets liquid. Most people are sure that's impossible but we wouldn't want to stop an oracle if it ever appeared. :p