There's a meaningful difference between casino-style gambling and investing in something like stocks or cryptocurrency.
Specifically, in a casino the odds are known and fixed in favor of the house. If I'm playing roulette at the casino and place $1000 on black, I have a less than 50% chance of winning (18/38) due to the two green spaces on the wheel. Over a long enough period of gambling the house will win and I will lose.
With stocks or cryptocurrency, things are very different. The odds are not known in advance, nor are they controlled by a specific organization. You can have a situation, particularly with stocks, where value is actually created and there is a net increase in wealth - this is not possible in traditional gambling, which is explicitly zero-sum.
Can't you also have a situation where value is a lost and there is a net loss in wealth?
I think it's mostly about how predictable the risk is. In a casino, the odds are stated and known. In stocks, (in the US) companies are supposed to file statements with the SEC to honestly report the risks to their best extent. With crypto, no one seems to have to report any risk evaluation.
I guess the other difference is that in casinos, the bet typically goes to zero faster than with stocks and sometimes crypto, as it seems rare that those will zero out, so people may not lose 100% of a bet but sure can lose 99%.
But I agree with OP, that it mostly depends on whether someone likes it whether they see it as gambling, less so in actual definitions of what gambling is.
That's not the same thing as value being destroyed.
Indeed, Japanese companies have on the whole been profitable throughout that time and have passed on some of those profits to their owners, so value has been created.
The stock market bubble bursting didn't destroy value, it simply revealed that some investors overpaid
If a company pays no dividends and its stock goes to zero, it's a complete loss. Not sure if there's any value created. If a company takes investment money and never sells a product and then runs out of money, I suppose you could argue maybe value is created for others in the spending of that investor money, but that argument may apply for casinos as well.
But maybe I'm missing the point you're trying to make.
Surely crypto has always been zero-sum? People put their money into the pot, and then take it out at different times, in proportion equal to when they originally put their money in.
Crypto seems to be negative sum, due to the large amount of equipment and energy expenses that go into operating the whole infrastructure. (Obviously this is technically true of almost everything, but in case of cryptocurrencies I think the relative operating cost is much higher than, e.g., stocks or bonds or casinos).
It depends on the currency, some have transaction fee mechanisms that pay existing holders, meaning there’s at least some amount of revenue (holders are selling transaction slots to transactors). Holding the currency is essentially a bet that revenue will increase
Bitcoin can be considered zero sum since the only way to get money out is to trade with someone putting money in, and there is no other income stream. There are no plans to change this.
The real difference with traditional gambling is that there is no plan to ever end the game. As long as it continues, the players can believe they will come out ahead, even though if you stopped the game at any time, losses by people who didn't exit would match gains by people who did.
"The game ends now" values current holdings of Bitcoin at zero since there is nothing in the pot, but it's unclear if that will ever happen, and no sign that it will soon.
I always assume you don't create value at all when you are a speculative investor like buying a stock. The value creators are the company you invest in.
There's also a theoretical difference between trading stocks and trading cryptocurrencies.
Speculation, or the assumption of existing risk, or investing in creation with an expected return is not the same as gambling (which is 0 sum game and creates risk to shift money around).
That being said, in the real world today, this appears to be a distinction without a difference.
The most problematic gambling is where the bookie also provides credit. A guy putting $100 on a game in Vegas and losing it is nothing compared to the guy who puts $10k on a game he doesn’t have, and then is out stealing from his employer or committing insurance fraud to cover debts and vig.
There is another important distinction. For some of these (equities, fixed income) risk taken may be compensated by the risk premium. Others (FX, cryptocurrencies) have no risk premium, so risk taken is uncompensated. Finally, sports betting, casino games, lotteries), there is a house edge, vig, such that the buyer pays to take risk and has a negative expected return.
Ha! Interesting, I had noticed the horses seemed off. In the comments it looks like the author was playing with CGI and modeled it on the Dutch failure video. I'd obviously just posted results of a quick search for short vids.
Does anyone else have an inexplicable subconscious desire for the JWST to fail catastrophically? I've been a huge fan of the project for years, but after launch my mind was constantly plagued with these urges. I can't seem to explain or get rid of it. "Call of the void", maybe?
Anyone else with this problem? I'd really like to stop thinking these horrible thoughts.
Intrusive thoughts. They're far more common than society lets on. Just try not to act on it. But if you do try to destroy the JWST, please document the process as NASA might be interested.
I legitimately thought it for several years as I wanted it to act as a restorative force in the US space industry against mismanagement. It 'deserved' to fail to 'punish' those responsible for it's mismanagement. That was my thinking for quite a few years. However now I think SpaceX is doing a better job of leading that charge by simply pushing the industry forward towards being a little less risk adverse and avoiding analysis paralysis. Carrot is always better than the stick, when it works.
Not totally fail, but somehow I would’ve liked to see a bit of drama, so that some clever engineering would have needed to salvage the mission. And this is probably what most of the engineers were expecting and had contingency plans already drafted for many of the mechanisms.
I've had my occasional "wouldn't it be funny..." moments, but oddly enough, for the telescope I can confidently say "no".
Even from purely an entertainment standpoint, the prospect of getting new images from deep space in unprecedented quality and resolution seems a lot more interesting to me than some drama and blame-shifting about billions of NASA dollars going up in smoke.
If you want the experience of a 20 year project dissolving into nothing, you can just rewatch the news coverage about Afghanistan from last summer.
But yeah, it would certainly fit into the string of bizarrely bad news of the last years. Maybe it feels so weird that some project actually appears to succeed for a change?
I think it's because our boring safe lifes makes us want a little bit of thrill.
It's the same feeling when you want society to colapse because 'how cool would be to be a survivor in an apocaliptical wasteland'. Or when you vote for a bad candite saying "f..k it, let's see what happens"
I experienced this with the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. I was horrified by the human cost, but so, so interested in what I was seeing. I had often wondered what the collapse of a super-tall would be like, and there it was, on TV.
The threat isn't directly to invade Germany. It is to stop Germany from intervening when Russia invade it's neighbor countries. EG if you embargo us or provide Military Support to russian opponents, will shut down the power in Germany and you'll freeze to death. A short-term gas disruption will cause Russia to lose some money, but would be much more dangerous for Germany
Russian gas makes up only 1/3rd of Germany's total amount of imported gas and only because it's cheap. If the Russians really were to turn off the valve, the amount could be made up for with other sources. By far not instantly, but nobody would freeze to death, either.
Germany's alleged dependence on Russian gas is mostly a fairytale of US propaganda.
I'm open to the idea that this is overstated, but would love to see the numbers. Is it 1/3rd now or 10 years from now? Does the alternative supply and import infrastructure have the capacity to provide 30% more on short notice? Alternatively, how long and how well can Germany operate with only 60% imports.
It's been around the 35% mark for at least a decade. We also import from Norway (~30%) and the Netherlands (~20%), along with about 6-8% from domestic sources and some imports from the United Kingdom.
The middle east is another potential supplier and Italy, for example, get their gas from Africa. Germany also has the biggest gas storage capacity in Europe and the gas tanks are usually filled quite well before winter (>95%). Not this year though, because the MBAs took a gamble on Nord Stream 2 going operational and lost the wager, resulting in soaring gas prices all across Europe.
You also need to keep in mind that natural gas is not solely used for heating homes, but also industrial processes and generating electricity, among others, which could be reduced or stopped if it really came down to it.
In short: Russia turning off the valves would be more of an inconvenience than the life-threatening situation it is often claimed to be. But personally I don't see that happening, as the Russians have been a very reliable supplier for decades.
There is trade, and then there is giving a geopolitical rival an "off" switch to a sizable percentage of your energy supply.
Free trade requires easy substitutes to remain "free" and opponents of this plan mostly think that energy markets don't work like that because of high switching costs. Germany can not just spin up new nuclear plants or easily buy electricity from neighbors past a certain amount of it's usage. I don't know enough to know if this angle is correct.
Green points... Gas is not green, thus better not to progress it until absolutely mandatory. On other hand eco-terrorist are also against nuclear so better to get rid of that as well. And electricity comes from wall...
"The overall protection provided by two doses of ChAdOX1 was considerably lower than that given by BNT162b2. However, infection-acquired immunity boosted with vaccination-induced immunity remained high over a year after infection. Based on these observations, the authors recommend the strategic use of booster vaccines to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission in the population."
Is there any indication if double-vax + exposure carries similar benefit?
My wife had 2x Pfizer and then she and our kids got delta. I had 2x Moderna and never had symptoms and tested negative 3 times. No quarantining whatsoever -- slept in the same bed as my wife, the kids still crawled all over me. I still got boosted a few weeks ago, but I've been curious if living in a sick-house with 100% certainty of exposure would carry its own booster effect.
Well I had a pretty bad second dose response. I was bedridden for a week. That said, my COVID infection was far worse and I'm still struggling with long COVID today.
I guess I'm going to have trouble taking a shot (active decision) I know I'll respond badly, albeit temporarily, to. As opposed to waiting around (passive decision) and trying my chances with COVID a second time.
Now that I'm writing this all out, I think I'll get my booster, maybe a fourth if I can weasel my way in.
Tesla doesn't publish data nor shares it with the NHTSA, so that's very difficult to do. The only """data""" we have are videos uploaded to YouTube by a select group of Tesla owners who have access to the beta. Even ignoring the bias in videos selected for upload by the beta testers, every single city driving clip I've seen has several illegal maneuvers and many more disengagements.
There are thousands of people using the beta safely. Try actually delving into the numerous communities online discussing the beta rather than being swayed by influencers.
Yes. Sex drive has a lot to do with T levels. Woman's sex drive is at her highest when her T is highest (ovulating).
>More likely to rape
Yes. Rape requires physicality. Most women are incapable of raping a man, without drugs or a gun.
All this to say, I'm not sure what the point of the subthread is.