I've read some of the cryptocurrency subreddits recently and it has been absolutely fascinating. The degree of group cognitive dissonance is something else.
This thinking only holds if you feel positively about who you currently are and your place in life right now. If you don't, then these "what if" questions can be a lot more appealing.
I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition.
People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could.
We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.
> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking.
I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).
No, it's not the same at all. Tether is not a bank. Banks are audited and bank deposits are insured. Banks can't print money unilaterally. Tether doesn't have the same regulations apply to it.
Maybe we have very different experiences and perspectives. If you're healthy and things are going well, then stability and routine look like something boring that maybe even takes away from the quality of your life. If you're struggling to function and having a normal day is an achievement on its own, then things look a lot different.
When I clicked on this post I was thinking of timelines like 1-2 years but 10 years is a long time to have something on the back burner. Do you really need to keep up? Do you want to have engineering as a hobby in some way?
As someone who is depressed, founding a company is very low on the list of things I would like to do.
Reasons:
- it's practically impossible for me to be excited about any business/software idea/project/opportunity
- depression diminishes my productivity which is extremely important for a founder
- the instability from building a company creates a negative feedback loop with one's depression
I need stability and routine; I need to put in a lot of effort just to have a normal life and keep a job. Running a company becomes almost impossible in those circumstances.
> I talk about my mental health to anyone who will listen, and also try to those who won’t. I don’t launch into the story of my life and whole disease history but I need everyone to understand that depression is something that affects every aspect of my life.
I can't relate to this at all. Maybe it's a big difference in personality, culture or place in life, but the last thing I want to do is to openly share things that are very personal with people that I barely know.
The whole video would have been better if he had built an argument from the ground up instead of starting with the idea that Tether is a scam and laying so many attempts at humor and irony on top of it.
Or at least it would have been clearer and more educational; I haven't seen his videos before and maybe other people watch him for entertainment.
It's not even created by financial people. If you watch the coffeezilla video that some other people in this thread linked to, you'll see that the people behind Tether have backgrounds in various types of fraud.
Also, this affects the entire cryptocurrency market. If you own any cryptocurrency, you're exposed to risk from Tether's collapse even if you hold no Tether yourself.
Is there a mechanism for Tether to collapse on its own or does the collapse have to necessarily come from regulation? If the SEC do nothing about this, can Tether keep printing forever?