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This article is fantastic. I think "get rich quick" schemes are so much worse when it comes to my generation and beyond (millennials/gen-z). People have been en

by dvt 6y ago

This article is fantastic. I think "get rich quick" schemes are so much worse when it comes to my generation and beyond (millennials/gen-z). People have been endlessly screwed over: graduated college during the 2008 economic bust, lived with parents until their 30s, fired/laid off during the 2020 pandemic -- so I fundamentally understand the mirage of Instagram fame and endless sacks of money for doing basically nothing of value. For a classic example, just look at /r/wallstreetbets -- young people are frustrated because there's no end to this tunnel. It also makes things harder for those of us that don't want to run Ponzi schemes: How does one break out when everyone's taking glamorous selfies in Thailand but I'm working in a dingy apartment trying to build the next big app? It's a tough situation on all sides with no obvious solutions.

the_gipsy 6y ago
Life is a pyramid scheme.
coldtea 6y ago
>How does one break out when everyone's taking glamorous selfies in Thailand but I'm working in a dingy apartment trying to build the next big app? Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting? Only except for the "nomad lifestyle" or "selling courses", etc, it's supposed to happen by coding in a dingy apartment. But it's equally unlikely, and too starry-eyed, the tech nerd version of the kind of dream the stereotypical bus-arriving Midwestern teenagers had of "becoming famous in Los Angeles". How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > How about merely building a business? More people need to be told this. The combination of work ethic, of risk tolerance, and of perseverance against ridiculous odds that is required to build a Tesla, or an Apple, or a Whatever, is extraordinarily rare
  - coliveira 6y ago
    Tesla was built by a billionaire. There was little to no risk involved.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Musk had about $140 million when he ~started~ bought (sorry) Tesla. That's a pretty far cry from a billion. On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars. Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that. Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        coryrc 6y ago
        Yes, I remember when NASA was launching reusable rockets as regular supply missions and weren't using 5% GDP, and did such a great job they didn't end up giving $400MM/year to Russia to hitch rides on the Soyuz for the last decade.
        coldtea 6y ago
        That would be the "slightly improved" part, "50 years later". And NASA hasn't used "5% GDP" for 40 years. It has been less than 1% since 1973. Actually scratch that, it has been less than 1% the federal budget, which is much much less than the GDP. Of course all that 50-years of IP got handed to the "private visionaries" of SpaceX for free, or rather, along with money paid to them...
- solotronics 6y ago
  I write software because I have always liked computers and always spent all my free time figuring out coding, linux, networking, and hacking in general. I don't expect to become the next Zuckerberg and I think that's the equivalent of telling kids they can make it in professional sports. I'm just content making a comfortable living building systems for someone else. I think I could have made roughly as good of a living being a plumber, an electrician, or a welder! A good electrician around here makes 150k a year. I think the best career advice I heard was pick something you can stand doing and work as hard as you can at it, try and be as good as you can, not measured against someone else but for your self. If you pick a career where expertise matters and it has demand and you work harder and smarter than other people you will do fine.
  - smabie 6y ago
    The thing is, some people don't want to do well and merely be part of the upper middle class. Some people want to get rich. And the strategies you must employ to be comfortable are much different than those required to make serious money. Different strokes, different folks.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      That's naive and unexperienced view on life values and true achievements. These days, money isn't impressive. What you actually do in your life is. For some of it, some amount of money is important, and if you have plenty its easier to achieve. But that's about it. I live in place swarming with rich folks, both old rich and new rich, while being neither. Most of them live such boring lives it would be sad if I cared for them. Never once met one of them that I would want to swap my adventurous life with. Had to go through a bit of hardship to get where I am obviously but not that much. What I want to say - striving to get rich from the start is a stupid strategy of a clueless person. Be good at something you do, and more importantly be good at living a great life, being a good kind person. Being rich becomes just a gimmick, whether it happens or not.
      - yakireev 6y ago
- totemandtoken 6y ago
  Reminds me a lot of this talk from the Pinboard guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c Or this talk from the Bandcamp guy about financial sustainability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting? Perhaps, depending on the app, a ponzi scheme is based on wanting to get rich by taking advantage of people's gullibility and non-understanding of how ponzi schemes work. I suppose some apps could have that kind of disregard for how users of the app are harmed, but I think in most cases people building apps also think they are helping their users in some way. Ponzi schemers know they're only helping themselves.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > How about merely building a business? But that's the thing right? You aim to make the next big app, and fail into the comfortable existence of "merely" building a business, or aquihired. Certainly better than aiming for moviestar and ending up a waitress.
- dvt 6y ago
  > How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon. I think you're getting hung up on my qualifier of "big" -- really, I'd be very happy to make 250k yearly off of a project (a far cry from Basecamp's $25MM yearly revenue), but even ramen profitability is hard, let alone getting to quarter-of-a-million.
- cultofmetatron 6y ago
  Working as a software engineer remote is easy mode compared to everyone else. You don't have to spend your time coding in a dingy apartment. There are plenty of people that will pay you a descent wage to work and you can do that from a nice cafe in Thailand. Living costs are low enough that you can pay your bills working part time while spending the rest working on your get rich long term side hustle. I'm writing this as we speak from an airbnb in Turkey with much lower living expenses than when I was in san francisco.
cbozeman 6y ago
/r/wallstreetbets exists for a different reason, but it got exacerbated by everything you mentioned above. WSB members have come to realize that so-called "financial professionals" by and large have no scrying crystal into the market. WSB got there because of the democratization of knowledge that the Internet has caused. And before you cite some unicorn like Renaissance, that's generating 40% YOY for 20+ years, keep in mind that unicorns, while rare, do exist. Microsoft, Uber, Google, Apple, etc., so forth. How many "investment professionals" would have recommended you dump all your money into these companies when they were but fledging entities? Or even when they went through tough times? No, I think WSB is doing a service to humanity. They're exposing the smoke and mirrors behind Wall Street. Good on them.
- MacsHeadroom 6y ago
  Front running is literally scrying and also the reason Robinhood options trading is "free." (Because traders aren't the customer. Front running quant firms are.) WSB has been duped.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    What you're talking about is not frontrunning, it's purchasing order flow for market making. Frontrunning is an illegal activity with a specific definition. Purchasing order flow is not illegal. While we're at it, quant firms occupy a family of trading strategies which are a superset of HFT; not all quants are market making, trading intraday or pursuing low latency strategies. With all due respect, please stop perpetuating popular finance misconceptions of the Flash Boys variety. If this is something you'd like to learn more about, I suggest you read the following: - https://blog.headlandstech.com/2017/08/03/quantitative-trading-summary/ https://blog.headlandstech.com/2017/08/03/quantitative-tradi... - Flash Boys: Not So Fast
    - jevgeni 6y ago
      So what if one of those non-market making firms buys order flow?
jariel 6y ago
"People have been endlessly screwed over" Heyzeus you have it easier than any generation literally in the history of civilisation. Those just a little bit older than you were fighting in Vietnam, getting beaten up because they were gay, told to live in ghettos and denied jobs by banks and government because they were Black, forbidden from drinking from 'White' fountains. Nothing anyone has faced 'since 2008' is existentially difficult, even this pandemic, while serious, is not that bad. All of these poseurs on Instagram are laughable and ridiculous to anyone born before the internet because we remember what 'life was like'. 'Not being able to live you dream life / dream job' is not a form of oppression or existential life difficulty. 'Dumb Schemes' come and go. Amway used to be huge.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Good way to minimize someone's pain and life experiences because others have had it bad. If we're going to go full retard..., let's go: "Black people shouldn't complain about slavery because they weren't systematically killed off by the millions like Jews." What a fun game! Look, I can play it too!
  - jariel 6y ago
    Coming of age in 2008 is not 'pain'. You're literally extending the plight of someone 'graduating in 2008' to 'Jews dying in the holocaust' as though they are on some similar scale which I think helps prove my point.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      That's because of the way you personally perceive it, while I'm looking at the holistic scenario under which they're living. The economy is fucked. Its working because its artificially propped up by the Fed and the European Central Bank, to a lesser degree. People know this because the stock market continues to perform well, but individuals are mostly static. Social mobility in the United States is at all-time low and this is well-reported. Student loan debt has ballooned 2000% over the past 50 years. Housing prices, be it to buy or rent, have ballooned by 200% in the past 50 years. Climate change is a serious concern, and absolutely no one can say with any degree of scientific certainty what the long-term (100-300 year range) effects will be. Now I told you all that... to tell you this. They're being robbed of hope. People can endure through hardships unimaginable... as long as they have hope. When you take away someone's hope, you take away their life.
an_opabinia 6y ago
> For a classic example, just look at /r/wallstreetbets -- young people are frustrated because there's no end to this tunnel That's a bad example. By many measures retail investors have outperformed institutional investors since March. The simple reason is that options have a built in exit strategy, the thing that's missing when most people lose in scams - including Ponzi schemes! On the flip side, why then do they outperform? High risk, high reward. Opportunities where you lose your entire principle, like out of the money options, turned out to be wildly underpriced, simply because institutions never buy them. Anyway, I get it, those people are stupid. But they made money.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > Anyway, I get it, those people are stupid. But they made money. They are absolutely not stupid. Everything they're doing is entirely rational. It doesn't seem that way, because clearly you're not in the same circumstances as they are. Neither am I. However, I completely understand it. If you're 22-25, not married, and have far more liabilities than asset, you have no reason not to trade on high margin with an options play and try to turn $50,000 into $2 million or more. If you lose the $50,000, you can recover. If you end up horribly in debt, you file for bankruptcy and move on. Given the current state of affairs, its completely understandable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- coliveira 6y ago
  If you think OTM options are underpriced you're in for a rude awakening. Sure, you can make lots of money with OTMOs, but don't expect to do this regularly.
  - micael_dias 6y ago
    To be fair he didn't they are. He said they were, which might have been the case in March after the corona crash.
nish1500 6y ago
People want to believe in get-rick-quick schemes, and will go by the flimsiest evidence they can find. I think the trick is to realize those glamorous selfies are mostly a mirage. If you were having the best day of your life on the beach, maybe, just maybe, you wouldn't be on your phone trying to get the perfect selfie.
- dvt 6y ago
  > I think the trick is to realize those glamorous selfies are mostly a mirage. If you were having the best day of your life on the beach, maybe, just maybe, you wouldn't be on your phone trying to get the perfect selfie. Well said, but the optics are still there. The selfie is bound to get more hits on social media, more coverage, etc.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    That's why I make a point of not following people who broadcast glamorized versions of their lives.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
unishark 6y ago
I thought the point of those nomadic lifestyles is to earn the same trifling money anyone can earn over the internet with a little effort, but live where the money goes farther.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Don't try build the next big app? If you're frustrated by the status quo, reject it and live life by your own values. Also nothing (bar the pandemic) is stopping you going to Thailand or another cheap location and building your app from there. The flight tickets will pay themselves off in cost of living savings pretty quickly.

by dvt 6y ago

the_gipsy 6y ago

Life is a pyramid scheme.

coldtea 6y ago

>How does one break out when everyone's taking glamorous selfies in Thailand but I'm working in a dingy apartment trying to build the next big app? Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting? Only except for the "nomad lifestyle" or "selling courses", etc, it's supposed to happen by coding in a dingy apartment. But it's equally unlikely, and too starry-eyed, the tech nerd version of the kind of dream the stereotypical bus-arriving Midwestern teenagers had of "becoming famous in Los Angeles". How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon.

cbozeman 6y ago
> How about merely building a business? More people need to be told this. The combination of work ethic, of risk tolerance, and of perseverance against ridiculous odds that is required to build a Tesla, or an Apple, or a Whatever, is extraordinarily rare
- coliveira 6y ago
  Tesla was built by a billionaire. There was little to no risk involved.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Musk had about $140 million when he ~started~ bought (sorry) Tesla. That's a pretty far cry from a billion. On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars. Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that. Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - coryrc 6y ago
        Yes, I remember when NASA was launching reusable rockets as regular supply missions and weren't using 5% GDP, and did such a great job they didn't end up giving $400MM/year to Russia to hitch rides on the Soyuz for the last decade.
        coldtea 6y ago
        That would be the "slightly improved" part, "50 years later". And NASA hasn't used "5% GDP" for 40 years. It has been less than 1% since 1973. Actually scratch that, it has been less than 1% the federal budget, which is much much less than the GDP. Of course all that 50-years of IP got handed to the "private visionaries" of SpaceX for free, or rather, along with money paid to them...
solotronics 6y ago
I write software because I have always liked computers and always spent all my free time figuring out coding, linux, networking, and hacking in general. I don't expect to become the next Zuckerberg and I think that's the equivalent of telling kids they can make it in professional sports. I'm just content making a comfortable living building systems for someone else. I think I could have made roughly as good of a living being a plumber, an electrician, or a welder! A good electrician around here makes 150k a year. I think the best career advice I heard was pick something you can stand doing and work as hard as you can at it, try and be as good as you can, not measured against someone else but for your self. If you pick a career where expertise matters and it has demand and you work harder and smarter than other people you will do fine.
- smabie 6y ago
  The thing is, some people don't want to do well and merely be part of the upper middle class. Some people want to get rich. And the strategies you must employ to be comfortable are much different than those required to make serious money. Different strokes, different folks.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    That's naive and unexperienced view on life values and true achievements. These days, money isn't impressive. What you actually do in your life is. For some of it, some amount of money is important, and if you have plenty its easier to achieve. But that's about it. I live in place swarming with rich folks, both old rich and new rich, while being neither. Most of them live such boring lives it would be sad if I cared for them. Never once met one of them that I would want to swap my adventurous life with. Had to go through a bit of hardship to get where I am obviously but not that much. What I want to say - striving to get rich from the start is a stupid strategy of a clueless person. Be good at something you do, and more importantly be good at living a great life, being a good kind person. Being rich becomes just a gimmick, whether it happens or not.
    - yakireev 6y ago
totemandtoken 6y ago
Reminds me a lot of this talk from the Pinboard guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c Or this talk from the Bandcamp guy about financial sustainability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting? Perhaps, depending on the app, a ponzi scheme is based on wanting to get rich by taking advantage of people's gullibility and non-understanding of how ponzi schemes work. I suppose some apps could have that kind of disregard for how users of the app are harmed, but I think in most cases people building apps also think they are helping their users in some way. Ponzi schemers know they're only helping themselves.
im3w1l 6y ago
> How about merely building a business? But that's the thing right? You aim to make the next big app, and fail into the comfortable existence of "merely" building a business, or aquihired. Certainly better than aiming for moviestar and ending up a waitress.
dvt 6y ago
> How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon. I think you're getting hung up on my qualifier of "big" -- really, I'd be very happy to make 250k yearly off of a project (a far cry from Basecamp's $25MM yearly revenue), but even ramen profitability is hard, let alone getting to quarter-of-a-million.
cultofmetatron 6y ago
Working as a software engineer remote is easy mode compared to everyone else. You don't have to spend your time coding in a dingy apartment. There are plenty of people that will pay you a descent wage to work and you can do that from a nice cafe in Thailand. Living costs are low enough that you can pay your bills working part time while spending the rest working on your get rich long term side hustle. I'm writing this as we speak from an airbnb in Turkey with much lower living expenses than when I was in san francisco.

cbozeman 6y ago

/r/wallstreetbets exists for a different reason, but it got exacerbated by everything you mentioned above. WSB members have come to realize that so-called "financial professionals" by and large have no scrying crystal into the market. WSB got there because of the democratization of knowledge that the Internet has caused. And before you cite some unicorn like Renaissance, that's generating 40% YOY for 20+ years, keep in mind that unicorns, while rare, do exist. Microsoft, Uber, Google, Apple, etc., so forth. How many "investment professionals" would have recommended you dump all your money into these companies when they were but fledging entities? Or even when they went through tough times? No, I think WSB is doing a service to humanity. They're exposing the smoke and mirrors behind Wall Street. Good on them.

MacsHeadroom 6y ago
Front running is literally scrying and also the reason Robinhood options trading is "free." (Because traders aren't the customer. Front running quant firms are.) WSB has been duped.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  What you're talking about is not frontrunning, it's purchasing order flow for market making. Frontrunning is an illegal activity with a specific definition. Purchasing order flow is not illegal. While we're at it, quant firms occupy a family of trading strategies which are a superset of HFT; not all quants are market making, trading intraday or pursuing low latency strategies. With all due respect, please stop perpetuating popular finance misconceptions of the Flash Boys variety. If this is something you'd like to learn more about, I suggest you read the following: - https://blog.headlandstech.com/2017/08/03/quantitative-trading-summary/ https://blog.headlandstech.com/2017/08/03/quantitative-tradi... - Flash Boys: Not So Fast
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    So what if one of those non-market making firms buys order flow?

jariel 6y ago

"People have been endlessly screwed over" Heyzeus you have it easier than any generation literally in the history of civilisation. Those just a little bit older than you were fighting in Vietnam, getting beaten up because they were gay, told to live in ghettos and denied jobs by banks and government because they were Black, forbidden from drinking from 'White' fountains. Nothing anyone has faced 'since 2008' is existentially difficult, even this pandemic, while serious, is not that bad. All of these poseurs on Instagram are laughable and ridiculous to anyone born before the internet because we remember what 'life was like'. 'Not being able to live you dream life / dream job' is not a form of oppression or existential life difficulty. 'Dumb Schemes' come and go. Amway used to be huge.

cbozeman 6y ago
Good way to minimize someone's pain and life experiences because others have had it bad. If we're going to go full retard..., let's go: "Black people shouldn't complain about slavery because they weren't systematically killed off by the millions like Jews." What a fun game! Look, I can play it too!
- jariel 6y ago
  Coming of age in 2008 is not 'pain'. You're literally extending the plight of someone 'graduating in 2008' to 'Jews dying in the holocaust' as though they are on some similar scale which I think helps prove my point.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    That's because of the way you personally perceive it, while I'm looking at the holistic scenario under which they're living. The economy is fucked. Its working because its artificially propped up by the Fed and the European Central Bank, to a lesser degree. People know this because the stock market continues to perform well, but individuals are mostly static. Social mobility in the United States is at all-time low and this is well-reported. Student loan debt has ballooned 2000% over the past 50 years. Housing prices, be it to buy or rent, have ballooned by 200% in the past 50 years. Climate change is a serious concern, and absolutely no one can say with any degree of scientific certainty what the long-term (100-300 year range) effects will be. Now I told you all that... to tell you this. They're being robbed of hope. People can endure through hardships unimaginable... as long as they have hope. When you take away someone's hope, you take away their life.

an_opabinia 6y ago

> For a classic example, just look at /r/wallstreetbets -- young people are frustrated because there's no end to this tunnel That's a bad example. By many measures retail investors have outperformed institutional investors since March. The simple reason is that options have a built in exit strategy, the thing that's missing when most people lose in scams - including Ponzi schemes! On the flip side, why then do they outperform? High risk, high reward. Opportunities where you lose your entire principle, like out of the money options, turned out to be wildly underpriced, simply because institutions never buy them. Anyway, I get it, those people are stupid. But they made money.

cbozeman 6y ago
> Anyway, I get it, those people are stupid. But they made money. They are absolutely not stupid. Everything they're doing is entirely rational. It doesn't seem that way, because clearly you're not in the same circumstances as they are. Neither am I. However, I completely understand it. If you're 22-25, not married, and have far more liabilities than asset, you have no reason not to trade on high margin with an options play and try to turn $50,000 into $2 million or more. If you lose the $50,000, you can recover. If you end up horribly in debt, you file for bankruptcy and move on. Given the current state of affairs, its completely understandable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
coliveira 6y ago
If you think OTM options are underpriced you're in for a rude awakening. Sure, you can make lots of money with OTMOs, but don't expect to do this regularly.
- micael_dias 6y ago
  To be fair he didn't they are. He said they were, which might have been the case in March after the corona crash.

nish1500 6y ago

People want to believe in get-rick-quick schemes, and will go by the flimsiest evidence they can find. I think the trick is to realize those glamorous selfies are mostly a mirage. If you were having the best day of your life on the beach, maybe, just maybe, you wouldn't be on your phone trying to get the perfect selfie.

dvt 6y ago
> I think the trick is to realize those glamorous selfies are mostly a mirage. If you were having the best day of your life on the beach, maybe, just maybe, you wouldn't be on your phone trying to get the perfect selfie. Well said, but the optics are still there. The selfie is bound to get more hits on social media, more coverage, etc.
- coliveira 6y ago
  That's why I make a point of not following people who broadcast glamorized versions of their lives.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

unishark 6y ago

I thought the point of those nomadic lifestyles is to earn the same trifling money anyone can earn over the internet with a little effort, but live where the money goes farther.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Don't try build the next big app? If you're frustrated by the status quo, reject it and live life by your own values. Also nothing (bar the pandemic) is stopping you going to Thailand or another cheap location and building your app from there. The flight tickets will pay themselves off in cost of living savings pretty quickly.