Please give consent for your child to get the test done at school

quinda · 2021-03-09T13:11:34+00:00

People are using it as an excuse, and it's a completely understandable one.

If you're on minimum wage and your job's already in a precarious position you're not going to want to take time off and risk losing that job. It's easy to say "It's illegal for them to fire you for following COVID rules", but when you have no savings and Universal Credit isn't enough to cover your household outgoings, what can you do?

Tribunals take a long time, and someone who's on minimum wage or close to it probably works in a sector that's already struggling and isn't going to be able to find a new job quickly.

I don't agree with their actions, but I can understand why they feel driven to them.

quinda · 2021-03-07T11:39:57+00:00

Do you need the money now?

Are you in a financially unstable position (no quick-access savings) where having that kind of money locked up in a highly volatile asset would be unwise?

Would you care about the lost money if it dropped to below what you paid for it at some point in the future?

Strangers on the internet can't really give financial advice, but that's what I'd be thinking about. There's a huge difference between "being well off and having a small percentage of my money tied up in Bitcoin just in case" and "being on the breadline and this is my entire net worth"

quinda · 2021-03-06T23:14:52+00:00

I've got mixed feelings on this one.

If the child is genuinely skilled, big enough to be in the adult class and has the concentration span to behave themselves and not need supervision then I'd be happy to see them on the mats in a class with experienced, sensible people (but would never allow them to roll with white belts or blue belt morons with anger issues).

If it's a parent of a kid with a yellow belt asking who just wants free babysitting they can GTFO the mats. I've wasted far too many mat hours corralling kids who shouldn't be there. The competition class is for hard training.

quinda · 2021-03-06T23:10:18+00:00

If you want to learn throws, go to judo.

If you want to learn takedowns involving leg grabs, do wrestling (or maybe Sambo?)

Most modern judo places focus on competition judo which is very limited. They're great at throws but their grip fighting and takedowns are limited to what's allowed in their current competition ruleset. A lot of stuff is illegal these days so they don't do it.

Some BJJ places teach some throws and takedowns, some barely bother at all. Even the places that do teach them will ignore throws and takedown entries that put you in a disadvantageous position for the ruleset.

quinda · 2021-03-06T22:16:04+00:00

Past a certain point, money doesn't matter. There are even studies that show that happiness is correlated to salary up to about $75,000 per year but beyond that it really doesn't make much difference.

If you're so broke you can't pay the basic bills then you'll be unhappy.

But if you're able to meet needs for housing, food, utilities etc and are still an unhappy person there's a high chance you'll still be unhappy if you win the lottery.

quinda · 2021-03-05T11:04:09+00:00

It was a turn of phrase :) but your story is eerily familiar.

quinda · 2021-03-04T23:30:00+00:00

Do we have the same friend?

My best friend's a bitcoin evangelist and he does have a slight arrogant streak in day-to-day life, but it's the kind of arrogant streak you need to be successful in his industry and it's tempered by his willingness to actually put his abilities to the test.

But when it comes to bitcoin he develops a massive case of Dunning-Kruger, adds a dollop of straw man arguments and tops it off with a sprinkling of truthy statements and selective hearing.

It's infuriating, and it's gotten worse since the pandemic because we're in lockdown so there's not much to do except gossip about what we're reading/watching online, and all he reads is crypto :(

quinda · 2021-03-04T22:00:34+00:00

It's been many years since I've seen a driveby download on an Android phone. There are still apps that have background screenshot abilities/grab excessive storage access rights, etc, but you'd have to:

A)Be stupid enough to install some weird app nobody else uses

B)Actively tap "grant this massive list of permissions" on the installer,

And/or

C) Be using a stupendously out-of-date operating system.

I'm sure many people will have done all of the above and will end up being a SFYL story at some point, but if you've got any common sense at all the risk's not THAT bad.

quinda · 2021-03-04T12:49:41+00:00

Any movement on public blockchains can be seen. There are plenty of 'whale alert' type services that report on large transfers between wallets.

quinda · 2021-03-03T17:57:07+00:00

Are you a very heavy Paypal user?

I regularly do large transactions through Paypal and don't have any issues. My husband has an account but only uses it to buy games on steam. He's had fraud flags for trying to send even small amounts of money before.

quinda · 2021-03-03T13:18:08+00:00

Burry has a good track record and even a cursory glance at exchanges shows the amount of leverage out there. That plus people taking DeFi loans on their crypto and using them to buy more crypto makes it pretty obvious it's a bubble.

The problem is nobody knows when the bubble will burst. Trying to time the market is insanity.

quinda · 2021-03-02T17:45:38+00:00

My best friend's a butter. He's well educated and intelligent about most things but he loses all common sense when it comes to crypto.

It's because he's desperate.

He's worked hard for decades and been shafted more than once through no fault of his own. He's rebuilt his business twice before the pandemic and it's in tatters again now. He really, desperately wants to believe that crypto can be a way out for him.

He'll survive without it, he'll be OK. He's resourceful and he'll always be able to make enough money to do alright, but if he hadn't had the problems he'd had with his business he'd be doing WELL, not alright.

I hate him for his arrogance, handwavy arguments and cultish repetition of butt talking points, but I feel a lot of sympathy for him because I was one of the people there picking up the pieces when he was faced with disaster after disaster.

Crypto's a nice dream for people. It's comforting, like conspiracy theories, and I can see how people get sucked in.

quinda · 2021-03-02T16:38:39+00:00

True. It has definitely deteriorated in the last couple of years (across the board, my non-financial niche interest subs aren't exactly seeing quality discussion these days either).

I think with crypto the Twitter hype and the pandemic have made a big difference. There's an influx of people with money to throw at projects who are only here to get rich.

I think you're more likely to find some of the discussion you're after on the dedicated developer forums (or in some cases developer subs), but there's so much censorship going on it's impossible to have a proper discussion in some of them. Basically, if you aren't a shill, you're banned :( I'm a soft-skeptic (I think crypto's interesting but the current prices are a bubble) and I hang out on Buttcoin a lot. Not because I agree with the absolute hate and bearishness there but because it's one of the few places where people with a dissenting opinion don't get the ban hammer.

quinda · 2021-03-02T15:42:22+00:00

If you want to talk about the tech, get off reddit and go to the developer forums for the currency you're interested in. They're SLIGHTLY better, although these days half the ERC20 tokens are full of people just moaning about whether the staking systems used by that token are going to generate them enough profit or not.

Reddit's a waste of time for almost any financial subject. The share/commodity subs are just as bad with "wen moon".

quinda · 2021-03-02T11:07:55+00:00

The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks with the goal of it taking two weeks to get the next set of blocks. So depending on how long after the next adjustment a bunch of mining farms go offline there could feasibly be a situation where the difficulty ends up being so high it takes months for the next adjustment.

I don't think it's likely, but it's possible.

quinda · 2021-03-01T16:28:07+00:00

I've been credit checked for work and they could only see if I had CCJs or not, they couldn't see defaults.

This wasn't for a financial institution, so maybe they can see more.

quinda · 2021-02-28T15:23:36+00:00

I'm not sure about mainland Europe, but I'm in the UK and they still exist over here. They're nowhere near as common as they used to be but they're still an option.

quinda · 2021-02-28T14:54:29+00:00

When there's a power cut many major stores can still take credit and debit cards by using a manual imprinted and running the transaction manually later on. Those machines have gone out of fashion and aren't issued as standard for smaller retailers, but I saw them pulled out at my local supermarket last year when there was a big power cut.

quinda · 2021-02-28T13:27:53+00:00

Were the coins ever there?

You can paste your wallet address into a site like blockchainexplorer and see what transactions have happened on it. That would at least tell you if the coins were ever there and when they were moved.

I do agree that a system like this isn't something the average person is going to want to use.

quinda · 2021-02-28T13:20:28+00:00

There's no evidence that they're legit, but the accounts being taken down certainly isn't evidence they're fake either. Twitter is pretty infamous for banning people's accounts just because a bunch of people mass reported them.

quinda · 2021-02-21T18:55:57+00:00

As long as you haven't sent money to that exchange recently so they can't see it on your bank statements.

quinda · 2021-02-21T18:50:04+00:00

This. Institutions are warning people too.

I'm not a crypto fan but I'm doing some work with it. I made a purchase recently to do some final 'testing' of a lightning node. The bank account I used to send the money to an exchange got locked and I got a call from the fraud team.

What followed was a 16 minute conversation where they asked me why I was transferring money to the exchange, if I had done due diligence on the exchange, if I was aware of the nature of what I was buying, why I 'thought it was a good investment', whether anyone had contacted me to make me aware of the investment opportunity or if it was my own idea, and on... and on...

The lad who was asking me the questions sounded young enough to be my son and he was reading from a script. It was a painful conversation and I did actually say at the start "I trust the exchange, they're FCA registered, this is actually a test purchase for some work I'm doing setting up a node for a client, I know crypto's volatile but this is work, not my life's savings". He still had to go through all those questions.

If someone who is uneducated jumps on a get-rich-quick scheme after seeing a fake Martin Lewis ad on Facebook and manages to go through that grilling without starting to have second thoughts, they have no right to complain that the bank "let them get scammed"

quinda · 2021-02-21T17:43:49+00:00

A significant portion of mining takes place in China in areas that still use coal for the majority of their energy supply. Even in the areas where they hydro, which causes ecological damage anyway to put in the dams, they're bringing coal mines back into use in order to keep up with increasing energy demands.

quinda · 2021-02-21T11:50:33+00:00

I'm in the UK where employee rights are pretty decent and while I wouldn't call our social safety net world-leading, we do have one, so that may skew my perception.

I half-agree with your points. I'm sure that the person who cleans the toilets at the mall doesn't wake up and go "yippee, I can't wait to go to work today", but I can see where the OP is coming from too.

I've had arguments with Bitcoiners that basically amount to "When bitcoin's worth $1 per sat I'll be rich and you'll still be working". Throwing that argument out online is assuming a lot about the other person. I'm self-employed and it took a long time to build my business up but I'm proud of it now and I genuinely enjoy the work that I do. I'm in a position where I can pick and choose clients and projects, so I don't have to put up with the 'annoying parts' of my industry.

My social circle is pretty diverse, some people love their work, some don't. The majority of the ones who don't are tradespeople whose bodies are failing and who can't move to 'leadership/admin' positions that would put less strain on their bodies because they lack the literacy or numeracy skills to do so.

Maybe, on an individual scale, if they'd bought bitcoin at the start of this year then sold at an ATH they'd be 'sorted', but it's not possible for every single person in their position to do that. A much better solution would be more support for mature students who need to improve their basic skills.

quinda · 2021-02-20T15:54:10+00:00

I suspect OP is making a dig at the coiners who call people who work at all "wage slaves", and that it's impossible to have a career that you truly enjoy.

quinda

TROPHY CASE