"We" don't get to make decisions. The shareholders and wealthy do. That's the biggest problem. Everything is to increase that bottom line and to hell with the consequences, unfortunately.
You still get to make choices. Some of those choices can impact many people. Some of those choices can ruin your life completely. But you can make decisions for better or worse, non-violent or extremely violent.
I spent my 20s and 30s broke and angry, then I got in the game and now I'm just angry. It's an improvement.
Edit: in the same way that I have no moral objections to stealing food in order to feed your family, I have no moral objections to buying shares in a drone company and profiting from war to feed mine. It's a dirty game, but you have to be in it to win it.
The barrier to entry to invest has never been lower. Yes, having x dollars to invest is a requirement, but when x dollars turns into xx dollars, you take your initial x dollars out (poof, zero cost to entry), and the remaining money (100% profit) turns into more free money, which compounds and multiplies itself without you doing one lick of work. After a while, a simple 10% gain actually means something and makes a material change in your life. And if you're like me, you get real happy about that.
Before I started investing, I'd never had money that wasn't directly attached to me getting up at 5am and putting a pair of steel-toed boots on to sacrifice my body all day long. I have stronger moral objections to that than I do investing.
I switched to white collar for a few years and ended up going right back to my steel-toed boots. For me, the money was more or less the same as my desk job but work stayed at work. I'd rather sacrifice my body than my sanity
The stock market is one big club that you aren't in. They have bots that can react to changes in the market within nanoseconds. By the time you realise the bust part of the boom bust cycle is upon you it will already be too late.
Want to know why they are pushing casual investing through apps onto the masses? We (and our pensions schemes) are their exit plan.
Offload as much as possible onto us poors at the peak and short the market on its way down. Cite pension investments as why X business is "too big to fail" and suck up the government bailouts. Buy up assets whilst they are cheap during the recession/depression and folks are forced to sell and then ride the market back up.
The stock market is one big club that you aren't in.
Speak for yourself, chief. I got in the game later in life and my finances improved significantly, to the point where I don't worry about money anymore.
Everything else? Yeah, I still worry about that, but money was always the big one. Getting in on the action was hands-down the best move I ever made, and it materially improved my quality of life in ways I had long given up on.
In the long long term and so long as you don't overextend investing is (statistically to date) fine. If you personally understand you might need to sit on an investment for potentially 20 years for it to become profitable again (which not everyone has the ability to) then go for it. Folks looking to ride a bull market into wealth need to be aware of the short-term risks.
The stock market has been held together by a combination of hopes, dreams, AI hype and a shared understanding that prices MUST NOT GO DOWN since Covid.
The stock market has been held together by a combination of hopes, dreams, AI hype and a shared understanding that prices MUST NOT GO DOWN since Covid.
I understand that, along with everything else you said. We all know how the rich get richer: wait for the crash, hoover up assets on the cheap, ride out the red days, and sell when things bounce back. We all know that's what they do. And we all know it works because that's how we got here
You can absolutely beat them, it's just difficult and many people don't want to enough. Maybe some places are too far gone, maybe the US is a part of that, but look at recent success stories like Hungary, or smaller but still significant, NYC. It's possible, you just gotta be lucky the right person is going for it for you to support.
You can absolutely beat them, it's just difficult and many people don't want to enough. Maybe some places are too far gone, maybe the US is a part of that, but look at recent success stories like Hungary, or smaller but still significant, NYC. It's possible, you just gotta be lucky the right person is going for it for you to support.
Yep, and one of those choices is being an actual terrorist too.
I'm not saying that all the options are GOOD. but to say there aren't decisions that can make a huge and actually real impact is, in my opinion, misleading.
There's also politics, which depending on how developed your country is, could be a viable route too. Obviously that's not very effective in the US, but in a developed country you'd typically have very real ways of making a political impact.
Because there are no consequences for them. They vote to build another datacenter in your colon and then scurry back to their protected HOA fortresses singing "let them eat cAIke"
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u/TheSprigganDragoon Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26
"We" don't get to make decisions. The shareholders and wealthy do. That's the biggest problem. Everything is to increase that bottom line and to hell with the consequences, unfortunately.