and just in the last hours I've become more-confident Trump is just going to grift even more for himself and those in the Republican Party or otherwise "favored" by him.

The Trump "meme coin" should be all the evidence you need and its so "in your face" maybe -- just maybe -- it will wake his supporters out of their stupor.

Let me remind you that money is what you have left over after you make something of value and have paid for the materials and labor to do so.  If I drill for oil, hit oil and then refine said oil into usable fuels and lubricants, once I've paid the costs in doing that what's left is money.  It is the net improvement in my condition as a result of producing something of value to other people generally.

Credit is simply a promise to produce something of value in the future.  It spends exactly like money does; it is the future tense of money, to be precise.

But all "crypto" or "token" things are in fact nothing more than a negative-sum lottery.  The negative portion is quite-variable but not the primary aspect of it.

If you buy a lottery ticket some percentage of your spending on it goes into the prizes.  The rest is siphoned off; in the case of regulated lotteries a large part allegedly goes to education and the rest pays for the terminals and bounties that the winning ticket sellers get, plus the expense of operating the game (including auditing it if its a regulated one so as to assure the public it isn't rigged.)

If you buy a "meme coin" nothing was produced whatsoever.  The "increase in price" (or the converse) occurs solely because someone else pays you more than you paid for it.  The same, incidentally, is true of stocks traded on an exchange in the secondary market -- that is, most stocks.  Its a negative-sum game instead of a zero-sum game because nobody works for free and the exchanges have to be paid in order to continue to operate.

In this case only 20% of the coin is "float"; the rest Trump-controlled firms held back.  So your acts deposited your money into something that has no value and now those entities can siphon it off into Trump's pocket -- if people continue to buy it when the lockups expire and they can be sold.  If not then what he has (and what you have) is a huge money loser.  (Those who bought "HaukTua" anyone?)

Now contemplate proof of work or proof of stake coins.  They're even more of a negative sum game because the energy and hardware required to "mine" or "prove" them (or both) are quite expensive and yet when that is expended you have..... nothing.  In fact you spend all that only to exhaust it as heat into the atmosphere and ultimately trash into the landfill (the electronics themselves.)

Yet here we are.

Then there's TikTok.  Who believes that any "social site" is worth that sort of money as a mechanism to publicly post cute pictures of your cat?

Of course it isn't.

They have "value" because they can and thus are used to change human behavior.  This of course is not disclosed to any material degree; you believe you are obtaining entertainment (e.g. watch cute videos of someone's cat) but the real point is not to trap your eyeballs on the screen but to change your behavior and thus expenditure of funds or other actions taken in the real world.

Toward what end?

That's not disclosed, is it?

Of course it isn't.  But it has to be the case because cute cat pictures are not worth a trillion dollars no matter matter how many of them there are.

Convincing you the world will end if you don't stop using a gas-powered car and furnace, so that you screw yourself out of tens of thousands of dollars over the space of a few years and hundreds of thousands over your entire life, times the millions of users...... now that is worth enough to justify the valuations, is it not?

Oh incidentally that's one possible example out of many.

Now does it make sense why certain topics will get you tossed off these sites?

So how about the immigration situation?  Well Hohman is set to put up a good show but will he actually change anything?  We'll see.  How about the H-1b abuses; those screw the middle class bigly, especially those in technical fields, and on a per-capita basis have a lot more impact on Americans than do illegal Mexican roofers.  But the homebuilders are a small piece of the S&P and Nasdaq with roofing companies almost entirely absent from public trading; not so for Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Disney and similar.

Then we have the medical scam generally -- if you think the tech space is a problem in that regard the medical system is one dollar in five and 75% of it is stolen via various schemes from intentional recommendations to do things that slowly make your health worse (e.g. use seed oils) and disparate billing and extortion schemes that have been illegal for more than a century and twice ruled to apply at the Supreme Court forty years ago -- and yet nobody will bring the charges and enforce the law.  Of course the media, including social media, is a major part of convincing you (see the above again) to do those stupid things and the latest of the stupidity is the furor over "weight loss" drugs like Ozempic -- I guess they ran out of profits to be made suckering people into statins and then dealing with all the Type II diabetes it produced as a "side effect."

The problem with corruption like this is that once it takes root like this through an economy its like a parasite that gets into your blood; it goes everywhere and infests everything.

Well, supposedly today a new hour and era dawns for America with Trump's swearing in.

We'll see if it really is all that, or if he's just going to redirect the scam to his friends and away from Joe's -- while you still get it in the ass.

As I said in my podcast I'll reserve passing judgment until approximately the end of March, unless of course I see evidence before then that all he's really doing is capitalizing on this for himself and then playing with himself in the Oval Office.

The last day or two with the meme coin thing certainly doesn't throw any cold water on that premise, does it?