cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5292091
Day traders be like: “I don’t have a gambling addiction”
line go down, time to disrupt everything and give rich people more money
Just wait for line to go back up??
The day trading phenomenon is just so sad. My mom has a few friends whose sons fell for the meme and just sit at home all day making these bets. It always ends up with them losing all their “progress” and, in a very real sense, wasting huge tracts of their lives staring at random numbers being generated. Nothing built, nothing gained, nothing grown. All that remains is regret. That existence is undeniably cushy but psychologically hellish. Down to the countryside with them.
This is why for years now, I push back so hard on people here who are like “hey why can’t I use the power of Marxism to make money picking stocks?”. Because you can’t, first of all. But also because this stuff is really easy to be a gateway into getting hooked on just staring at red and green numbers all day while losing everything you put in.
OTOH, it’s not like the vast majority of “real” jobs are productive in a real sense either. It feels like so much of the economy is propped up by bazinga AI tech bullshit, and everything else is service jobs or online store warehouse work for $12/hour and no career prospects.
Add on that our system is designed to have a constant pool of millions of people in a reserve army of labor… what are people supposed to do? Starting a business is not a guarantee of anything. Most fail. Work sucks. There’s a joke of a welfare system.
Getting work is harder than ever since we are competing worldwide and I’m sorry, but not everyone has a job that fits them. Some people just aren’t skilled enough to work in a modern company.
For a mediocre person without special talents or lots of capital day trading doesn’t sound that bad. This system is designed to fail the average person. No wonder the average person takes up socially-acceptable forms of gambling to get by.
