Bubble Deniers

Bubbles occur when the perceived value of some commodity far exceeds its real value.   In order to do this, some folks have to keep the perceived value in the public eye, and tamp down any mention of real value.   Social media is the perfect platform for bubbles.

In the world of investment scams there are what I call bubble deniers.  These folks, and the arguments they make, fall into a number of categories, and basically their goal is to groom and program people to buy into investment scams by de-legitimizing any opposing viewpoints.  Their tactics and types are many, and include one or more of the following techniques to shout down opposition to pyramid schemes, bubble Investments, Ponzi schemes and the like.

One way to tell if something is a bubble or a scam, is if you see these sort of techniques being played out either online or in-person.

The bubble denier proper, denies that bubbles even exist.  I ran into this recently when we were discussing the tulip bubble. I received an email from a bubble denier claiming the bubbles never existed in fact the Tulip bubble in Holland 1600s never even happened.   That's good news to all the people who lost their life savings on tulip bulbs - maybe their descendants will get their money back.

The so-called logic behind this argument was that inflated prices for commodities or stocks or whatever or merely "market evaluations" of those items.  This is sort of a non sequitur.  It doesn't address the fact that the price of these items skyrocket in a short period of time and then crash just as quickly.  If these are truly realistic market valuations of these commodities or stocks, why do they rise and fall so quickly?  And the answer is of course that they are not realistic evaluations but inflated or hyped evaluations - they are skewed perceptions of value, and it is all-too-easy to skew people's perceptions through persuasion.

And that is how con artists make money out of these scams, whether it is hyping gold or hyping penny stocks or whatever.  The idea is to change the perception of the value of an item and get people to pay a lot of money for it, before you pull out the rug from under them.

UPDATE:  Another way to "validate" inflated prices is to engage in sham transactions.  Beanie Babies are listed on eBay for thousands of dollars, even as the company making them warns that even the most "valuable" one is worth maybe $20 on a good day. These listings (which never result in a sale) are used by con artists to ensnare the unsuspecting into buying their worthless junk for hundreds if not thousands of dollars.  Or, it is like mortgage fraud, where straw-buyer sales of homes drove up prices - and the fraudsters take the cash profits, leaving banks (and you and me) holding the bag.

Another technique is the credentialist argument.  They will quote or cite some so-called expert in the field, saying that the value of the commodity or stock or whatever has nowhere to go but up.  This was common during the gold bubble (which I can think we can now say has burst) where "experts" predicted that gold would hit $5000 an ounce, "soon" - without any reasons being given.  Of course, the credentials of these people is usually somewhat sketchy.  Often, the only real credential they have is proclaiming themselves to be expert on the field whether it is gold or Bitcoin or some heavily hyped penny stock.

The victims or potential victims of these scams are then told, "Look, Mr. Credential says this is a great deal, and the naysayers, what credentials do they have?  They don't know what the hell they're talking about!"

And people will believe these sort of arguments, and even repeat them among each other.  That's the beauty of all of these scams and hypes is that not only will people believe what you or your audience shills or trolls say, but the victims will actually repeat these things themselves - what the Soviets used to call "useful idiots."  It is like going to a timeshare seminar.  After sitting in the audience for three hours, hearing what a great deal timeshares are, you may find that you yourself fall for this rhetoric and actually repeat it to others. Why not invest in your vacation?  Why not, indeed.

(Shills bear mentioning, and the term is from the auction world.   A shill is a "plant" in the audience who places fake bids on auction items, in order to gin up the price.   If an item is getting no bids, the shill will bid on it to make it look like people want the item.  Or if a buyer is serious about buying it, the shill will counter-bid, trying to get the buyer to raise his bid (a tricky bit of business, as if the shill over-bids, the real buyer may back out).   Sometimes, a real shill isn't needed - the auctioneer merely points in a vague direction and calls out a phony bid he claims to have seen.   Since he is usually pointing at the chandelier, these are called "chandelier bids".  As you can see, the auction world is another example of how perceived value trumps real value.)

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The good news is, whenever you see these sort of arguments in play, you can be sure you have stumbled upon a scam, con, or bubble.   Legitimate investments don't need to skew your perceptions to get you to invest. 

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The third subset of this group or type of argument is the phony mathematician. This is the guy who cranks numbers to show that whatever the investment is, it is a good deal. Of course, the numbers are either fake or skewed or the math is wholly wrong.  But few people challenge it, as few people really have a visceral understanding of math.  For example, in one gold group I recently visited, a fellow opines that gold is still a good investment for anyone who bought it in the past, except perhaps for the three or four years when it peaked in 1981.  Other than that, he argues, it has "held its value" with regard to inflation and therefore would have been a good investment for anyone.  As he put it, "Any investment in anything that's gone up in value has to be good investment right?"

Of course, there a lot of errors in his mathematics.  To begin with, besides the bubble of 1981 there have been other bubbles such as in 1974 as well as the recent bubble in 2011 where the price peaked at $1,800 an ounce before falling back to $1,200 today.  Not only that, by selectively choosing start and end dates, they're showing it to be a "good investment" when in fact it really wasn't.  Even if you bought gold after the bubble burst in 1981, you would have seen absolutely no appreciation in it for almost 15 years.  Factoring in inflation, that's losing money.  Thus, it was really a bad investment for more than merely a time period of a few years during the bubbles but also during the long stretches where it just simply fail to appreciate in value.

But his argument carried the day, of course, with others "piling on" (some shills, some useful idiots) echoing the sentiment and not bringing up any sticky details that might derail the group-think.

The reality is, the only really good time to buy gold is right before it shoots up in value in a bubble, and that's really hard to predict.  Even harder to predict as when the bubble will burst and then sell out in time.  In fact, bubbles are really shitty investments to begin with, and there really is no way to properly time that the buying and selling of bubble items. The best thing you can do is just stay away from these things.  And specious mathematics doesn't change this analysis.

Yet another tactic used to preserve the group-think is the personal attack which may be combined with baiting - along with a combination of the previous techniques.  I noted before in another posting how a fellow in another blog tried to debunk some sort of scam.  Like clockwork, he was baited by people perpetrating the scam - posting messages on his blog which were incendiary.  When the blogger responded, the troll played the classic game, "Well, I can see my comments have clearly upset you!  Why don't you calm down and we can talk about this rationally?"   In other words, the guy's a weirdo, so whatever he says can be discounted.   And that's how the bubble promoters work, on their sites.

If someone questions the legitimacy of whatever it is they are doing, and the above tactics don't work to convince the plebes to keep the faith, you just attack the attacker.   "Don't listen to him - he's nuts!  Everyone who knows anything knows that gold/bitcoin/pennystocks/real estate/timeshares/whatever is the greatest thing since sliced bread!   He's probably just miffed he missed out on such a good deal!

Arguing with these folks or trying to point out the flaws in their logic is fruitless - regardless of whether it is a paid troll selling the commodity in question, or just the useful idiot at work who bought into it, and is now proselytizing on his own.  The best thing you can do for yourself, is not try to "save others" but just walk away.

The good news is, whenever you see these sort of arguments in play, you can be sure you have stumbled upon a scam, con, or bubble.   Legitimate investments don't need to skew your perceptions to get you to invest. 

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UPDATE:  With regard to Bitcoin, South Korea said today that they will close cryptocurrency exchanges unless they can be made accountable (i.e., - provide the government with the names of who is buying and selling the currency and how much).   Like clockwork, a cryptocurrency "expert" (self-appointed, natch!) tried to spin this as South Korea being "jealous" of "so many people making so much money in cryptocurrencies!"   Uh, right, that could happen.

The reality is, of course, that their neighbor, North Korea, is skirting sanctions, engaging in arms and drug trading, spreading ransomware, and doing all sorts of nefarious and illegal things using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.   Shutting down Bitcoin is their way of striking back at a rogue state.

We are moving to a cashless society where physical money is disappearing quickly.   This is good news for governments and tax authorities, as it is harder to conceal money electronically.  Even Swiss bank accounts and offshore Cayman Islands banks have been pierced by governments.   If they are taking down the Swiss, do you think they will let Bitcoin get a pass?   I think not.  South Korea and China are already cracking down - the rest of the world will follow suit.

And then what do you have?  A "currency" that costs more to use, takes longer to use, and is just as traceable as a credit card transaction.   Hmmmm.... that value does that have?

UPDATE:  A reader sends me a link to a blog entry where the blogger engages in the old "the tulip bubble never happened, thus Bitcoin is not a bubble" bit.   But that is not the blog entry I was thinking about - but rather one from several years back at the height of the gold bubble, when someone made the same argument - the tulip bubble never happened, thus gold is not a bubble.   Since gold crashed from a high of nearly $1800 to $1200 and has stayed there, I think we can call that a bubble now.

Another person argued we should "go back to the gold standard, when the economy was stable!"  He uses credentialism ("respected Wall Street Publisher") and the ersatz mathematics to make his "point".  But as I noted in my blog entry, there are maybe - just maybe - one or two bubbles that burst when we were on the gold standard.

No bubbles?   You don't have to go back to the 1600's to find examples of bubbles.   We had one just a few years ago in gold, a few years before that in houses, and before that in tech stocks, and so on.   And in each case, the techniques recited in this blog entry were used to shout down the naysayers.

This alone, is proof of a bubble - when people say, "It's not a bubble!"

And MLM isn't a pyramid scheme, either!  Ha!

Where Did All The Goldbugs Go?

Calling all goldbugs!  How did that work out for you?

A few years back, all you heard about was goldbugs.   Gold was the best investment in the world!  It was going to go up in value because... it was!   And if you couldn't see that, well, you were just an idiot and clearly not spending every waking hour on r/goldbugs!

As the chart above illustrates, the folks who got into gold during the height of the recession (2011) are kind of hurting right now.   People who bought in at $1400 an ounce or more are sitting on negative equity, while the rest of us rode the bull market.  Gee, I wonder how that bull market is going to do, long-term?   Or bitcoin?  What goes up, must come down.

What is interesting about these bubbles - and they are bubbles - is that no one talks about them once they burst.   People are embarrassed to admit that they were wrong, particularly when they were so fucking smug about it a few months or years previous.

I mentioned before that some neighbors (now dead) were getting into "day trading stocks" back in 2007, before it all blew up.   They called me an idiot for buying and holding stocks and mutual funds (among other things).   They were making "big money" by purchasing stocks and then unloading them - often within minutes!

They had subscribed to some sort of "day trading system" which may also have been a pyramid scheme, as they seemed to spend more time trying to sell this to their friends than they did actually using it.   Anyway, months later, no one is talking about day trading stocks, and when you bring it up, well, awkward silence.

We don't talk about that... change the subject please!

And so on down the line.   The people who smugly told me that they were going to make it big in real estate and that I was a fool for selling out, are strangely silent today, much as the Elio "investors" and depositors are - the latter of whom all went out and bought a moped.  And sadly, this silence isn't helpful.

Silence is the con-man's friend.   Whether it is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, or just a shitty investment, when people clam up about their failures, well, the con-man goes on to live another day and claim another victim.  And so it goes with gold.   The rabid true-believers are largely gone, and in fact, will never admit to being rabid true-believers in the first place.

Besides, gold is so, yesterday.   Crypto-currencies!  Now there's a winner that is sure never to fail!  And if you can't see that, well, you are as dumb as the gold-doubters were a few years back.

Act rationally in an irrational world.

Kidnapped!

If you won the mega-millions lottery, your life would change in a whole lot of ways - and not pleasant ones.

We live on old people's island - full of retired New York State schoolteachers.  Pretty middle-class existence and very quiet.  Next door is rich people's island - where people build mini-mansions and drive luxury SUVs and pretend to be rich - until the money runs out, and the money always runs out.

But next door to that is really, really rich people's island, where people have vacation homes that start at $4 million.   These aren't strivers, these are the real rich, and their private jets are lined up on the ramp next door on mere rich people's island, so the strivers can have something to strive for.

You can't drive over to really, really rich people's island anymore.  Even the maintenance staff has to take a shuttle bus there.  But occasionally they have concerts there and you can go and see how the other half lives.   And while I was there, I picked up a magazine they had laying around.  It was fascinating.   In addition to ads for multi-million dollar vacation homes, were ads for cars that started at $100,000 each and went up - way up - from there.   There were ads for private jet companies and whatnot as well.  And jewelry - lots of jewelry.

There were also ads for various security services - body guards, burglar alarms, and whatnot.  One ad showed young rich kids playing with an enormous German Shepard.   The company touted that they could provide trained German Shepards that would be gentle with your children, but rip off the gardener's leg, if he didn't enter his security code properly.  It was very interesting - this anxiety that the very, very rich have, about being assaulted.

Turns out to be an anxiety that is rooted in reality.  If you won the big lottery and had nearly a billion dollars, you would have all sorts of problems.   Having friends and family members kidnapped would be one of them.   And it goes on more than we think.   We never hear about more than half the cases.   We only hear about things when they go wrong.

There is a new movie coming out about the Getty kidnapping.   But there are other high profile kidnappings (that we know of) out there as well.   The Lindbergh baby, Freddy Heineken, Patty Hearst.  In fact, the list goes on and on.   If you are mega-rich, you need a bodyguard - and hopefully the bodyguard isn't in on the kidnapping.

People don't think about this, but if you were to win the powerball lottery and got a check for $500 million, your life would change dramatically.   And I am not so sure that having a fancy house and a fancy car would make up for that.   Being rich would become a full-time job.   And you'd have to become a lot more paranoid about people in general.

Suddenly, being an average everyday ordinary schmuck doesn't seem like such a bad deal.   I recounted before how Howard Hughes had old jalopies rebuilt so as to be reliable, but to look like dented, rusted old cars on the outside.   He had one made for Katherine Hepburn, and she enjoyed being able to go out and shop at the grocery store without being mobbed by photographers and fans.  "Say, did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like....?"

It turns out when you are mega-rich, being a schmuck is a big treat now and then.   Not being in the spotlight and not being a target is a pleasure.   Something to think about.

The penalty for kidnapping used to be death, which was problematic and illustrates why extreme sentences are often less of a deterrent to crime.  In the drug wars, the sentence for dealing drugs was often harsher than that of shooting a cop - so drug dealers did the math and figured they had nothing to lose in shooting someone, if it meant the possibility of getting away.   Similarly, for a kidnapper facing a death sentence (or a life sentence) killing the kidnap victim to eliminate a witness is a calculated decision.   And perhaps that is one reason why kidnap victims often end up dead.

Quite frankly, one reason I stopped buying lottery tickets is the dread of winning the lottery.   I am not a rich person by American standards (maybe by global ones, which is why I don't go to Mexico anymore) and can live a comfortable, fairly anonymous life.  If I won the lottery, it would upend my life, and I would end up a prisoner on very, very rich people's island, wondering which one of the many service employees I had hired would end up kidnapping me for ransom.

Sometimes, it is good to be a plebe!

Education Versus College Education

This video says succinctly what I have been trying to get across in several postings.

A reader sends me a link to the above video on YouTube.  The fellow who makes these videos is funny and he tends to make good points concisely, although some of the videos could be about half their length and still get the point across.  But then again, I tend to run on, too.  He makes the same point I have been trying to make - something has changed about college, and it may no longer be the bargain it once was.  This does not mean all college educations are worthless, however.   Just more and more of them are less worthwhile - and cost a lot more.

Another reader chastises me for valuing education - saying one can never "get rich" merely by going to school.   But then again, I never said that.   A good education - regardless of where you get it - is going to advance you in life to a better station than where you were previously, unless of course, it is a junk education from some touchy-feely college which has courses in self-esteem and queer studies.

If I hadn't finished my Engineering and Law degrees, I would probably still be working as a technician at Carrier or some other manufacturing company (likely, as they closed the plant) and struggling to get by in a blue-collar job.   Not only that, law school taught me more than just the law - it taught me how to think.   And classes like tax law convinced me that getting into real estate at that time, was a good deal - and that getting out later on was an even better one.

I learned how to solder plumbing and wire a house at Carrier.  I learned how to buy and sell houses in law school.  And having a law degree and a practice meant the banker knew me by my first name and loaned me money.   A good education helps.

But as the above video notes, there are a lot of people who dropped out of college (myself included) who went on to become successful.   And it is not that college offered them nothing, only that they reached a point in their lives where their career was taking off, and finishing that last year of the degree seemed a lot less important than making the next million dollars.   Indeed, college (and high school) really seem less and less relevant, the further your career goes along.  Dropping out to go live in Mom's basement and play video games, on the other hand, isn't the same thing.

A neighbor of mine is an Engineer, but never went to college.   He did take a State certification exam to be a licensed Engineer - designing and installing huge HVAC systems, building systems, pumping stations, and the like.  He ended up owning his own company.   He never went to college, and I think it is something of a sore spot with him, as some folks look down on someone who doesn't have an advanced education, and I think he also wonders what he missed.   But the people looking down on him are often not as smart and talented as he is, and quite frankly, I doubt he missed much by not going to college.

College was the best 14 years of my life - literally.   Since I was co-oping and going part-time and at night, it took me ten years to get my Engineering degree and four years to get my law degree (instead of the usual three).   In the interim, I was actually working in these fields and learning more by doing than from textbooks per se.   By the time I got my degrees, it was a mere formality - I already had the job in question, and just needed the credential to keep it (employers are funny that way).   I never had to worry about "finding a job" after graduation, as I already had it.

The point is, you can obtain an education just about anywhere, and college doesn't have to have a 100% monopoly on this.  But again, employers are weird about this - often requiring the credential to hire you or keep you on.   I found that by working in fields where demand was high, people would pay me to go to college - General Motors, United Technologies, the Patent &Trademark Office, and the first law firm I worked at, all kicked in dough toward tuition.   And people say college is unafforable.  Pfft!

But getting back to my second reader's point - the point of this blog isn't how to "get rich" because, quite frankly, if I knew how to do that, I certainly wouldn't tell you about it, would I?  In fact, no one would.   So whenever you see a get-rich-quick scheme, you can bank on the fact it is a fraud, as no one in their right mind would give away such secrets.

Rather, the point of this blog was how to better myself and my situation.  If you get something out of that, fine.  If not, go off to the Bitcoin discussion group or some self-help seminar and see what you get out of that nonsense.

A good education, no matter how you get it, will advance you in life (a bad education is, by definition, not an education at all).   And by education, I mean often very simple things.   For example, knowing how to read and write and speak.   For example, a reader ages ago accused me of faking this blog - that I had an army of writers at my beck and call, typing up all these entries.   Who could possibly write 3,000+ entries on utter bullshit - sometimes two or three times a day?   Well, I can type 110 wpm, bitches, so go stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.   I can type faster than I can dictate using voice recognition.   And yea, all the letters are long-ago worn off my keyboard.  That was a skill that has served me well over the years.  So many people I meet today are doing hunt-and-peck well into their 50's!

Learning to write - and to type - took a long, long time.   Decades, in fact.  And it is something you learn by doing.  And when I got my first law firm job, I realized what a shitty writer I was.   It was depressing - as I related before - that first letter I wrote for a partner that came back covered in red ink with the notation, "don't send me anymore DRAFTS!"   I was ready to quit, but I sat down, re-read the letter and realized it was shit.

Technical writing and typing were probably two of the most useful courses I took in high school and college.   Oh, sure, the Engineering stuff was OK, too.  But frankly, the only use I ever found for differential equations was to calculate the voltage curve of a capacitor, and that's just one equation you could look up in a book.   Many other courses, like elecromagnetics, just taught me how much I didn't know, and to have respect for the subject matter.   Still others, like basic circuits courses, I actually used in designing electrical circuits (briefly).   But the bulk of college courses don't have "real world" applications - but teach you how to think, instead.

As I noted in a recent posting, understanding mathematics on a visceral level is important if you are to understand money.  Neither are taught well in our nation's schools.   But if you take enough math courses, eventually some of it sinks in.  And what sinks in can be useful.  Casinos, for example, are a form of poverty tax for people who never took a course in probability.

Speaking well - intelligently and without a horrible regional or socioeconomic accent - is also important if you want to get ahead in the world.   So many "poor" people of all colors, races, regions, and whatever mark themselves apart from society by the use of thick accents and local slang.  There are people in Georgia, west of I-95 who talk in a thick southern drawl so thick, it is like molasses.  They are nice folks, but will always be relegated to the margins of life just because they can barely make it through a job interview.

The problem today - as pointed out in the video above - is that "getting an education" is looked upon as being limited to the monopoly of colleges and universities, which are run like businesses, even the non-profit ones, where the heads of these organizations take home millions.   And this was not always the case.  As I noted before, my friend was able to become a licensed engineer without going to college, and there are still a few States where you can Read the Law and take the bar exam and become a lawyer without ever going to law school.

Shhhhh!  Don't tell anyone!

You got that right, you can be a lawyer and not go to law school.  But few do it, in modern times.   It is not impossible to do - or even hard.  You go to work for a lawyer as an underpaid apprentice and you learn the law by working in the field (much as I did).   If you take the bar review class, odds are, you can pass the bar exam the first time (as I did).   It wasn't that hard, quite frankly.   But it was stressful.   A lot of what I learned about the law didn't coalesce in my brain until I took the BAR/BRI bar exam review course.   It was only then I realized I could have saved four years and $40,000 and a lot of hassle.  Law school is founded on the principle of hide the main idea.   They teach you everything but the law, which is what is on the test - and on the bar exam.   Oh, it's also what you end up practicing.

Of course, traditionally, colleges and universities served other functions than just mere education.   They were also institutions of socialization and a means of keeping young people out of the workforce for four years.   Today, they are a means of enslaving young people with staggering debts early in life, for life, as well.  But social connections, historically, were one reason the upper classes sent their kids to college.

Take Harvard and Yale.   Many famous people went to those schools, and they made social contacts there that served them well later in life.  It was a private rich-kids club, and often the social organizations and "clubs" such as Skull-and-Bones and the Porcellian club - the latter of which would not admit even Franklin D. Roosevelt - were more important than the classes and lectures.  In fact, back in the day, attending class and trying to get good grades was seen as something only the poorer mercantile students did.   The rich kids partied and made connections.

A lot of that has changed - at least a bit.   But today, education still is one of the best ways to advance your personal situation.   But not all educations are equal.   And as the video above points out, once everyone has a college degree, having a college degree no longer sets you apart.

My friend from England has a degree in Physics from a prestigious University there.   I asked him why he didn't go into some science-related field (indeed, he could have been a Patent Examiner or Attorney) and he replied, "Oh, I only got an ordinary degree".   It seems they have a system there where if you actually get good grades, you get a "first" or at worst, a "second" degree.   But if you just show up and drink beer and party, you get an "ordinary degree" which is useless for getting a job, but was a good way to keep young people busy for four years.  And for young people from monied backgrounds, back in the day, an "ordinary" degree was all they needed.   Today, it is sort of outdated, but since college over there is far less expensive than here, young people can afford to waste four years of their life stacking empty pint glasses into pyramids at the local pub.

In America, not so much.   College is so freaking expensive and useless degrees are really not worth getting.   Sure, getting straight "C's" at Harvard still might work out for you with the social connections you'll make and the aura of the institution.   Lesser schools, less so.   And lesser degrees - in courses specializing in bullshit - are utterly worthless.   At the bottom of the pile are the for-profit and online schools.   You might get something out of these, but you'll have to work at it, and they are often the most expensive to attend.   Plus the prestige of the institution isn't there on your resume.

And it is possible to become over-educated as well - although this happens to few people.   I know a few folks who get serially addicted to obtaining college degrees - delaying entry into "the real world" for one more chance to go back and add a few more initials after their last name.  By the way, PLEASE do not put "esquire" after my name, I hate that shit!  If you want to know if you are dealing with an asshole attorney, check to see if they put "esq." after their name.   If they insist you put it after their name, you've definitely are dealing with an asshole attorney.  But I digress.

So what is the solution to this conundrum?   We've turned college into High School 2.0 and exhorted everyone to go on the premise that everyone will make more money if they go to any college and get any degree, which clearly is not possible to do.  You can't make everyone a king, just by sending everyone to college.   Some of us end up on top, most of us end up in the middle, but someone has to be the plebe at the bottom.   You can't have an organization that is all Vice-Presidents, although American industry is certainly giving it their best shot!

I wish I knew the answer.   Making High School better is one answer - kids today are graduating with hardly even basic skills.  Most of the day is spend in study hall, lunch, and gym - socializing taking precedence over education.   It is warehousing of teenagers, basically.  Training them to get up in the morning and worry about what other people think of them and put in their hours in a cubicle.   And College has turned into just four more years of this.

Maybe college should teach skills as well as academics, so that young people have marketable skills upon graduation.  Or maybe there should be more college alternatives that are less expensive and more skill oriented.  Because let's face it, we are graduating a lot of kids who can barely read and write and think - as evidenced by the fact they didn't read their student loan documents or think very much about them when they signed them.  Hell, half the people graduating from college today can't even drive a car -  not very well, anyway.

All of these things might help, but they are just externalization.  Again, pining for the world to change to suit you isn't going to accomplish much, as the world ain't likely to change - that much.  No, a better approach is to sit down and figure out what your options are, and make better choices.  Get an education, yes.  By what means, I don't know.   What worked for me likely won't work for you - my education is over 30 years old now.

But I think learning some basic skills will always serve you well in life.  Learn to read, write, and articulate.  And whether the smart phone will take over or not, those who can write will always have a place in the world and be in demand.   When you read about any Hollywood story, the bottom line always comes back to the writers - without a good script, even the best directors and actors and producers make crappy movies.  Even the best of ideas and inventions go nowhere, if you can't communicate them to others.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein 

I don't know if the above quote is real or not, but it reminds me of a similar quote, something along the lines of "If you can't explain a complicated concept to a simple person, then you don't really understand it yourself".   In other words, an idea that cannot be communicated to other people is really not an idea at all.   Basic communication is one of the key aspects of any good education.

But beyond that, I have no idea.   Never take career advice from people over 30, as I have noted before.  What works for young people today might be different than what worked for me.   But as my unorthodox 14-year journey through industry and academia illustrates, an education can be what you make of it, and there is a surprising amount of flexibility involved - if you put your mind to it.

Why White Supremicists Live With Their Moms

Why are political radicals of all stripes utter losers in their personal lives?  There is a connection.

Hey, Mom, take care of my cat while I go to a Hitler rally, OK?

I'm getting older and starting to appreciate what my elders thought when I was a kid.  I can only imagine what people who lived through World War II and the horrors of the depression thought about the spoiled rich-kid hippies of the 1960s.  Our forefathers fought Hitler and Nazism and Tojo and the Japanese, and suffered through the depression, only to have their spoiled children complain that materialism was no good and that life should be all about sex and drugs and rock and roll.

They must have thought our generation went insane.  And perhaps we did.  And perhaps part of this was caused by subtle misdirection from foreign powers.  We realize now that our government was involved in manipulating public opinion in foreign countries, and that the Russians in the Chinese were also doing the same thing in our country - today via the Internet.  We may have thought that the Peace, Love, and Drug movement was organically homegrown, but much of that protest era was probably aided and abetted by Foreign agents.  Kids with college deferments protesting a war they were in no danger of being drafted into - makes sense, right?   But I digress.

Today the new thing is slovenly young men wearing tan slacks and white shirts and calling themselves the alt-right, white supremacists, or whatever.  These are often young men in their early twenties.  They were barely twelve years old when President Obama was elected, and even younger when the economy crashed.  They have no real experience in life as of yet.  Alas, when we were that age, we also felt we were sage with wisdom.

As the press reports, when these sort of folks are found out, either through their acts of violence or being "doxxed" on the internet, it turns out they were often living marginally, at home with their Mothers.  These are the sort of underachievers that have always been with us, even since I was their age.

A recent article online exposed how one of these warriors on the front line of racial supremacy was living with his mother and delivering pizzas for a living.  Now granted, I delivered pizzas for living at one time, but I wasn't living with my mother.  I owned my own house at the time and was working my way through college.  I was trying to better myself rather than trying to better the country.

What we see here is the classic trap of externalization.  These youngsters are convinced that there's no way they can get ahead in life by bettering themselves, and thus only radical social change is the solution to make things right.  In their minds, until white supremacy is asserted, they will never get ahead in the world.  And it's a convenient excuse for failure, as white supremacy clearly will never become the law of the land.  So they can continually point to this failure as the reason why they are personal failures.  And they can explain to their mothers why they need to live in the basement for a few months more.

Simultaneously, and overlapping with the same group, are these so-called "red pill" people, who are related to the "involuntary celebrates" - both of whom are misogynists.  These are young men, again in their twenties, who feel that they are owed sex by women of their age group.  They resort to drugging women with Rohypnol in order to have sex with them, and then act surprised when they are accused of violent sexual criminal acts.  Or failing that, they just go on a mass-shooting.  In their minds, everyone else is "lucky" in the world, and they got a raw deal.   They've never been to Africa, apparently.

They argue that "nice guys" like them have trouble getting laid, as if having sex with some sort of inalienable right.  But the reality is, if they moved out of their mother's basement and got a decent job and showed themselves to be respectful human beings, women would likely flock to them.  What women want more than a handsome face or a six-pack abs is a man who will support them and raise a family.  Yes, women want traditional family values as well as men.

But of course, that smacks of effort, it is lot easier to pass the bong and stay in the basement and play video games all day rather than try to go out into the world and make something of yourself.  The sad thing is, the media harps on these people as if they were some sort of vanguard of a new generation of deep thought.  The reality is, these are folks living in the margins who really have nothing else to offer, other than extremist ideology.

Again, the media loves a good story that sells clicks and eyeballs.  And so they posit that these "alt.right" or white supremacists are some sort of huge movement, when their protests usually feature no more than a dozen or so people, and hundreds if not thousands of counter-protesters.  In other words, they are a fringe group representing a tiny minority of thought in the United States, but they're given a huge platform by the media in order for the media to sell advertising space.

Of course, the irony of their position is that they are always playing the victim card which is something they accuse everyone else of doing.  When they propose to put on one of those little hate rallies, and they're denied a protest permit or denied space in public auditorium, they claim their "free speech rights" have been violated.   When it comes right down to it, they act like whiny little bitches.

And schools and other public venues have been intimidated by this argument, and have often spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on police and other security measures in order to hold these little hate events.  They are afraid of spending the same amount of money in legal fees on court cases (that they would likely win) but instead spend more money for security and police protection.  It makes no sense to me.

While public venues should be open to all parties as determined by the constitutional right to free speech, it is also a logical argument that if someone is going to incite a riot, that maybe their right to free speech is not so free.  In other words, if somebody wants to stage a white supremacy rally, they should be charged for the cost of security if they are going to be inciting riots as a result.

And though maybe that legal argument might not carry the day, it is at least worth pursuing.  Because when you get down to it, I strongly suspect that these alt-right leaders who are living in their mother's basement don't have the dough to hire a law firm to prosecute the matter.  Better to spend $200,000 in legal fees then $200,000 in excess security.

And send the little boys home to their mommas.