Best of Web: Pandemic Mental Wounds, Coins Everywhere, Dagobert Legend, Real Estate Frenzy

What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale

The latest by Ed Yong of The Atlantic. He reminds us that the pandemic’s mental wounds are still open. I think we are all trying to come to terms what we are living through, we are all changed. Must read to try to make some sense of it all. Archive.is link if you need it but please consider buying your own subscription, it is well worth it imho. This archive linking shortcut is not working on iPhones it appears, sad.

A sweeping and continuous crisis produces two almost paradoxical phenomena. First, people become inured and apathetic to suffering at a mass scale, experiencing what the psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon has called psychic numbing. But people also become sensitized to further traumas in their own life. Silver has repeatedly found this pattern among people who experience successive disasters, such as 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the Boston Marathon bombings. Many didn’t habituate: Each new blow brought more stress, not less. “Around the one-year anniversary of COVID, a number of journalists asked me, ‘It’s been a year; why aren’t we adjusted to this?’” Silver told me. “I found that question very unusual.”  The pandemic hasn’t been a one-off disaster but “a slow, recurrent onslaught of worsening things,” adds Tamar Rodney, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, who studies trauma. “We can’t expect people to go through that and for everyone to come out the other side being fine. People suffered in between, and those effects must be addressed, even if we’re walking around maskless.”

Inside the Rise and Fall (And Rise and Fall) Of ShitCoins

I have been blogging away here screaming to the void how totally insane some areas of the current investing environment are. Welcome to the era of “pump and dump,” where investors bummed about missing out on getting rich with Bitcoin are being taken for rides by online jokesters pushing tokens with nonsensical names and no clear value. I must warn you to try to keep your head steady reading this as it may shake violently, you have been warned!

If this all seems a little ridiculous, it’s designed to be. The entire premise of shit coins is to play on people’s anxieties by inflating every aspect of the coin in question. Think of it like theater, in which the entire internet is the stage, and every social platform, messaging app, and meme is at the disposal of the actors who are trying to pump up the value of a specific coin so they can make money, and then run off with the proceeds before everyone else realizes they’ve been conned by a group of rogue investors.

There is a certain genius to the shit coin market. It’s not just odd and infantile names, or the pump-and-dump scammers who manipulate the space, but every aspect of the coins are meant to create the ultimate sense of FOMO, and also a promise of extreme wealth. One example is the sheer number of coins out there. While traditional cryptocurrencies operate on a supply-and-demand metric of economics, where there is a limit to the number of available coins in the marketplace (there are currently only about 18 million Bitcoins in the Bitcoin maker space, which is partially why the price is currently so high), shit coins take the complete opposite approach, flooding the market with as many coins as their algorithms can create.

Where are the regulators, looking at you SEC!

The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “Ducktales” Bandit

I had no idea about this guy, what a fun story…and what a character, wow! In the nineties, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero. There has to be a movie about this  guy, Bill Murray will be perfect imho. This would never happen in the US, they would have shot him dead way before he became so famous and made the German police look like a joke. Here is the Archive.is Link.

The police, meanwhile, were beginning to look like fools. During one money handoff, officers ambushed Dagobert on a grassy embankment in Berlin. One officer tried to grab him but slipped and fell, and Funke managed to escape on a bike. The media reported that the officer had slipped on dog poop, creating gag headlines across the country. Ulrich Tille, a lead investigator on the case, said that Dagobert was making his officers “the idiots of the nation.” The police tipped off the press to their next handovers, hoping that the journalists would see a heroic capture. But, in October, 1992, the press watched several more train handovers in which the police failed to capture Dagobert. The journalist Zand-Vakili recalled that, at one point, he saw a police officer kicking a pillar in anger.

Thread on Current Real Estate Frenzy