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What I've Been Thinking About Lately #28

Substance, Casinos, and Professional Siphoning Firms

When listening or reading, it's important to focus on the content of the idea and not your opinion of the person who is saying it. This occured to me as I found myself not considering something I was reading because I had written off the originator of the idea. Then, someone much smarter than me whose opinion I respect very much, was praising the idea and sharing further ideas related to the core content.

Smart people can say dumb things and vice versa, think for yourself and let opinions from others be data points but not deciding factors.


I hate Casinos. The lack of windows, the bright lights, the inside smoking, the crisp high pitched ringing of winning alarm bells while losses are suffered silently. All of these things intentionally designed to get people to play more games by inciting a fear-of-missing-out mentality on its patrons. Even those privy to the psychological warfare in action are still subject to the casino's influence of changing how they think.

Recently, when I scroll 'Crypto Twitter', I've been reminded of casinos because shitcoin trading is becoming popular again. Shitcoins are blockchain based units of exchange that do nothing. However, because blockchains are capable of quickly financializing things by making trustless markets of exchange, this 'nothing' has a price associated with it. The prices on these shitcoins are known for their volatility with some taking massive gains and most taking massive losses.

While I know that statistically these are not games I want to be playing, the gains feel so alluring. Much like seeing the group of boisterous bros at the baccarat table jump up and down, slapping their now slightly richer friend on the back for his superior dice rolling skills, I can't seem to look away.

Normally, I'd hold disdain for these games because I believe the trustless nature of crypto to be important for its resistance to government capture, decentralized source of truth, and digital-ownership properties, not gambling. However, some individuals who in my view have made immense contributions to crypto told me shitcoins are how they initially got into crypto. "Came for the money, stayed for the tech" they said.

So maybe shitcoins are a net good, maybe not, all I know is people placed one right in front of my eyeballs on my favorite app and I may need to move my eyeballs elsewhere for the sake of my attention.


Calling large consulting companies like Accenture and Deloitte 'Professional Service Firms' is a misnomer. The outputs of these companies are measured in hours of time that their employees spend working on client work, not the quality of the output. This sets up the wrong incentives where consulting firms are incentivised to spend more hours using cheaper people, effectively decreasing the work product which is what the client is asking for help with. In addition to this, they share in none of the outcomes of the actions they recommend and the professionals are made up of recently graduated kids who are copy pasting things from other jobs and have no idea what they are talking about.

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