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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Ok where do I invest my money then?

    Well-diversified mutual funds, or something equivalent to that, and in particular you want a mixture of asset classes such as stocks and bonds. You also want to have a hierarchy of investments, ranging from very low-risk but also low-growth investments for your emergency savings that you can tap at a moment’s notice to high-risk but also high-growth investments for savings that you do not need to tap for a long time (such as for retirement, assuming that is far off). “High-risk” in this context doesn’t mean “risk of your investment disappearing” so much as “risk of your investment suffering from a dip in value at the time when you need it”.

    But to reiterate: the most important thing here is diversification, because diversification means that some of your investments can drop in value by a lot or even become worthless without causing you to lose everything. Putting all of your money into a single asset or kind of asset, such as a cryptocurrency, is basically the opposite of what you want to be doing.









  • Unlike Twitter, hashtags don’t perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it’s federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don’t share your interests.

    If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.

    In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it’s more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that’s just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don’t have a basis for comparison. :-)



  • It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

    I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

    The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.