Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5h ago

If you asked some friend of yours, in a tight corner, to borrow $100 and they gave you a lottery ticket that might be worth $100 once you scratched it off and redeemed it, you possibly would be forgiven for punching your friend in the face, although the sort of person who did such a thing would feel very offended and like you'd been ungrateful. After all, the lottery ticket has potential value: if you add up the various possible payouts of the lottery ticket weighted by the probability of those payouts, you'd arrive at an expected value for the ticket that would probably be well under a dollar but still not zero.

If you were given a big stack of such tickets, in other words, you'd expect to get a certain number of dollars out of the stack: the expected value of each ticket alone, multiplied by the size of the stack.

But in the here and now, there isn't a stack of lottery tickets but a single one, with a tiny expected value. Most likely you'll get zero dollars from scratching it off.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5h ago

It's in this weird area where a lot of obfuscated and mystified thinking about #capitalism and #markets belongs, in this paradox that one can have a non-zero probability of making money with some activity and yet no expectation of making money with a given transaction or even with a big heap of them.

There's a teensy tiny chance, for example, that if you decided one day to walk into every single office in a neighborhood corporate office building and knock politely on the door and ask for $100 (like you were Harry du Bois from #DiscoElysium let's say) you'd have a hundred bucks at the end of that process, maybe even more. There's a teensy tiny chance someone will give you $100,000 if you ask for $100.

And on such a slender basis do the defenders of capitalism claim that "everyone" ought to be able to get rich in the capitalist system if they really want to.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5h ago

They have a core myth in #capitalism, the self-made millionaire, and just about every money-mad boss or investor has trotted it out no matter what their actual past is like. Suddenly, in their zeal to defend the Free Market and its infinite bounty, they'll recall how they started from nothing, saving their pennies as they trudged back and forth to school (uphill both ways, in pouring rain no matter the season, etc.) and that's why they're a multimillionaire Internet Outreach Coordinator or whatever. The implicit argument is always the same: "I exist, therefore you have no excuse for not getting rich instead of demanding handouts."

If you ask how this tale helps them deal with a $100 debt immediately they'll just get angry and throw you out of their office for being disrespectful, for the defender of capitalism always regards their wisdom about capitalism as, in some indefinable sense, the very best balm that they could possibly offer to a person in need.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5h ago

This is very much like the social logic which persuades bullies they're helping people to eat more healthfully by shaming them for their weight: the capitalist ideologue has appointed themselves a sort of high priest of capitalism, passing along its lore which ought to be known by all and which gives comfort to those suffering—isn't it grand to be told you ought to be able to get rich if you want it bad enough? so inspiring and reassuring—and therefore they feel incredibly insulted if you spurn the advice. In their extreme concern for your plight and your edification they will probably start hurling slurs at you, if you complain persistently enough, and accuse you of Marxism.

After all, they can always persuade themselves there's a chance the preaching might work, and therefore they do it and expect you to be comforted by that slenderest of chances.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

Probability is a strange thing in capitalist logic. Under certain circumstances, probabilities cannot drop below 1% because capitalists harbor a curious reverence for percentages and also the word "percentile" which they sometimes seem to think means the same as "percentage". There's a wonderful bit of the Dan Olson NFTs video in which he features a dramatic reading of a proposal for a comic about a big-titted NFT girl. The proposer feels very generous in speculating that they could capture "just 1%" of the entire comics-reading market and thus rake in a bazillion dollars: "THIS IS A CASH FLOW!!" I expect a lot of grifters' scams are like that: they see some gigantic amount of money flowing in some particular sector and tell themselves they have a chance to grab "just 1%" of it. So small! Why that's practically the same as nothing.

Meanwhile of course other business calculation require manipulation of far slenderer odds. #Cryptocurrency has immensely aided scams which make use of the large payouts which may be amassed by multiplying a huge number of tiny expected sums of money because fake crypto money, unlike actual #currency, can assume very tiny incremental values. Ordinary currency is quantized, with 1/100 or 1/1000 of a base unit usually being the bare minimum quantity.

(cont'd)

11:10pmWeb
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen5h ago

I find myself wondering if that's not been exploited in some kind of rounding-error scam exploiting the ability to move hard currency into the #crypto sphere, doing murky manipulations using different "coins" that have widely different equivalent values in terms of hard currency, and then pulling the money back into the sphere of legitimate business. "Liquefying" it, some would say, although it's actually a process of condensation, condensing gas-phase money (i.e. money existing mostly as promises and gambles on the future) into liquid money.

Thinking about money in such physical terms has been, I must say, helpful in demystifying this crap. I don't like dealing with money and people who talk about it constantly are unbelievably dreary, not the least because such persons ALWAYS chatter about how they don't care about money.

They've managed to blur "money" in their minds enough to convince themselves that all the things they're doing, the #investment and gambling on the #markets and buying and selling and lending and extorting rents and such, is somehow not about money but some vaguer thing they imagine to be an unquestionable public good, like "wealth" or "value". No greedy person admits to being greedy: denying the greed, right in the middle of grabbing for money, is one of the surest signs of it.

They can always tell themselves it's #mathematics. You don't hate math, do you? Sorry, maths.

~Chara of Pnictogen