Talk me out of this

On November 21, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

A couple of months ago, more or less on a whim, I started sinking $50 a week into Bitcoin.

Yeah, I know. Stay with me here.

You are not reading that incorrectly.

That is up nearly five percent today, nearly twelve percent this week, and nearly fifty percent in a month. Those are fucking insane numbers. Ridiculous numbers. Stupid numbers. “That can’t be right” numbers.

I have actually invested $342.16. My personal actual rate of return over the last seven weeks or so is 40.9%. I assume there would be some transaction fees or something and taxes to set aside once I sell, but that’s ludicrous.

I am seriously and genuinely considering getting a zero-APR advance from one of my credit cards to sink into Bitcoin for a month, at which point I’ll sell off whatever the advance was, pay it off, and let the profits coast for a little longer. I’m not talking about an enormous amount of money, relatively speaking; nothing that would bankrupt me or even put me into real trouble if the market crashes, and one way or another I probably want out of this (or do I?) before Trump takes office and wrecks the economy. But 40% of, say, $5000 is two thousand dollars in a month. Even if the rate of return drops by half that’s still a thousand dollars for doing nothing. When I started thinking about this a week or so ago, the one-month number was around thirty percent.

There’s got to be a correction of some sort coming soon, right? Nothing stays on this high of a trajectory for long, and Bitcoin is proof positive that money (and the investment market) is nearly entirely fake anyway. But … shit.

Am I gonna end up $2,000,000 in debt in two years, and this is the post that led to my downfall?

Somebody tell my wife about this post so she can forbid me to invest in this stupid, imaginary product, please.

The best part of waking up

On December 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I’ve been a little preoccupied with dying lately, right? You can understand why if you’ve read my post about last week. I spend a patch of my drive in to work on a highway, a highway well known to be treacherous in bad weather by basically everyone who lives around here, and as I was pulling on to said highway this morning it floated through my head that there were no less than three places on my way into work where my chances of getting killed in a car accident were going to spike.

My highway cruising speed in my current car is around 60 MPH, which is slower than most of the cars on that road are going to be going. It’s not me, it’s the car; when I rented a car for the Nashville trip I was driving faster. In this particular car, for whatever reason, I have to think about it if I want to drive faster than about 60.

I’m on my way in and the idiots on the radio start blathering about some study some yahoo did to determine how much Santa Claus ought to make. They’ve decided it’s around $137,000 a year, and the idiots are going on about how they’ve combined yearly salaries for a whole bunch of things– shipping, delivery, receiving, manufacturing, blah blah blah.

For whatever reason, this sets off a chain of thoughts in my head where I’m musing on how much difficult work in this country is compensated shittily because we don’t value the people who do it. I’ve said this before, and it’s true: people who make minimum wage in this country work harder than I do. I’ve had minimum-wage jobs. They are much harder than jobs that make much more. What they aren’t is more valued.

But anyway. This post isn’t actually about politics. What this post is about is that I looked down at one point during this brain-rant and discovered I was going eighty miles an hour.

Make that four places where my chances of dying were going to spike on my way in to work.

I’m safe at my desk now; hopefully that’s the last dumb thing I’ll do today.

In which I am full of contradictions

On November 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews12 Comments

So I discovered today that I can’t handle Costco. I’ve never been in one before, and one just opened nearby, and my mom and wife wanted to go, so I tagged along. I’ve never in my life had such a visceral negative reaction to a store before. I hated the place– from the fact that there aren’t any damn signs anywhere (even the bathrooms aren’t labeled) to the fact that the place where you walk in is nowhere near any registers to the utter fucking randomness of the layout– within a 15-foot radius you could find housewares, fresh seafood on ice, liquor, and piles of leather jackets, an item that should never be in a pile. I’d had enough after five minutes and told Bek and my mom that I’d be in the car; I had my phone with me to keep me entertained so they could take as long as they wanted.

On the way back to my car, it hit me just how much the place is like a casino. No signs, no markers, everything is set up to disorient you and keep you lost and wandering. And the $50 a year fee for the right to shop there as the icing on the cake. No thanks; I’ve had enough naked capitalism lately and this place, despite having a stellar reputation for how they treat their employees, is one of the most grotesquely capitalist places I’ve ever had the misfortune of entering. And I’m not even generally that down on capitalism, although it does get worse this time of year; it should be noted that the very next thing I did after leaving Costco was go to Best Buy and buy a new iPad. But, still… guh. If a store is going to try and manipulate my behavior I’d prefer it if it wasn’t so goddamned obvious. I don’t give a damn how cheap their diapers are, I’d rather go to fucking Wal-Mart, and I have literally never before in my life said the words “I’d rather go to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, that’s not true, because I still won’t be going to Wal-Mart. But walking into a Wal-Mart doesn’t immediately give me the creeping screamers the way Costco did. And note that all this is before we get to the fact that it was the second Saturday the place had been open and it was crammed full of filthy, stinking humanity. I’d have hated it empty; the people had nothing to do with it.

So. I’m crabby today, is the point. How’re you?