demmie

[Zen 🎈 @Zen_Trades1]

My key takeaway from Token2049 was that none of the suits were talking about $PUMP on stage. Not a single mention from Solana Foundation leadership at Solana Summit

"The industry" embarrassed by it? One of the two most profitable crypto apps of all time. Everyone pretending Solana's user growth, transaction volume etc is from tokenised stocks, RWAs, stablecoins and not degens slinging memecoins

My conclusion was that Pump will pump so hard and so high that everyone at the next Token will be forced to talk about it whether they like it or not

[奶奶 capital @testinprodcap]

> Trump started the war because he knew that crippling the rest of the world with higher gas prices would cause cap to flow to the U.S. which is much more energy independent. This would allow U.S. companies to raise capital to beat China in AI. 20D chess arc.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

I’m not trying to argue for the sake of it. I’m making a narrower point than the one you keep replying to.

I’m not claiming economics explains everything, or claiming that economic policy alone will push fertility above replacement.

I’m saying you cannot look at weak, surface-level incentives failing and then conclude the bigger issue must be cultural. That is not a sound inference. To reach that conclusion, you would first have to show that governments seriously offset the real private cost of children. I think people are drawing a much stronger conclusion than the policies tried so far can support.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

That’s a straw man. I did not say women should have less education, less work, or less freedom. My point is that once women have more valuable options in the labor market, children become more expensive in opportunity-cost terms unless policy compensates for that properly.

You can’t say it’s “not economic” and then explain it with opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is an economic concept. If people value freedom more because children now impose a larger private penalty on income, time, housing, and flexibility.

If by “culture” you just mean how people respond to incentives, tradeoffs, and opportunity cost, then you’re not disagreeing with me.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

I think we are arguing different things.

My point is simple. The economic penalty of having children is very large, especially for women with strong career prospects (in the case of developed economies, most women have strong career prospects), and the support governments give is usually far smaller than that penalty. That is enough to affect fertility at the population level. It does not require every woman to think the same way. Birth rates are aggregate outcomes. They move when enough people face the same broad incentives.

Culture matters. Partner quality matters. Marriage timing matters. Wanting to travel in your 20s matters. I’m not denying any of that. I’m saying those things do not mean it’s not an economic issue. In fact, they often sit on top of it. The way people think about family is partly shaped by what family costs.

Take the career point. A woman wanting to focus on her career is not separate from money. A career has economic value. It affects future earnings, promotions, optionality, independence, and the ability to recover from bad outcomes. If having a child means losing momentum, reducing future income, narrowing options, and operating with much less time and energy for years, that is a serious economic cost.

The partner point also does not really answer my argument. Of course many people do not find the right partner early enough. But the cost of children changes how high the bar for the “right partner” becomes. If having children is expensive and risky, people will be more cautious. They will delay longer. They will want more certainty before saying yes. So partner matching and economics are not separate buckets. They interact.

On the point that people now want to date and travel in their 20s, I agree. That actually supports the point I’m making. It shows that the opportunity cost of having children is much higher than before. A childless couple in a rich society has far more freedom, consumption, and optionality to give up than a couple in the past or in poorer countries. They have more income to spend, more places they can go, and more ways to live.

What governments have actually shown is that small, generic bonuses and tax cuts do not do much. That is not the same thing as showing money does not matter.

To conclude, I’m saying that people did not just wake up one day and change their beliefs or culture. They have always thought about children partly through the lens of economic payoff and opportunity cost, even if not always consciously.

What has actually changed drastically as compared to the past is the structure of developed economies, especially the extent to which they rely on and draw women into market work as an economic resource. That shift has large second-order effects. Policymakers actually make their job harder when they abstract this away and call it a culture issue.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

I believe it’s still a money issue and would say poor countries are not a counterexample.

A child is not the same economic object in every society. It may feel wrong to see children as economic tools, but I have read enough papers to believe that people think this way subconsciously, even if they say otherwise.

In many poor countries, children still fit into the household economy more easily. The standard of consumption expected for each child is lower. The mother’s career path is often less steep to begin with, so the earnings penalty from motherhood is smaller in absolute terms. The household may also expect more support from children later.

In a rich city, especially for educated women, the economics are much harsher. A child can cost years of earning power. It can slow promotions, reduce flexibility, force the purchase of more housing, more childcare, more help, and leave the household with much less spare energy. That is a real economic penalty, and hence a “money” issue.

So when someone says poor countries have more children despite being poorer, I’d say they’re comparing the wrong things. Poverty by itself does not tell you what children cost a household. What matters is the ratio between what parents give up and what they get back.

In the way developed economies are set up right now, that ratio is bad.

The state gets a future worker, taxpayer, and caregiver. Society gets the long-run benefit. Parents bear most of the private cost and get very little economic benefit.

I think one reason places have not been able to solve this with money is that they focus on short-term costs. When that does not work, they conclude that it is not a money issue. That may simply mean they are pricing it wrongly. Once you price the cost of having children as opportunity cost on a career woman, you realize that most of these cash incentives are orders of magnitude smaller.

[Cited @cited]

yesterday while I cooked dinner for my son, he was so mature and said, "one day i’ll help you with bills, groceries, and expenses."

my eyes teared up

he’s a 33 year old crypto trader

[signüll @signulll]

“laid back” is what high agency ppl look like from the outside when they’ve correctly identified which games are worth playing & simply declined the rest.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

@xnxswe @ivailoj @JasonYanowitz then they would still need that 1.5B liquidity pool bro 😂

[AzFlin 🗿 @AzFlin]

"I'm running 20 agents in parallel, each with their own customized models, contexts and specialized tasks"

The agents:

[Game @game_for_one]

Creative rug.

Whole dev team got drafted into the Iranian military.

Account deleted shortly after. Bold strategy.

[Molly @bigmagicdao]

When Bitcoin was at 120k, CT feel be like we’d never see 60k again. Now it’s at 60k, CT says we’ll never see 120k again. lol

[demmie @0xDemeter]

@tzedonn hey claude, tell me what important ideas to test. no mistakes

[demmie @0xDemeter]

@yoitsyoung zerocash

[rektober @rektober]

the hardest part in crypto is not making money

the hardest part is keeping, growing it slowly like a smart and solid/disciplined investor, telling nobody that you have money, being humble, repeating to yourself you are lucky & blessed, keep learning, and stay connected to God.✍️

[demmie @0xDemeter]

It’s a number.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

Does anyone know what the z in zcash stands for?

[demmie @0xDemeter]

Does anyone know what the z in zcash stands for?

[alex @kirbxbt]

this is our punishment for pumping zcash and litecoin

[demmie @0xDemeter]

The @PlasmaFDN syrupUSDT Vault has been fully subscribed in -60* minutes.

[Maple @maplefinance]

The @PlasmaFDN syrupUSDT Vault has been fully subscribed in under one minute.

A total of $200M USDT TVL will now be earning syrupUSDT interest, Drips rewards and XPL rewards (Post TGE).

Trillions.

[demmie @0xDemeter]

pump dat