George Mulder

[George Mulder @GeorgeMulderr]

@speculation_st Stack hard or fall behind #bitcoin

[Atlas @DentesLeo]

Bees do not waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.

[George Mulder @GeorgeMulderr]

@speculation_st Enjoying these fresh perspectives mate. A #crypto future is looking more and more promising

[Speculation Station @speculation_st]

K-Shaped economy

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

There are a number of forces contributing to our K-Shaped economy. Today’s Government will try to convince you it is through tax benefits to the rich, unequal access to resources or some other subjective, divisive, political reason.
The truth is the K-Shaped economy was implemented by design. Those with money and power, wish to retain that money and power, so they created a system by which the value of barter is controlled politically. Fractionalized reserve lending created an unstoppable credit system, helping capitalism flourish. At the same time, it entrenched greed into institutions and a materialistic mindset into individuals that are forced stored their value within the system. By having your money inflate at 2% a year (supposedly), it creates a drive to beat that benchmark. Economically speaking, this isn’t entirely bad. Creating value, jobs and products that make our lives better is a good thing. The problem arises when:

1. Making money is preferred over human-centric development, and

2. Inflation goes beyond economic stimulation to economic deprivation.

Both of these ideas are present and are key drivers of the K-Shaped economy.

Making money and creating value are two distinct concepts; an economy incentivized to create value is one that flourishes, but an economy fixated with making money is destined to fail. In recent times, the latter has become normal. By maximizing the reduction of costs and being willfully blind to the effects that their products have on society, corporations have been able to create immense profits. Nowadays, the trade-off isn’t between costs and profit; the trade-off is between costs and health, where large entities can produce such large amounts of product, profit is inevitable. What do I mean by health? I mean the influx of plastics, bad quality products and more recently, dopamine farming digital products that ruin attention span and harvest your personal data. Profit is now the priority and genuine value creation falls behind. Who becomes richer and richer? The rich. And who ultimately bears the burden? The consumer.

Capitalism has fallen on its own sword, by harming the very people who keep it afloat, extending the arm of the K.

Inflation also has a big part to play in all of this. The idea is that the purchasing power of money decreases by 2% a year, yet in 2 years, my Big Mac Combo went from costing $10 to costing $16. This isn’t an exception; the Big Mac index is a credible valuation tool due to its international accessibility. This is a physical manifestation of what happens when banks print money that they don’t have. Initially, inflation was used as a way to keep the economy stimulated, by introducing new money in small increments. What the bank ‘forgets’ to tell you is that inflation compounds, the amount of new money that comes into the world economy each year trumps the year before by a large amount. This ultimately puts good assets like homes and businesses out of reach for most individuals, particularly young people. So, what do they turn to as alternative? Consumption. Cheap, addictive products. Majority of the population is convinced that such assets are unattainable, and resort to feeding the very system that put them there is the first place.
These ideas can be daunting to think about, but they have extended further than purely a function of the economy.

K-Shaped Sociology

The danger of a K-Shaped economy is just the fear of having a low bank balance, it has leaked into the fabric of society. When rampant inflation causes good assets to become unattainable, the corporations that used to sell a dream, turn to selling an escape. The very institutions that are profiting from debasement, are now profiting from the cheap and harmful products available to us today. Now, I’m not trying to point any fingers, the institutions are not the ones to blame, this system itself is the bad actor. The upper arm is aware that you have to adapt to stay ahead of the curve, and if that means that you have to put some people down to get there, you’d probably do it yourself.
The idea extends further than merely profits, it has leaked into our governments and politics.
It is the job of the Government to explain to their citizens why the economy isn’t flourishing and why everything is so expensive (because when have you ever heard them tell you things are going well), and no matter what the Government says, the citizens will believe them. They can’t tell them the truth, that our economic system is fundamentally flawed, because it would create fear, and control would be lost. Instead, they turn to fabricating narratives, convincing the public there are alternate reasons. By creating division and allowing groups to pin the blame on each other under the guise of democracy, the government can keep the trust of the public and the theatre can commence. Unfortunately, the system is rotten at the core, and often the bureaucrats that are preaching to the masses are probably unaware themselves. Powerful people have built a reverse Robin Hood system that feeds on the poor and enriches the already abundant.

Now, at this point you’re probably thinking well, why don’t I just stop trying if the system is rigged against me? I would say that’s a good question, here’s what I think.

What can we do?

Not only bad things have come from capitalism and profiteering, it has driven innovation and helped birth an informational age where all information is one prompt, search or click away. AI has bridged the gap that used to exist only through a higher education, information that used to be exclusive is now widely available, it is your job to extract it from your screen. Knowledge is the hedge against the K-Shaped system that we live within; combine this with awareness, and you have the ingredients to build a long-lasting framework that can help you take advantage of the system. Information is the commodity that costs nothing to acquire but allows you to advance towards the acquisition of valuable, future-securing assets.

When you habitually consume, or your emotions are stirred from an online article, really think deeply. Is this something I asked for or need? Or is this something being fed to me by an algorithm? Does this idea beneficial for society? Or was it put here to distract me from the problems in my own life? Once you become aware, you become enlightened. Once you stop consuming, shifting your focus to building knowledge, you earn that dopamine naturally and move past consumerism into incentive alignment. It is time to filter out the information put there to control you and lure you in the herd of sheep.

Now that you understand that the system is designed this way, what are you going to do about it?

[George Mulder @GeorgeMulderr]

@speculation_st Ngl I am intrigued by this. Speculation or not - this young person has obviously quantified the most fatal of flaws in the global system, whom is now willing to share his knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is speculation. I’m all ears for the #speculationstation

[Speculation Station @speculation_st]

Who am I?

In the interest of privacy, I want to keep this account anonymous, but I would like to give some context about who I am and what I want to achieve by building the Speculation Station. I have just graduated university with a degree in both Law and Finance, and am in the process of getting a j*b. As I go through life, I have noticed that often my thoughts don’t align with other people; being brought up to question everything has led me to conclusions that are unique, deviating from the people that I am surrounded by. To others, my outlook on the world is viewed can be construed as contrarian or far-fetched, but to me, it feels instinctive and principled. Thoughts of living my life constrained by a 9 to 5, being delegated tasks by a superior instead of creating my own and living in a state where heightened stress is commonplace isn’t all that appealing to me. I’m aware that not all j*bs are stressful and my thoughts about this topic can come across as pessimistic, but these are systems that have been built to help people cope and give them a sense of security. On the other hand, I understand that industry experience is crucial; this clashing of ideas puts me in a confused place, looking for a way through. I constantly question whether this is only way to create value and therefore freedom of time and money, so here I am trying to navigate an alternate path.

So why did I take this path if I didn’t really agree with the position I would end up in as a result?

I would like to preface this by noting that since the time I started my study that world has changed drastically. AI has become unpredictably powerful, and systems are changing at their core; the imminence of understanding this change has accelerated. Nevertheless, I don’t think this changes my thinking from its base.

Firstly, I seek to learn. I am curious about the world, I want to know how things work, how money flows and what people do to create value. University is a hub of information given to you in a structured form, it teaches you how to study, network and learn. I have built a foundational of knowledge that I am grateful for and can leverage to help me navigate the world’s newest problems. The nature of my degrees revolve heavily around individual research and study, two incredibly important skills in today’s information age.

Secondly, I wanted to have the necessary credentials to support and validate my work and opinions. People have respect for those who have a set of qualifications and j*bs hire people with those qualifications; completing university creates a safety net of sorts, knowing that if my aspirations to create value on my own accord manage to fall through, knowing that I have a backup relieves stress.

Thirdly, I wanted to build my network. University has helped me meet my best mates, helped me build a network of unique people to talk to and share ideas with. It has allowed me to have some of the best experiences of my life and broaden my perspectives of people, their thinking and why they act in the way they do. Putting myself in a place where I was forced to meet new people and create a network was one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Now that I have reached the end of that path, the only thing I regret is the student loan bill.

What do I want to achieve with this platform?

I want to use this platform to share ideas, speculate on the future and create a platform that invokes important conversation. Mountains of thoughts are being built up in my head and I’ve never had a chance to get them out. The young people around me don’t appreciate how rapidly the world will change because they have never questioned the reality they live in; they just accept it. Whilst acquiescing to the system will get you somewhere in life, it is unlikely that it will enlighten you and drive you to create something bigger that what already exists. I want to use my thoughts and opinions to drive change and inform people of swiftness of change that new technology will enforce on to people. The world we live is going to look completely different in only a short period of time, and it is time for people to wake up, take advantage and think differently.

What am I going to talk about?

The topics that I believe are important are as follows:

The financial system is going to change drastically. The valuation of companies will be driven by speculation as the value of labor and the dollar goes to zero. Value will be created and stored in the form of scarce assets (like Bitcoin), counteracting the uncontrollable inflation that the fractionalized reserve lending system has convinced people is the most optimal reality. The politicization of money has allowed centralized actors to control the value of barter systems. Money should be valued by the people, for the people, not by reserve banks and institutions. The intersection of AI and crypto are going normalize the existence of programmable money and bring world adoption to digital ledgers as the optimal place to store value, rather than in the hands of middlemen.

AI is going to overhaul the whole world. Access to any information will be available at the click of a button, the touch of screen or by recording a message, with feedback given in seconds. Jobs that were once considered high-level, like Law and Finance will be largely automated and made extremely efficient through expertly trained models and agents. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not far away, if not already present, and this will need to be adapted to. The world’s largest companies are going all-in AI, investing trillions of dollars to try capture the value of the opportunity.

The underlying systems of the world will go through fundamental change. Governments, institutions and world markets are going to be transformed by the development of technology. Legal systems are going to have to adapt quickly to incentivize people to act for the greater good, rather use powerful technology to extract value and create a harmful physical and digital world. Bureaucracy will fail; people will wake up to narrative creation and hunger for control present in governments and corporations. The bureaucratic ideals of making the citizens of the world serve governments and institutions will erode, people will prefer a decentralized future where self-custody is preferred, and consensus is formed on distributed networks.

These ideas form the pillars of what I like to think about, and where I believe the world will experience the most change in the future. I hope to build this platform to incite unique thinking and drive a worldview that is separated from the system that media tells you is the option for you to participate in. You are the god of your world, and it is up to you to decide what the future looks like.

Now let’s get to work!

[George Mulder @GeorgeMulderr]

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