Hi,
I want to thank everyone who responded to the postscript about NFTs in last week's email. As I predicted, I got a mixed bag of responses - from excitement to indifference to disgust. I'm fascinated and intrigued by how polarizing this topic is. I've never observed so many different types of folks having such strong opinions about an asset class.
I was having dinner at a restaurant with my wife last night, and I started to eavesdrop on the table of four next to us when someone at the table revealed to all parties that they recently bought some Bitcoin and exactly how much they'd bought. A woman at the table reacted to her friend's news by saying, "A financial advisor would never recommend that anyone put that much money into Bitcoin." To which someone else at the table replied, "Well... it depends how much they have invested overall." Which is exactly right; it's all relative.
At that moment, I could feel the tension at the table, even though I was more than six feet away. The shift highlighted this little dance we're all taught to do. We can talk around money, but never about the gritty details. And sometimes, if too much gets revealed, either by accident or with intent, you can literally feel the discomfort cascading off of other people's bodies.
For all the madness that crypto is causing in our world, perhaps one of its gifts is that we're all finally starting to talk more about money, even if these initial conversations are painfully awkward. Maybe if we get more comfortable talking about "fake digital money," we can get more comfortable talking about the real issues surrounding it.
Have you come out of the closet to friends and loved ones about investing in crypto? How are these conversations going? Is it somehow easier to talk about digital currency than “real money”? Don't be shy; hit reply!
Your favorite finance friend, Paco
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1. 🤓 The Hell Yeah Holiday Gift Guide: Alternative Gifts and Sustainable Giving Ideas (HYG Original) This gift guide isn’t meant to shame anyone who enjoys buying gifts for their loved ones or to reinforce feelings of lack or scarcity. On the contrary, I hope it’ll help you see that there are many ways to give gifts and that as long as the intention and energy behind it come from a place of worth and love for you and the recipient, you can’t go wrong.
2. 🗣 The Many Worlds of Enough (More To That) 3. 🤔 I’ve Realized My Student Loans Are Not My Fault. Can I Just … Not Pay Them? (Slate) 4. 💰 How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day (The Verge) 5. 🤓 A bookkeeping thing Do You Need a Tax Projection? Hint: Yes, you probably do. (HYG Original)
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6. 💎 Dreams are a precious resource. Don’t let advertisers hack them (Aeon Essays) As someone who has spent a significant amount of time and energy over the last couple of years learning how to lucid dream, and having a great time doing it, the thought of brands trying to get into our dreams bums me out.
7. 🤷♀️ Is Crypto Bullshit? (Model Citizen) “This kind of decentralization has pretty radical distributive implications. When there is nobody at the top, nobody at the top can hoard the value generated by the network. The economic surplus generated by this kind of network is necessarily distributed to the community of miners, stakers, and users because that’s what brings them into existence, keeps them going and lends them value. The diffusion of economic surplus is part of the basic architecture of the system. Market structure, distributive principles, and defenses against network domination are all baked into the code.” 8. 💸 In America, being single is expensive by design (Vox) “Some people crave something more than what marriage can provide. They wonder: What would it look like to create small systems of care for one another that go beyond one other individual? What if we could figure out how to acknowledge that the most important person in our lives isn’t always someone bound to us by family or sexual relationship? How can we think about housing, health care, caregiving, and work in ways that actually acknowledge and actively include single and solo-living people — not as afterthoughts but as the third, if not more, of the population that they are?”
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🤓 Did you hear? We're offering a portion of our classified ad space to newly created, not-yet-profitable, BIPOC, or female-identifying owners through 2021 free-of-charge to our subscriber community. Do you have a project or business that could use a boost during these weird times? Let us know about it, and we'll schedule it to appear in The Nerdletter. 🤓
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The Nerdletter is written and curated by Paco de Leon and a tiny editorial support team. Please consider several ways you can contribute to this important mission – an inclusive conversation about money, finances, and capitalism for Creatives.
We can't do this work without you. Thanks for being part of the crew and reading this far. Peace.
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