What drives you? Is it money, general problem-solving?
I must be wired differently because I cannot understand how someone can try so many things in so many different industries without being driven by a mission beyond financial wealth. I have friends who are like this and I don’t get it.
I’m not blaming depositors. In fact, I think depositors have a right to panic withdraw. They’re making a decision to take business elsewhere, as they should.
That that can cause or accelerate collapse makes me question the entire bank model.
What other model leads to instant death, damage to their entire customer base, and collateral damage to the broader system, when a certain number of customers decide to go elsewhere?
Maybe a stupid question: if banks can collapse from a bank run, shouldn’t the entire model be questioned? A bank run is simply when a threshold number of customers decide to withdraw their cash, with every right to do so. With social media + frictionless mobile banking, the entire notion of teetering your model on mitigating the risk of a “bank run” seems anti-customer, regressive, and unsustainable.
VCs with no personal skin in the game have funded what is essentially addiction engineering. It’s wild that the industry does not seem to have the awareness to understand or care about this. People are getting paid fat salaries to figure out how to covertly manipulate users into abdicating their attention and time to wholly isolated, disconnected, and malnourishing behaviors.
Now the techies are concerned with the mental health crisis.
Because many of the engineers here either do not understand or are unwilling to accept that society operates in more dimensions than the technical and "rational". They see celebrity and functions like marketing and sales as inherently bullshit and unnecessary.
"I can think the community is more important than the individual, but still leave to protect my children from starvation."
You can think that, but your actions demonstrate otherwise. In that scenario, you valued your children's health over remaining within your community. What is special about those specific children? They are yours towards whom you feel a duty you must fulfill as their parent. And yet, there are others who would choose to stay. I'm not passing judgement on either.
"There's a plethora of reasons people come here: freedom to express themselves, security, financial opportunity because they're literally living in squalor elsewhere, etc. I don't think a majority of people came because they _wanted_ individualism. They wanted to improve their situation and came to a country that had a pretty good marketing spiel."
All these reasons are examples of valuing the individual over the community.
The very act of leaving a community for better economic opportunities abroad is a demonstration of one's relative values, even if there is a hope to eventually reestablish that sense of community at some point.
Not just losing religion, but losing every source of shared purpose that people have historically relied upon. Religion is bad. Having kids is increasingly looked down upon. People are losing any and all sense of professional duty.
The US is a country of immigrants who for the most part came here because they valued the individual over the community. The individualism lives in the deepest roots of our culture. As a child of immigrants who was born and grew up in the US, I feel the same way you do the older I get and have been seriously considering a move abroad because of it.
Further, it feels like the only basis of a shared culture, our basic political ideals, is now up for question. So if it isn't faith, ethnicity, etc, then what is actually binding us together?