That’s such a Gemini thing to say.
No, a Gemini would say “My apologies, you are absolutely correct!”
According to whom?
The stars. Keep up with the conversation!
according to some folks, taking responsibility for your behavior is a shitty thing to do.
I shall say that I’ve both done that AND gotten laid
yeah but you get laid more if you agree to blame nebulous abstract concepts for personal and social grievances.
or blame their parents… that always works too.
In the same way I feel bad for all the women out that had to put up with conversations about crypto for the last decade, the astrology for dudes
Crypto really is the astrology of white guys isn’t it.
I have no idea why you are bringing racism into this.
It’s ok to be casually racist against white people because it’s “punching up”. Which implies white people are superior. Which is racist against non-whites wait…
… that’s like saying billionaires are superior, because you punch up at them. It’s not about being better, it’s about privilege.
rich white men are privileged.
poor whites, are not privileged.
and there are way more poor white people than rich white people.
Poor whites are still white. Yes they’re still privilege
Edit - at this point 4 downvotes. 4 white people need to pull theirs heads out their ass
cool, go trade places with a poor white boy in louisana and see how much ‘privilege’ that life brings.
I’m sure you will love the lack of education, economic opportunity, and the backwards culture you’re brought up in that you can’t escape.
oh, you don’t want ot make that trade? gee, maybe because you’re more privileged than they are…
I remember when in my undergrad almost my entire class spent their entire second year learning about blockchain and attending events related to it, and I was proud of myself for playing videogames all day instead. Nobody even talks about blockchain anymore. It’s a waste of compute, and most things built on top of it are a grift. There must be some useful cases, but none I can think of. Maybe someone with more experience in Industry can.
This might be controversial but hear me out:
The idea of an international independent currency that can be made use of anonymously and therefore not controlled by anyone is a great idea.
Most smaller coins are just scams, reimplementing the same protocols that earlier schemes did and eventually adopting a clear pump & dump characteristic.
However, I personally believe that bigger coins like etherium that don’t fold as quickly and stick around are genuinely a good idea.
Moreover, there’s use cases where transactions are tracked for different systems, for example tracking an interconnected energy grid and usage of households.
And then you also have to consider that block-chains themselves can just be used to keep a fulsome record of something, with the main goal of decentralizing control over that record. I’m sure there will be quite a few use cases for it that make more sense and it’s quite a shame the stigma of crypto got attached to it.
If you wanna learn more about how block chains are actually researched, you have to dive into academic publications, but then you will find out scientists have a very different vision for this technology which is way more useful. And for the sake of actual science, I hope they don’t get buried under the stigma of crypto, because oftentimes these are just very smart people with lots of passion for something that they genuinely see value in.
First of all, it’s not guaranteed that it’ll say “not controlled by anyone”. For example the arms race of something like bitcoin mining leads to mining becoming unprofitable to anyone not building massive mining farms. The efficiency of mining leads to bigger control over the proof of work so there’s a natural centralization of control happening with proof of work. And proof of stake isn’t saving anyone either because that just opens the door to a different kind of centralization of control. Give it another 50 years and currencies like etherium will also be centralized. With all of the negatives and none of the benefits of centralization.
And that’s the other point, I don’t think an internationally independent currency is that great of an idea. At least I don’t think it’s better than a currency with a central authority. For example central authorities manage the inflation (or in case of crypto currencies the deflation) of the currency to keep is stable and usable. Central authority also keeps oversight of illegal activities, the lack of that oversight is why crypto is popular with the black market. You also get certain consumer-protections which you’re unlikely to get with crypto because there’s no authority to enforce them, for example if your account gets hacked or stolen you’re fucked while banks would freeze your account and reverse transactions. And of course there’s taxation, which I can’t imagine how that would even happen with crypto.
I’m not saying blockchain itself is a useless technology, but I have don’t believe it’s usable as a currency. I also have some serious reservations in its use elsewhere because I have a hard time imagining where it would be better than a traditional database solution.
Yes, a centralized currency can have consumer protections. What about the flip side, protection from the central bank? A central bank can restore your balance under fraud, they can also fraudulently steal your balance. Central banks also get to dictate who/what you get to spend your money on. Which is why blockchain is popular with those who oppose fascists. The government doesn’t like Wikileaks, well, they get to block payments.
Countries manage currencies for their own ends, not for the benefit on its citizens. Plus, how much violence is the central bank willing to inflict to fulfill its ends? Your whole post ignores the long history of truly awful behavior from governments in order to keep the power of money under their control.
What about the flip side, protection from the central bank? A central bank can restore your balance under fraud, they can also fraudulently steal your balance.
I’ll make a very simple argument here, don’t elect corrupt officials who use institutions meant to work for you against you. You may not like that argument and that’s fine because I’m not here to argue that argument. Instead we’re going to discuss what is you argument when the centralized cabal of your blockchain currency steals your balance? Outside of forking the chain and hoping it gets accepted you’ve got nothing. You don’t get to choose who takes over and you have no way of holding them accountable.
Before you claim this is impossible go look up Steem. That chain got hard forked into Steem and Hive and of the two Steem, which experienced a hostile takeover, is doing better than Hive, the community fork. People who opposed Steem got cut from the chain. Now, if crypto was a real currency for the sake of stability one of the two forks would have to be chosen (otherwise you end up with fork after fork), who is to say your money won’t just get wiped because you ended up on the wrong side of the fork? Who is going to give you that money back? The same way your money gets wiped whatever transaction you want to do can also get wiped if whoever controls the chain decides so.
And I’ll reiterate. My point wasn’t that FIAT currencies are the best thing ever, my point was that they’re better than the blockchain alternative because you end up with all the bad of the FIAT currency with none of the good.
It is easy to claim don’t elect corrupt officials except governments all around the world are corrupt. Government corruption is the common outcome, not a rare occurrence.
If a blockchain gets forked people who held coins before the fork now have coins in both forks. Your story involves a fundamental misunderstanding.
Yeah, no.
Proud to be ignorant and play video games rather than learn. Perhaps if you actually got an education you’d know better.
You missed the context that they were proud to avoid learning about a technology that ended up being a waste of time. I imagine they would have preferred going to class and learning about something real, it sounds like they just skipped the blockchain stuff. They’re flexing about being more prescient than most of his peers (and professors!), and they’re not wrong. 90% of strategy is knowing what not to do.
I didn’t miss that they are proud to not learn about blockchain. They are most certainly not correct.
I’m a woman, I have no patience for pseudoscience.
Typical Sagittarius! /s
I’m a Gemini actually
Just what a Gemini would say!
have you ever had anyone argue with you about your star sign?
I have, it was wild. They insisted my DOB was wrong and I was totally a Capricorn. They also argued with me that my job was awful and unfulfilling, despite me saying I enjoyed it. That was also bizarre.
That was also bizarre.
No! It was one of the most normal experiences of your life!
Sadly, yeah it is getting more like that year after year. Too many tiktok crackhead crazies out there, and they didn’t exist 5 year ago.
Hey there, how you doing?
I’m okay
It’s tough having no patience for pseudoscience in 2026
I like to think of astrology as a fine grained personality shorthand like Meyers Briggs.
the magical star-assigned fixed personality is dumb. what’s useful is being able to tell Becky to stop being such a Capricorn and come out and party, even if she is a cancer or whatever. it’s just a memey way to reference behavioral traits if your friend group already knows what they mean. i don’t know how to explain this any better
I like to think of personality tests like Meyers Briggs as pseudoscientific nonsense like astrology
I will choose to make fun of it at every chance. Fortunately my girlfriend doesn’t mind, so I can also still get laid.
Shut up Wesley
Seriously why is that lol
because like half of all women are into astrology
like 45% of them is the latest stat. Only 20% of men believe in it
for me, it’s probably 1/3 women who is into it, and they get really really angry with you if you don’t take them seriously when they start lecturing you about it.
IME women and men who are into astrology refuse to take accountability for their actions/choices, pathologically.
because like half of all women are into astrology
In the same way that half of all men are into video games, sure.
they get really really angry with you if you don’t take them seriously when they start lecturing you about it
I’ve definitely had girls explain it to me. And I’ve stepped in it when I teased one too hard, because she just read me as an obnoxious prick (which… in my early 20s… she wasn’t wrong).
But I see astrology get the same treatment as veganism. You mention, in passing, that you’re into a thing. People line up around the block to heckle you and argue with you and scream slurs at you. And for some reason this doesn’t really change you opinion on The Thing You’re Into. It just changes your opinion on dating or on talking to anyone outside your insulated The Thing community.
I ditched someone when she attributed something to her star sign, because I have no interest in a relationship with someone stupid
Astrology, tarot, any religion whatsoever
I’m not going to be able to respect them, and no relationship works without respect
Honestly while I’m secular myself, this stance would lead to me politely refusing a second date.
Yes astrology is daft, but most of the things you and I believe are daft too or at least only locally true and culturally constructed rather than globally true. I don’t care if someone is religious or secular, what I do care is to what extent they believe humanity can know unfiltered truth in the first place. This is a much more important and useful axis in my view than whether they are religious or secular.
In my view no human can know direct truth, they are forced to rely exclusively on the unreliable narrator of their senses and for this reason I don’t trust people who make excessively confident claims about the nature of reality at all, whether religious or secular ones.
So when you buy a coffee do you lecture the cashier about how ‘culturally constructed’ money is, or do you just pay them?
This isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is. I could just as well ask the fedora fanclub how they respond to someone saying ‘bless you’ when they sneeze. The point is there are local truths and there are global truths, and you don’t have undistorted access to the latter. None of us are playing with a full deck.
To use your own example of fiat money, we all know it’s a society-wide fiction but it is kept up willingly and enthusiastically for the reason there’d be a very non-fictional economic meltdown if we didn’t do that. We are pretending a small-t truth is a capital-T Truth for practical reasons alone. The danger comes when we forget we’re doing that and mistake our aggregate belief for reality itself in my opinion.
I cannot stand people who think they are personally exempt from this kind of thing; people who insist their imperfect senses give them full and perfect access to objective truth. These kind of people are dangerous whether they’re religious or secular, I would much rather date a superstitious person who was aware most of what they believe is vague and wooly than someone who calls themselves a rationalist and makes these massive sweeping metaphysical judgements about things.
your premise here is that real things aren’t real.
good luck with that. all I see here is something trying really hard to feel they are ‘one up’ on other people because they have mistaken skepticism for reality.
Or just don’t try to get laid with stupid people.
I mean calling half an entire gender stupid is pretty bold
It’s a good thing nobody is doing that, then. Nowhere near half of women believe that nonsense.
Oh sorry, only 43% of women aged 18-49, I guess 43% is nowhere near half. I suppose if you’re a granny chaser then it is indeed only a quarter. If you’re into LGBT folks, it actually goes above 50% (over 60% for LGBT women).
Since my own dating pool and most of my friendships are smack dab in the middle of that 18-49 demographic, I can tell you it’s easily around half of women around that age who believe in astrology, tarot or something else similar here in Estonia, so it’s not US specific either. Including a lot of otherwise very intelligent women. A master’s degree in a STEM field for example does not discourage one from believing in astrology by any means.
Or perhaps you just don’t know enough women?
Oh and men aren’t all innocent either. A fifth of men aged 18-49 believe in astrology or similar superstitions too. Less than half as many as women, but still a significant amount.
We really need to distinguish between “stupid” opinions and “stupid” people.
Very smart people can hold very stupid opinions in some aspects and the average person will certainly hold some stupid ass opinions not necessarily restricted to “spirituality”.
My uncle was top of his class but fell for every mlm he encounterd, my dad is a capable businessman but believes a cut up onion in the window will get all viruses out of the air. I have so many examples like that.
So half of women aren’t stupid but probably 100% of all people hold at least one stupid “believe” i think.
Mocking believes of others and surprised that other don’t want to be nearby. If you thin you have to disrespect everything your disbelieve, you are not that rational thinking person you think you are
Its really not that easy.
Don’t be a dick and let others be their kind of weird is in general good advice but you can make fun of someone without being a dick and “their kind of weird” might turn into something harmful.
It might be okay, not okay or there might even be a need to ridicule certain ideas depending on the situation.
If don’t think it is reasonable to expect the public to entertain any ridiculous idea at all times, if you want to voice your believes/opinions you will have to let others do the same and they might not be nice about it. But lets be honest here a lot of “believes” aren’t that nice themselves so…
I’ll choose making fun of astrology.
even if i were male and straight, I don’t think i could ever respect astrology…
but moreover, it’s creepy as fuck for someone to pretend a change in their beliefs just for sex. that’s kinda literally false pretense for sex. i know I’d never convince a jury of it, but as far as I’m concerned in my personal life, imagining doing such a thing fills me with revulsion and it crosses the line into sexual assault territory.
you realize it’s incredibly common for folks to do this? of any gender?
i broke up with most of my exes because they false presented themselves to me. they saw absolutely nothing wrong with it, and to them I was the one who was awful and terrible for not ‘loving and accepting them for who they really are’. i had one ex who specific said ‘you’d have never dated me if i had told you the truth’.
was I sexually assaulted by those women? who deliberately lied to me to have sex and engage in a relationship with me?
I don’t think very many people would consider what they did as sexual assault.
yes, i do in fact realize that it’s incredibly common for folks to be shitty human beings. i have elected to not be like them. because they are shitty. “everyone’s doing it” does not make it right.
furthermore, literally all the rest of my post after the first sentence, set aside purposefully with two line breaks, intentionally did not specify or even mention gender. so I’m not sure why you brought it up as it were relevant.
above and beyond standard social contract expectations,
i shall additionally, PERSONALLY decline to perform acts that feel wrong to me,
irrespective of others’ opinions.Well, IME people who talk like you, who boast about how truthful and honest they are, are the same ones who lied.
Weird how that works out, isn’t it?
Almost as if folks who boast about how honest and great they are, typically aren’t either of those things. And their need to boast is projection/overcompensation for their true behaviors.
Come to think of it, it is weird that the way you think things are just so happen to work out in your favor. It’s almost as if you never had anything relevant to say in the first place.
I can feel this post in my root chakra
What’s sadder is that yoga, chakras, and crystals are traditionally from religions within the Indian subcontinent. Westerners are simply taking aspects of South Asian cultures, indigenous cultures, African cultures, and then bastardising them into marketable “neo-pagan witchcraft.”
Not the people, industries do that.
People are very good at adopting whatever and thats mostly fine. Nobody is forced to partake in the corporate stuff. I also think its a bit unfair to westerners, we would like some culture too and we would not like to be restrained to christianity or the celtic stuff (that i personally like) but is very popular with nazis as well. In general living in the middle of europe everything native to my culture always feels a bit right wingey which many obviously dislike.
Being part of a foreign religion doesn’t make it non bullshitty though. I will not just shit on any religion that i didn’t grow up with but you can’t argue that there aren’t people everywhere commercializing and using religion in their own interest.
Irrespective of its truthfulness, astrology is really cool! I love learning about it. I also really like alchemy. It’s kinda like looking at someone’s fanfic AU. Of course 17th century guys were inventing cute lil alphabets, pretending they belonged to angels, and writing lil secret notes. Of course someone looked up at the sky and then invented a whole magic system about how the pictures affect our lives. Humans never change.
In fact things like Tarot and astrology can be used to ascribe meaning to some of the ways in which we behave - like, you can’t tell the future objectively from it, but you can figure things out about your own current feelings based on what you gravitate to and what the results make you think about.
Spoken like a sag
Imma level with you, I have no idea what that means. But uh, it was cool hangin’
Sagittarius
Oh! Haha. Then you’d be wrong ;)
Theres a not so secret third option, don’t date folks that believe in such nonsense.
Nobody said anything about dating
Pretending to believe in astrology to get laid is kind of rapey by today’s standards.
what if you believe but you don’t believe as much as the other person?
It’s like when you are drunk, but not as much as the other person.
and what if the more drunk person threatens you if you don’t rape them? or worse, threatens to tell others you raped them if you don’t rape them?
what do you do then? I’ve been in that situation a couple of times. Not a fun place to be. Sometimes doing the right thing gets you punished.
Save yourself time and don’t lie about who you are.
This is also job application advice. If you never smile in real life but you pretend to act bubbly for an entire interview: your ass better bubble like a pro if you’re hired.
But ymmv
I bought an astrology tapestry when I was in university. I don’t buy into astrology really but the tapestry served its purpose.
nice
Star racism is still racism. I don’t make fun of it, I simply reject it as esoteric bigotry.
I mean the word you want is prejudice but sure star racism is a lot catchier and race is a construct anyways.
Prejudice is much too generic imho.
“Races” in racism are (socially constructed, as you said) classes assigned from conception/birth, which racists believe to have class-specific inherited (often behavioural) traits.
The only functional difference between (classical) racism and the (star) racism of astrology is that one claims inheritance via genetics, the other inheritance via “vibes” from star formations.
Yeah, it’s deterministic sorting. That’s what racism is too. The idea you must possess/lack inherent traits based on your race, for astrology it’s your DOB.
MTBI fans also have a lot of this. The websites play into it by pretending some personality combinations are rare, or that any of it is set and doesn’t actually change every time you take one of the damn tests, or that you can’t force results. So you have the INTJs who definitely think they’re better than and smarter than everyone else, or the ENTJs who are categorized as “visionaries” so they’re totally going to become a corporate CEO once they’re done working on their dad’s construction crew. If there are subforums, you’ll get to watch people fight over their self-labeled categories.
Also to further your point, there are notable periods of the eastern zodiac where people either try to get pregnant or avoid getting pregnant just because of the good or bad luck attributed to some years. Japan also has an actual word for blood type discrimination (avoiding or not hiring AB or B blood types) called bura-hara.
Not all women are into astrology, but all the people who are into astrology are women.
Actually, they’re a very specific and weird subset of women. They almost always have these traits:
- In their late teens to early/mid 20s
- Into “witchcraft” unironically
- Too into celebrity gossip
- Think yoga and meditation is sacred
- Have a completely delusional and out of touch view of Buddhism and Hinduism
- Have at least one of the following: Comically proportioned glasses, excessive piercings, unnatural hair colors, “spiritual” tattoos
- Think they’re an “artist” of sorts
I’ve yet to meet an astrology fan who didn’t have at least 80% of these.
