That… the wild motorcycles… may be a subgroup of the rockabilly group, or another group?

I am not sure lol.

Japan, more specifically, the Harajuku district of Tokyo, has a number of … very aesthetically bold subcultures, which certain people take extremely seriously.

One of which is basically exagerated 1950s American Rockabilly.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/01/07/the-tokyo-subculture-of-1950s-rockabilly-gangs/

A good number of these guys are in actual Rockabilly bands.

I dunno if this guy’s PS1 blocky haircut really fits into an existing subculture, or if it is a joke off of this subculture… or if it is totally unrelated to all that…

But there actually are a good number of very dedicated aesthetic subcultures in the Harajuku district, Rockabilly is one… the ‘gothic lolita’ style almost certainly came out of Harajuku… there are many other niche identity/aesthetic/lifestyle cliques.

That is what I was referring to, not just… psycho/rockabilly generally around the world.

As someone with an actual Econ degree:

… Yeah, a whole lot of ‘technical signals’ aka, chart reading that a lot of ‘retail’ (ie, amateur) day traders use… is basically astrology.

Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit… like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward… definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now… but as far as the “power” of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?

No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong… there are just way too many other confounding variables.

…

Even the quants who work for hedge funds… who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects…

…well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.

Part of this is because… if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains… is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants… the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.

Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy… well now it doesn’t return outsized gains anymore.

… Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.

…

Now, all that being said… one arguably ‘technical indicator’ that always has been correct in the last 100 years… is when the bond yield curve inverts… the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion… soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.

Except for right now, the last few years.

We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions… and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.

But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as ‘investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency’… which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down… which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive… and our exports won’t be worth as much… and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous…

And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical ‘products’.

(Great work Mr. Trump -.-)

So… yeah you can’t really make a day trading strategy out of that.

…

Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.

Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable… ‘class’ system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of… allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of ‘classes’ that… could either focus on one main ‘class’, but augment it with certain abilities from other ‘classes’…

And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.

Also… being a Jedi/Sith used to be… exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.

IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive… but you wouldn’t even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a ‘gray’ jedi.

Finally… SWG … still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo… as a core game mechanic of a player ‘class’.

Though I haven’t played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.

… Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like… administrative capacity and zoning laws.

Do MMOs even… do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to ‘you have a house in the set aside ‘suburb’ instance’?

i was asking in good faith, and i can’t thank you enough for providing such a thorough and effective answer.

I just wanted to clarify, as… at least for myself, even here on lemmy, discussions about this have been going on for at least 6 to 9 months, and … a good number of people have not been engaging in those discussions in good faith.

But yes, I am happy to answer, glad you found it helpful!

Apologies for the hilariously simplistic graphics… i literally just drew them on my gas station tier phone haha. But I think they get the point across.

it almost sounds like bluesky is just a baby twitter in the making, and it’ll probably end up the same way. i’m really digging the actual fediverse thing, mainly because it seems to be one of the only places that money and vc bs hasn’t been able to touch.

Yep, it pretty much literally is twitter 2.0 (3.0?), was founded by Jack Dorsey, … its not even a non profit, it is a for profit ‘benefit’ corporation, which basically just means its corporate bylaws claim that it attempts to benefit the public in some way.

IE, literally the corporate / legal version of virtue signalling… it is still ultimately a for profit corporation that will put profit and growth above everything else… and hopefully by now, people understand how that literally always turns out.

My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:

When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.

When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.

When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.

When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.

… I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.

Assuming you are serious:

Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.

To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:

The ‘Tankie Triad’ of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.

But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.

So that means if your account is on hexbear… you can’t see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.

But, if you (a hexbear…ian?), post on a neutral instance… users on that neutral instance will see the post.

But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance… they will not see the hexbearian’s post.

This sounds complicated, and it is, but … thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract… but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable… without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.

Not an unreasonable assumption.

That or he’s a die hard fan, really into that subculture.

For reference:

May Day, A View to a Kill (1985):

May Day, Goldeneye (N64, 1997):

Looks like I’ll be pirating Black Flag for my next replay.