Better Than Bitcoin

Old(er) age is uncharted territory for me. I’ve crossed that River Styx and entered foreign territory. Like ‘walking point’ in the Nam, it’s one cautious step after another and may the best man live…for another day.

Life investments have been made, squandered, lost, accumulated, divested and set aside. Some things worked out while others didn’t. Mostly what’s left is the residue of one’s collective wisdom and the luck or mistakes to live with for the rest of our lives. One of the few common denominators remaining is the enduring value of friendships.

It’s the best currency around and yet we’re seldom smart enough to recognize or appreciate what it brings into our lives. Who were those kids captured in that newspaper photo so many years ago? What did ‘finding the one’ mean for future friendships and life-long acquaintances?

It doesn’t seem that long ago when the world was a rainbow landscape full of wonderous adventures and opportunities. Each of us set out to become whatever we thought we should be…at the time. The world was our oyster and we meant to have it all.

It’s funny how reality evolves and our past lives and aspirations finally catch up with us. That winding road called ‘life’ is either running smooth as asphalt or rough like gravel. And yet none of us want to get off the road even if the ride isn’t what we expected it to be after all these years.

It’s been sixty plus years since I turned twenty-one and shed my cloak of anonymity to adorn myself with the costume of adulthood. Now I, like so many others, am at a point in my life where reflection is more than a glass of chardonnay framed within a sunset or a cold brew among high school buddies.

My current life style is an accumulation of habits born at birth. For some of us it was modeled after our parent’s pioneering excursion into life. For others, it was a process of discovery, loss, acceptance and rejection. Our life style became us on a daily basis and we weren’t even aware of it. It’s only now that the accumulation of excess and/or scarcity raises its hidden head.

Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying that life is like a bank account. How you use it is solely your determination. You can withdraw it in a hurry and live a very short life. Or you can be diligent with your withdrawals and live, hopefully, much longer.

We can always try to rectify some of our mistakes or enhance our positive steps but age and reticence to change are usually huge obstacles to overcome. We’ve let life’s ebb and flow (our gypsy muse) guide us in this rhythm of life. For most of us, the process was organic and without a lot of thought. Living abroad, that first apartment and that first step in something called a career.

We find ourselves both benefiting and/or suffering from past investments of our youth. The things we did to ourselves, the deposits we made on our bodies, our finances, our love life and our children. We’re now at the stage of making withdrawals from our youthful decisions and indiscretions.

Those random discoveries got me thinking about friendships; past and present, strong and vapid, present and omnipresent. I thought about the friends I’ve had over the years. Some of them shared isolated points in my life; high school, college, the service and work. Some were but fleeting incisions in the tenderness of my youth. Others were shared experiences like the military; isolated, vacuous, and destined to crash with each discharge celebration where inane behavior in the barracks seemed to make perfect sense back then.

Most of those memories are lost now in that vacuum called life experiences. A few were found again but most are just fragrant memories of a life well spent. Like separating wheat from the shaft, I’d love to rekindle a few of those friendships and nourish them back to the point of commonality we once shared.

The cliché that you can never have too many friends dissolves over the pages of Facebook where collecting friends can be a cybergame for some folks, devoid of meaningful contact and concern. Having friends on Facebook isn’t the same as having real friends who care and share and actually want to be somebody in your life. Big difference there! For some folks it’s like grade school best friends.

I guess that’s why I want to continue seeking out old friends and acquaintances who might share my own values and interests. The past can’t be replicated nor ignored. It can be accepted for what it was even if we couldn’t see it at the time. It’s all cloaked in that most evolving, trans-lucent, vapid metaphor called relationships. Together they fill our thoughts and dreams and aspirations with dream-like illusions we’d like to believe in. It’s a game we play on a daily basis as we go about the business of living.

Maybe I’m just trying to replicate some of what I captured early in life when playground antics caught a reporter’s camera and made the front page and added to the serenity of those long-forgotten friendships. If it’s true that a life well-lived includes many friends, then I want continue adding to my roster.

They say true wealth is all about good health and friendships. If so, I’d like to be a very wealthy person.

Survival Guide to Everyday Living

There is a book I’d love to write but probably won’t. In reality, I don’t have the time, patience, or willingness to put it ahead of my other writing commitments. Unfortunately, I think it’s a book that many people need to read because it could be so relevant in today’s social, business and economic climate.

The idea behind the book came from my recent readings about the economic, political, and social upheavals that occurred in the past and are still going on today, not only in this country but worldwide.

The intertwinement and entanglements of business and political interests has been going on since the late sixties and early seventies. It’s an open secret that lobbyists weld an enormous power in Washington for the vested good of special interests and the moneyed elite. Generally speaking, it’s the middle class who gets the short end of the dollar stick in most of these transactions, arrangements and agreements made into law.

Even Norman Lear’s autobiography ‘This Too I Get to Experience’ touched on the same subject matter……short-sighted vision instead of long term perspective. Lear talks about a conversation he had with a Harvard professor who lamented ‘the most rapacious societal disease of our time: short-term thinking’.

The professor explained: “There will be a time very shortly when young people-very young people- will be looking into computer screens. They will be looking directly into screens, not to the side, so there will be no peripheral vision; they won’t be looking over the top, so they won’t see what’s ahead; they’ll be staring straight ahead into those screens, blind to everything ahead and around them.”

Money managers and financial product traders will be selling, buying, and swapping financial products around the world. With that narrow focus, like a horse with blinders, they will have more control and hold more power in those split seconds than we can today imagine. And all of it entirely focused on short-term gains.”

Back in 2008, the near collapse of our world-wide financial system, and Wall Street in particular, should have been a wakeup call for all Americans to pay more attention to their wallets and events happening around them. Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed over the ensuing years. Every day there are new financially-coated products, events, angles, schemes, and ‘can’t lose’ facades presented to the general public.

To that end, financial literacy and media literacy are two topics of interest that every American should acquaint themselves with. One of the best descriptions of financial literacy came from an internet site of the World Bank.

It reads as follows:

‘What is financial literacy all about, you may ask? Essentially, it is the ability to use one’s knowledge and skills to effectively manage financial resources, ideally for a lifetime of financial well-being. Indeed, financial literacy is something we all have to work on each day—it’s part of our ongoing education.

Despite being a relatively new field of study, financial literacy has become increasingly important for governments and citizens – without it there can be broad implications for the economic health and stability of countries.

Here in Russia, the authorities are highly cognizant of this and thus partnered with the World Bank in 2011 to start implementation a project on financial literacy and education. Promoting responsible and rational financial behavior is one of the main goals of the project, along with establishing financial education infrastructure at federal and regional levels, increasing the accountability of financial services providers, designing a national strategy, raising awareness and strengthening institutional capacity and underlying business practices between consumers and financial services providers.

This project focuses primarily on improving the financial literacy of school-age children and college student. The idea being that they gain the modern required financial knowledge and awareness of financial instruments, which then they can bring home to their families, including seniors, and to the wider community.

Thanks to the project, financial literacy courses have been introduced in schools and universities, with training provided to teachers and tutors across the education system. By June 2018, over 20,000 university students and teachers from almost two-thirds of Russia’s regions had completed training courses in financial literacy offered by the project.

Organized with support from the project, the National Savings Week for Adults and the National Week of Financial Literacy for Children and Youth have gained significant traction in 2018 – the latter engaging over 2.5 million children and teenagers who participated in around 25,400 events across Russia.

To support these goals, Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank approved in 2017 the National Strategy for Financial Literacy for 2017-2023, and launched its Implementation Road Map.’  *

Media literacy, on the other hand, is using common sense instead of letting some so-called journalist do it for you. A good definition can be found at Medialit.org.

It reads as follows:

‘What is important to understand is that media literacy is not about "protecting" kids from unwanted messages. Although some groups urge families to just turn the TV off, the fact is, media are so ingrained in our cultural milieu that even if you turn off the set, you still cannot escape today's media culture. Media no longer just influence our culture. They ARE our culture.

Media literacy, therefore, is about helping students become competent, critical, and literate in all media forms so that they control the interpretation of what they see or hear rather than letting the interpretation control them.

To become media literate is not to memorize facts or statistics about the media, but rather to learn to raise the right questions about what you are watching, reading, or listening to. Len Masterman, the acclaimed author of Teaching the Media, calls it "critical autonomy" or the ability to think for oneself.

Without this fundamental ability, an individual cannot have full dignity as a human person or exercise citizenship in a democratic society where to be a citizen is to both understand and contribute to the debates of the time.

from Literacy in a Media Age: An Overview and Orientation Guide to Media LIteracy Education

It simply comes down to that old, worn, yet so true cliché: Let the buyer beware. We all have the responsibility to listen and learn for ourselves instead of letting someone else do it for us. To use common sense instead of group-think and to forge our own path to enlightenment instead of following the crowd.

I recently touched on a similar subject matter in a blog entitled: ‘Don’t Touch my Avatar’. Today’s financial and media worlds are full of tall tales of quick riches and absolutes in the area of truth. We have to dig through the everyday floss and moss to find the reality behind many of those facades masquerading as the truth.

·       *Definition of financial literacy – World Bank web site

·       *Medialit.org

Don't Touch My Avatar, Please

I would betray my age if I told you that I don’t understand the hype surrounding Bitcoin, Metaverse, Block Chain and those other darlings of the new cyberworld out there.

Recently, the Business Insider web site reported that a woman reported being groped by a  stranger while working as a beta tester on a new meta platform. The platform creator defended itself by saying the woman hadn’t enabled safety features. I guess nobody thought to mention that it was a ‘virtual world’ and the groping was from one digital bit or byte to another. Unless the woman felt it vicariously; it must have just touched her fingertips. Great imagination on her part, though.

All of this came to mind when I was purging my ‘blog idea’ folder and came across an article in Futurist Magazine published in March-April of 2014. The article was entitled: ‘The Information Revolution’s Broken Promises.’

Its main premise was that many of the predictions, promises and visions for this new ‘cyber’ world either didn’t happen or didn’t pan out as promised. Only after the revolutionary euphoria began to fade along with our own critical judgments did a more sober perspective start to emerge of this new information revolution. Now fast forward some several years and I’m wondering what if anything has changed.

Before this latest convulsion of the Information Revolution, Alvin Toffler was warning us about radical changes taking place in many aspects of our society. The vocabulary has changed. The old players have either left, changed their persona or been replaced by their juniors, but the hype remains the same.

For example, is metaverse just another one of the Information’s Revolution’s broken promises or are there real treasures (fortunes) to be found in today’s digital landscape? Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term "metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash," in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who met in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments.

Since then, various developments have made mileposts on the way toward a real metaverse, an online virtual world which incorporates augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D holographic avatars, video and other means of communication. As the metaverse expands, it will offer a hyper-real alternative world for you to coexist in. If you’re of a mind to.

Inklings of the metaverse already exist in online game universes such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox. And the companies behind those games have ambitions to be part of the evolution of the metaverse.

Bitcoins have been described as a new kind of currency for the digital age. Now there are a slew of similar trading icons in the digital playing field. Other icons have appeared on scene and I must admit I don’t understand most of them. Block Chain, NFT Collections, NFT sales of virtual land and Meta real estate are just some of these new trading currencies. They have impacted online banking services and transactions, the sports betting industry, and currency exchange just to name a few.

Aside from these esoteric and often times exotic enounces of internet 3, there have been major advancements made in many areas of our lives and economy. Wind farms, solar panels and now storage panels are all harnessing the natural energy forces all around us. Solar is capturing more of the sun’s power to electrify our homes and businesses. New batteries are storing that power for future use….taking many households and businesses totally ‘off the grid.’

Tesla and Rivian are gaining ground against the old gas-guzzling chariots of our parents. Even the German ‘people’s car’ is no match for today’s electric vehicles.

My old area of interest, mass communications, is another example of the steady advancements made in the way people connect with one another or share information. From Guttenburg’s bible to the printing press to the telegraph to radio and onward.

In the beginning, the pony express carried our messages long distances. Then the telegraph hobbled that effort. Radio beget Television which beget Cable which beget Netflix and Amazon who together championed streaming services. Along the way, reel-to-reel tape morphed into Beta and VHS video tapes which, in turn, morphed into the Walkman, the iPod, iPad, iPhone, tablet and other personal devices.

Of course, along with those advancements come the camp followers and hucksters. Now (after a quick review Business Insider) we’re back to being inundated with articles like: ‘Seventh grader saves his allowance and invests in rental housing (or Bitcoins or NFTs or the metaverse) to generate more income than his parents. If he can do it, so can you.’ (Sign up here).

Instagram has been accused of having an adverse effect on teenage mental health. Tik-Tok isn’t far behind. In reaction, the Chinese government decided to limit teen-age use of online activities to three hours a day. Down through the generations and with each new decade, we’re told it’s a new world out there.

2008 was the culmination of years of fiddling around on Wall Street. We were told back then that it was different this time. They said real estate never went down. They weren’t making any more land. Equity in your home was meant to be spent and not wasted just sitting in your portfolio. All the experts agreed that ‘this time was different.’

Or not.

I understand the hype behind ‘it’s a whole new world out there.’ But I do believe many of the basics still count for something. The trouble with touting the basics is that they aren’t new or sexy or earth-shaking. The basics are not prone to over-caffeinated hype and exaggeration. Thus, they’re not very sellable.

In Norman Lear’s book : ‘Even This I Get to Experience’ he talks about a conversation he had with a Harvard professor who lamented the current narrow focus of the younger generation. He called it ‘The most rapacious societal disease of our time: short-term thinking.’ Lear went on to reflect on the professors comments.

The professor explained: “There will be a time very shortly when young people-very young people- will be looking into computer screens. They will be looking directly into screens, not to the side, so there will be no peripheral vision; they won’t be looking over the top, so they won’t see what’s ahead; they’ll be staring straight ahead into those screens, blind to everything ahead and around them.”

Money managers and financial product traders will be selling, buying, and swapping financial products around the world. With that narrow focus, like a horse with blinders, they will have more control and hold more power in those split seconds than we can today imagine. And all of it entirely focused on short-term gains.”

Unfortunately, many of today’s politicians and business leaders are following the same old game plan. It’s sometimes hard to see past the hype and colorful façade to the reality behind it. But a more proper perspective and long-term thinking is critical to seeing a clearer path ahead.

What’s old is new again and some things never change…for the good and the bad. So it’s back to: Buyer beware…all over again.