The average job nowadays asks a lot from you too. "Productivity" wise, one person with a laptop being paid the equivalent of $5/hr in 1977 could do the work of a moderately sized secretarial/data entry pool.
I'm a geospatial engineer who's managed to save negative $6k in the past year lol. I'm also not someone who spends above my means. I live in a 1200sqft rental, but take care of a disabled mother in law. Groceries alone for the 3 of us are so wildly expensive, I don't know how anyone can do it with kids.
What we need is to re-model the Internet kinda how television and radio worked. Lots of local nodes with public access regulated and standardized by a federal/national/global body.
We have that for protocols currently, but having that for infrastructure too would solve a ton of issues and make it easier for smaller projects to get off the ground by renting server space from their local data center.
Bitcoin is the modern equivalent of Marx's concept of socially unnecessary labor (e.g. repeatedly digging a hole in your backyard).
It's only maintained value because socially unnecessary labor is one of the most valuable forms of labor in the backwards neo-capitalist system since it's the only type of labor that the elite can perform.
Seeing this collapse I feel is a canary for a much larger crisis brewing that will snap away a lot of the fantasy value that has been incorrectly boosting GDP over the past decades.
This looks like an AI alteration maybe? Like the original photo was the guy wearing a regular Tsingtao jacket and it was painted out with like Adobe content aware fill or something.
That's assuming you don't pay down principal. If you're paying more than $20/month on it you'll be paying less in interest every month. Whereas the 279% loan means you need to pay almost 3x the principal every month or it grows
Basically no one will give a 5% loan unless it's a mortgage with a huge down payment or you're borrowing from your 401k. Most rates are closer to 10% from banks/credit unions. A 5% loan almost beats inflation right now.
There's a cruelty squad mod too