I have a female friend who is an Astronomer. I always call her Astrologer, especially at parties and such.
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.
Ah, it says straight men, therein is the disconnect
LGBT+ folks believe in astrology at the same rate as straight women.
Tis a shame
Alas
I generally try not to yuck anyone’s yum, I won’t make fun but I will just straight up say I don’t believe in anything spiritual or magical.
I’m straight, been married 32 years, and my wife hates astrology. There’s no dilemma.
That is such a Leo thing to say
I can feel this post in my root chakra
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.
Hmm this gives me an idea…
Ladies, who would like to invest in your sign? The of course you will have to compete for investments against the other birth signs I also represent…
And, just like that, Astrocoin was born.
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…
To my understanding white isn’t really a race.
We kind of just like… pick and choose who ever we want to consider white.
I suspect if I went around saying Russians are white people like Americans like South Africans, and like French people. Many people would give me the: 🤨
Finally. These are some of my favorite kind of white girls.
I prefer dark hair but I am a sucker for pale skin.
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.
Also, crypto and blockchain has an ENORMOUS negative ecological and energetic impact; I think that AIs are worse on that, but I’d still say that if AIs are the number one, cryptos are the number two.
And then you have the worst part: incel cryptobros, the face of crypto. And with them, lots of scams (even within stablished coins), sects and all kind of grotesque things like that.
Moreover, crypto is somewhat exclusionary and elitist, because it assumes that you have a somewhat decent hardware that, with the current hardware problems, isn’t the case anymore for almost anyone, and even before that, a lot of folks hadn’t the opportunity. Yet it’s said to be democratic and free (as in Freedom). There’s a clear contradiction.
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.
Yeah, Blockchain is really the prime example of a solution looking for a problem. Everything you can do with Blockchain can be easier done using less ressources with other techniques. It sounds fine on paper, and as you said there might be some esoteric use for it someday in the future.
If the blockchain already exists and used the resources yes it was horrible. But what really is the argument to say it’s bad to use the one already generated. You don’t have to use any more resources to make it. Essentially copy paste of a prime number that was already found right? Maybe I don’t understand how they work well enough
The problem with blockchain is that everything you can do with it can also be done with a good database. In the case of crypto, it also means that you have to download THE ENTIRE THING SINCE IT STARTED if you want to run a full node capable of validating transactions. The Bitcoin Blockchain was - as of September 2025 - 674GB in size, adding a gigabyte every few days, meaning it is probably around 750GB today, stored on every single full node - what a waste of space. Databases are a lot more flexible in that regard.
And a centralized database can be modified at will by whoever controls it. Just because you place no value on a distributed ledger that is censorship and fraud resistant doesn’t mean that configuration has no value. Centralized currencies are secured with violence. Blockchains are secured with math.
You can also apply cryptographic functions to make sure database entries are not modified - this is then an issue of transparency and not centralization.
Proud to be ignorant and play video games rather than learn. Perhaps if you actually got an education you’d know better.
I mean, I did complete my undergrad…
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’d say the stock market more broadly and crypto is only the latest iteration of it. But, yes, absolutely.
The Manosphere/alpha/beta/sigma BS is the real astrology for guys. Crypto is not a pseudo science its just gambling.
Yeah I agree the manosphere is more analogous to astrology, but I’m also guessing there’s a much higher percentage of manosphere believers that never actually go on dates to even discuss their ideas and culty beliefs, compared to any blockchain based technology, which almost all actively dating douchebags participate in and no doubt talked about on actual dates.
The amount of times I’ve asked a crypto bro to tell me exactly what The Blockchain is and them being able to actually lucidly explain it is exactly 0, in my experience.
I know there’s science somewhere in there, but the loudest enthusiasts I’ve come across treat it like magic.
It’s really not that interesting unless you’re specifically into cryptography, and then it’s like, kind of interesting for 20 minutes. I remember when “the blockchain” first came out people were talking about lots of potential uses (secure online voting was the only one that comes to mind) besides scamming people and selling illegal stuff, but of course none of those ever materialized.
it’s not magic, it’s just really boring and stupid if you explain it well.
it’s just a decentralized authentication network built on cryptography algorithms. but i guess if you don’t know what any of those words mean it seems mysterious. you need a baseline understanding of networking and cryptography, and well, very few people have that.
and people attribute financial value to each bitcoin (or whatever coin), which is just a piece of code you uniquely possess when it is in your ‘wallet’.
I know there’s science somewhere in there
There is! It looks something like this…
😬
Okay I felt bad for everyone who was too lazy to search so here’s how it works.
This made me look up astrology crypto and I tremendously regret it
We’ve both been wronged.
A friend set me up on a date with a coworker of him. then she spent about 20 minutes drawing my astral chart. She had notes, books and even an iPad app.
Eventually she concluded we were not compatible, while I concluded the same thing about 20 seconds in.
Yeah, I ain’t putting up with that either. People can have their beliefs, but getting my head screwed on straight was a hard fought, lifelong journey. I cannot go back.
Would you smash though?
Bro dodged a bullet 💀
And wtf, what’s that shit of judging a person you don’t ever know just because of some crazy cards bs.
A rather free love friend of a friend was trying to fuck guys from every sign of the zodiac, and she hadn’t gotten to Cancer yet. As an amateur astronomer now, and a child who was raised by a lunatic into all sorts of woo, I declined on principle.
Look, have your fun. But woo is a relationship red flag for me. You cannot remind me of my mother if you want me turned on. I haven’t gotten laid countless times. I don’t need or want sex that badly. I desire someone I can trust to keep a firm grasp on reality.
I’ll choose making fun of astrology.
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!
Hey there, how you doing?
I’m okay
That’s how anyone should be!
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
Early in our dating, my wife had me take the enneagram test. I got a 2, she’s a 9. I told her I found a page detailing relationships between 2’s and 9’s and some of the strengths and weaknesses we’d navigate as a couple.
As I was reading it she kept saying, at first, “That makes sense!” Or “Yeah I can see that.” There were a few that were kind of out there. But she kept listening.
Eventually I revealed to her that I was ACTUALLY reading a page detailing relationships between a dragon and a sheep, our respective Chinese Zodiac signs. And that I was using this to support my argument that personality tests are astrology for educated people.
Still ended up getting laid, though not that day. 😅
because they are
nobody takes them seriously other than teenagers and other emotionally immature folks.
Personally I do find it interesting, when people do tell their Myers-Briggs -test results, since it can tell about, what sort of a person they want to be. But it is not scientific in the slightest.
It’s clearly pseudoscientific nonsense. But it’s easier to say “I’m a pisces” instead of “I’m feeling hesitant about the future of our relationship, Sarah” if she is into that. The value is in being able to reference loose personality archetypes without having to spend a paragraph describing someone.
But being a Pisces doesn’t mean anything, does it? It could both mean being someone who is afraid of risks and someone who is bold and takes chances.
How is it easier?
it means what people want it to mean.
And that’s why Astrology is so powerful. it’s 100% projection and bias confirmation.
‘take chances’ is entirely relative. what is a bold risk for one person, is an afterthought for another person, but in astrology there is no specific context, just vague nonsense worded such that anyone can project onto it.
It’s all contextual, honestly, but here are my impressions of the uh, categories:
Pisces: wishy washy, both sides, indecisive, peacemaker, likes blue stuff
Capricorn: hustle culture, hates fun
Taurus: confident, aggressive, clumsy, bro-ish
I don’t have any others on deck without looking them up lol
Edit: oh my god you guys. 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
How is that helpful if the categories are based on birthdays?
That part is dumb. I edited my comment now that I understand the confusion
Here’s what I got from the dating pool: Gemini: bipolar two-faced Scorpio: will stab you and eat your soul
And you can’t see how stupid this is?
I addressed this in a tasteful edit.
The problem is that you’re not really referencing “loose personality archetypes” in these sorts of conversations, they’re being assigned to you, relatively arbitrarily. It doesn’t matter if I’m serious and thoughtful, but because I was born on the third moon after the pomegranate harvest, I’m the joker of the group.
No, I think it’s pretty reasonable to push back if you’re being pigeonholed into some kind of archetype you disagree with. Tell them to stop being such Capricorns. The trick is it doesn’t really matter what sign you use, it’s just a bit
A trait can apply to anyone in any category. The whole premise is an exercise in the celebration of ignorance. I won’t stand for it.
total Capricorn move
You forgot the part about how it’s determined by giant balls of gas millions of light years away that aren’t actually arranged in neat patterns, but are actually incredibly far from one another and only look like patterns from our specific position in the universe
That argument falls flat to me simply because there are 13 zodiac signs, not 12, and ancient (and modern) astrologers simply ignore the 13th one (Ophiuchus) for convenience.
If you are going to claim the stars have influence over our personalities, at least be consistent with how you “read” said stars.
Not to mention, there is zero evidence that astrology works.
Also, at the time most of the zodiac and star chart arrangements were plotted out, the Earth had an entirely different north star than it does now. So your modern star sign would not even be consistent with the ancient charts and star signs, yet somehow all the same definitions and assumptions are supposed to apply.
updated my comment lol
I can appreciate that view point as long as we are in agreement that there is no real science behind it. I can totally see how people use “I’m such a Pisces” to describe themselves as sensitive and emotional. I just wish they would say “I’m sensitive and emotional” instead, lol.
I tried to express that as clearly as I could, it’s just like a more ethical version of Slytherin/gryffindor/etc, I tend to be friends with excessively referential people I guess.
Or just don’t try to get laid with stupid people.
Dated a girl and, while we were walking through the park, she points up at the sky. “Oh look, Chemtrails”. I absolutely bust up laughing, because I assume I’ve accidentally stepped into a relationship with a conspiracy theorist. She looks incredibly confused. I explain what chemtrails are. She gets even more confused. We whip out our phones for a minute. She says, “Omg I meant contrails”
She’s a lawyer at a white shoe firm now and makes, like, twice as much as I do in IT. Also, absolutely incredible in the sack.
First day of uni. Having lunch with 3 people.
“Hey do any of you watch my little pony?”
I burst out laughing. Turns out guy was super serious. He was convincing enough that he managed to get me to watch half of friendship is magic before I decided i would never talk to him again.
Tbf The show was well written for a children’s show… But it was still a children show
Oh wow, with all the memes I’ve only ever learned the word “chemtrails”. Don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “contrails” before, even though that certainly makes a lot more sense…
LOL that’s a fantastic story.
Them being stupid makes em hotter. They fuck like they got smth to prove
There are more stupid people than non-stupid people.
Getting laid is a numbers game. You vastly reduce your chances if you start getting picky.
But maybe, just maybe, and I know I’m talking crazy here, but maybe if you weed out the ones that aren’t worthwhile your quality will go up.
for a lot of people being picky means they will never get laid. and that’s fine, if you can accept that.
but they don’t. they are enraged by the lack of ‘quality’ people available to them. and offended by the abundance of low quality people available to them.
the idea you can ‘raise your standards’ and get ‘better results’, in dating/mating, is mostly cope. Especially when you start looking at the statistics. truth is people really should lower them, and well, humble themselves. because most folks aren’t nearly as ‘hot’ as they perceive themselves to be.
it’s also highly subjective. I attract a lot of very desirable women, but they aren’t desirable to me due to my own biases and lifestyle preferences. Just yesterday I got like half dozen likes from women on Hinge, but they all worked in finance or pharma, so I rejected them because for me working in those industries means ‘low quality’ just like believe in astrology. But if I wanted to get laid? Yeah I should get over that bias, those type of women really like me, even though I hate them. And I only developed this bias due to my younger years… repeatedly trying to date them and running into the same miserable issues again and again.
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.
Wow that statistic is way more depressing than I realized. I guess I am lucky to only be surrounded by non-crazy women.
I suspect a lot of the women you know believe it but don’t talk about it unless prompted. Luckily the “oh you’re a whatever sign, it would never work” level of belief seems uncommon among even those who do believe.
Then yeah, they’re stupid. Any problem?
And 100% of gamers have pressed the randomize button to at the start of a game to see if it’s something they can identify with.
Consulting Tarot has as much to do with thinking it’s scientifically real as flipping a coin has to do with making objective decisions.
Astrology and personality tests that get sold to businesses and a ton of other “fake” things all work the same way: they propose things that are frequently or universally true and then invite people to look at in what ways they agree with them or how they fit current situations.
Calling these things fake is the same as saying the personal reflections of people aren’t real.
Half of everyone really. The average person is a fucking moron.
I don’t disagree, but it’s twice as common among women. That’s why there’s a stereotype in the first place.
Yeah, and the women who believe in astrology are dumb.
But there are men who don’t believe in it but have some other crackpot/spiritual nonsense to fill in that 30% gap.
I had several friends at school with the same birthday as me, so obviously we had the same personality and all the same stuff kept happening to us.
