I am failing to understand four simple things:
why do people always fail to know the limits of their individual reach?
why do people always believe everything authorities say?
why do people always think «it won't happen to us»?
why do people always prefer to lose everything in order to save a part?

All these four shine and glitter as they intricately weave into the topic of «cash vs plastic» (keep them in mind while reading).

It has become a popular fad to use «plastic» instead of cash… as usual people are completely unaware of the dangers of this fad. And for some reason they think that «plastic» is somewhat equivalent to cash — NOT EVEN REMOTELY!

The most important issue is (as usual) the simplest one and (as usual) the most ignored one — WHO COMMITS A TRANSACTION? You come to a store for a loaf of bread, you pay for it and take it away. Are you sure it was you who payed for it? I am sure, because I always use cash. When I give a banknote to a cashier I physically commit the transaction — this is MY FINAL SAY. When you type your PIN, you MERELY ASK a bank to commit the transaction for you. In the end of the day it is the bank's decision whether you gonna have this loaf of bread or not. Think about it for once! The bread you are having now is not a result of a free trade between you and a backer, it is a free will of an (undoubtedly honest) 3rd-party. The bank decided on their own volition to allow you to have this bread, and they can as easily decide to starve you at any time.

And when I am speaking about bread, I literally mean bread. It is a common practice in Ukraine and Russia to arrest bank accounts of family members of political dissidents, thus rendering them incapable of engaging in any trade, i.e. buying bread. When you are under a police investigation for political reasons, you are offered a choice: your family will starve unless you confess that you were digging a tunnel under Kremlin with a premeditated goal to assassinate the dear comrade Stalin. The most famous implementation of this tactics is the Ruslan Kotsaba case, his wife and kids have only survived thanks to the public campaign (launched by the defence attorney) encouraging people to trade with the wife for cash (she is a pastry chief).

But, of course! It can not happen to you! No way! (Ask The Lighthouse Project what methods do courts and prosecutors employ in USA and Canada to exert pressure on falsely accused.)

The banks do not bother with breaching your security, they took away your agency altogether.

(to be continued)

Dear mr. Thunderf00t, recently you have published a series of videos about melting gold in strange contraptions (or one might say «stupid setups»). This series culminated in the episode called «Will Burning Diamond Melt Gold?». I quote:

Gold melts at 1064 C, Diamond burns at 2700 C — this should be enough to melt gold, will a diamond melt gold?

Then you put a ~0.25g diamond on a 1g golden coin, ignite the diamond in the pure oxygen atmosphere and wait until the diamond burns a hole in the coin. The diamond burned happily to ashes and the coin remained intact.

This «failure» created confusion among yourself and your audience:

How so?! It burnt so HOOOOOOOT! and melted nothing...

Spoiler alert: ENERGY TRANSFER.

Given that few days before you successfully melted a bead of gold that was put in a cavity inside a burning graphite block (What a surprise that this contraption worked!), your confusion is legitimately cringeworthy.

FUCKING SHAME!!!

I want you to understand the magnitude of this shame. Mr. Thunderf00t is not only an official scientist like many imbeciles are, he has a real discovery in his portfolio which is an achievement that the Steven Hawking's portfolio lacks of. Mr. Thunderf00t is a real scientist — not a cosmologist or something — he knows his science and he is capable of conducting meaningful experiments. A man of this qualification was driven astray by the notion of temperature. So much astray, that laymen of ancient Egypt would laugh at his «gold melting» contraptions being so obviously against even the most basic common sense understanding of thermodynamics available for humans since 10 000 years ago… 20 000? Once again, pay attention, a credible scientist forgets to calculate the energy balance of his experiment before burning real diamonds.

I therefore propose to remove the notion of temperature from the middle school physics curriculum, for it is overwhelmingly confusing and marginally useful.

P.S.
make a funny experiment:
calculate «the temperature» of a 10 GEv proton, say X (note the amount of zeroes in the result)
and then ask a patented physicist: will a proton heated up to X Celcius deg melt a hole in a thin golden foil.

Picture that: You are a farmer.
You have grown a ton of potato and brought it to a marketplace.
You recon everybody sells potatoes for $1 and you decided to set the price to 0.9 so that you can return home earlier.
Presently, a group of well dressed respectable men with baseball bats approached you:
— Nice potato you have here, good sir. Do you know that the minimum price for potatoes here is $1?

QUESTIONS:
1. do you believe these respectable men helped you sell your potato for a better price?
2. do you wish the minimum price to be set higher (e.g. $1.1)?