Where the Rubber meets the Road

It is that time. New tyre time.
And they are expensive.

However, considering they are instrumental in holding the car to the road, good tyres are necessary in my opinion, especially when road and weather conditions vary so heavily.

660€ for the ones I picked up and while good, they aren't the most expensive by far. However, I am not exactly hard on them, since I drive like a grandma with feathers for feet.

These days.

_{For those who haven't seen winter tyres}

I was talking with a friend who was deciding on a car seat and was going to go for the safest. But in my opinion, rather than spending 600€ on a chair, spend less and improve the tyres, check the suspension, get defensive driving lessons - these things will make far more statistical difference than the variation in baby seats from mid to high range.

He bought the expensive seat.

And the next time he changed, cheap tyres.

His thinking was that there was no need to spend the extra 150€ on the tyres because he doesn't drive that often, but the extra 300€ on the seat was justifiable. I reckon this is a psychological bias, where we favor "what we see" over what we don't, and as a result, take what is not in our constant awareness, for granted.

Obviously, this applies to what we use also, where we will spend on all kinds of things that might not make much difference to our lives, but neglect what impacts quite heavily. Think about what the average person spends on clothes or entertainment, but that same person will complain about the price of food, or say that they don't have enough to invest.

And of course, we are predisposed to choose what we can "touch" over what we cannot, which is why so many take the bird in the hand approach and, just don't understand how crypto can have value.

I have spent so many hours with people discussing crypto concepts and application, but from the get-go, I suggest that rather than talk about it, they dive in and either buy a little or use a platform like Hive to not just learn how it works, but see it in action and interact with it at a practical level. You know, where the rubber meets the road - the concept becomes reality. But because they don't, they struggle to understand it and fail to see how it can be applied to improve their living experience, their financial wellbeing, their social activity and the way the world is governed, streamlining and replacing so much of what creates conflict, causes us harm and fundamentally undermines our security from the global level, all the way down to the individual person.

Why is it so hard?

Why are so many people fearful of using crypto?

It goes beyond laziness and complacency and seems to trigger a primal reaction in us, where we just can't come to terms with this level of change. Perhaps it is that because we have become so accustomed to the status quo, that we have started to not only believe that it is the way it has to be, but that it is a natural part of who we are as individuals. To change, means to change ourselves and lose what we know to be true. This is an interesting conflict though, as it means that while we know that we aren't happy (on average) in this current world, we have resigned ourselves to it and say, "this is just the way life is".

Nonsense.

The economic conditions might leverage our human tendencies, but the current version of the economy is just that, the current version. It wasn't always this way and has evolved to be it, but evolution doesn't mean improvement and a snapshot taken right now, doesn't mean it will be the same tomorrow.

Incentives are what drive the economy, because it is incentives that drive humans. This means that a a very practical level, we are all responsible for making the economy what it is, even if we aren't the largest or most influential players as individuals. We are all participating, we are all making the decisions about the direction we go and while there are roads built to travel, that doesn't mean we are forced to drive them.

While on a transport road, crossing over the lines can mean into the forest or oncoming traffic, when it comes to economic process and digital economies, the forest is open space to build and the oncoming traffic, are the centralized structures that want us to conform, even if it is not in our best interests as a whole.

They are incentivized to keep us between their lines, but people are slowly realizing that all of these lines are imaginary restrictions and we have the power to redraw or remove them entirely. Through this, we create a base of decentralized processes that rather than becoming train lines, are more like airspace, with a massive amount of room to move, with a ground floor, but a ceiling only ever as high as our next development that surpasses the last.

We are the rubber. We are the road.
We are the force that directs us.

We should meet and go for a drive.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]