I did all my transportation and shopping with a mountain bike for a year and it's kind of difficult on snow and ice, fell over some. The trick is to never turn at all when on that stuff, but it's still hard. The cold makes the oil for the mechanisms work worse too, you need special oil. My hands got very cold holding on to the handlebars, you need to find some balance between gloves that hold warmth and resist the wind and gloves that let you have enough dexterity for the brakes and shifters.
That said, just because someone tries to belittle you for your mistake or can’t provide proper feedback doesn’t mean the actual criticism is wrong. Sure, you shouldn’t take everything people say as complete truth but rather use it for introspection instead. They might have a point, even if they try to use it against you.
Even if someone has a point, if they are using it as social aggression you have to expect the other person to get their hackles up and dismiss it, and I don't think that's even an unreasonable response since how can they trust someone who is attacking them to be giving their honestly considered judgment rather than just making up something that sounds plausible?
I think the solution has to be building trust. Like establishing that you respect someone and aren't their enemy before offering criticism, and giving people credit for considering ways they could be wrong.
Most people aren’t taught how to deal with criticism and see it as a personal attack, an attempt to discredit them.
A lot of the time that's what it is though. Accepting criticism at face value takes a lot of trust because the main intention of the person giving it could very well be to assert dominance or persuade people to stop listening to you rather than give you useful information and help you improve. This is why people are afraid of criticism; it has always been used as a way to build social hierarchies, and it goes against our instincts to see it as not being about that.
If you have enough other investments to be comfortable, don't especially want to change retirement timeline etc. and your wife is fine with it, I'd keep it as a potential hedge against a depression that crashes the value of index funds. I would not split it between whichever small crypto projects can sell you a convincing narrative that they have 'moon potential' when your financial circumstances mean you don't really need that anyway and that is specifically what would open you up to the 'scamminess' of crypto.
There has been significant growth of crypto as currency, particularly in the developing world with use of USD pegged stablecoins. It remains the only practical solution to make online transactions privately or when alternatives have been censored, potential pitfalls notwithstanding.
Centralized control is a threat, but it's one that is taken seriously, and by practical metrics crypto has been largely successful in defending its integrity here. Other related values measures worth looking at are credible neutrality, permissionlessness, and trustlessness, also basically areas it continues to succeed. You submit a valid transaction to a major blockchain, it's getting included, even if powerful people would rather it wasn't. Transactions that are illegal as per US sanctions are treated more or less equally to any other. Miners and stakers are not taking control of the money printer dial for their own enrichment. And there's reason to think this will continue, because in a lot of ways control is a liability, and giving it up is valuable; "CEO of Bitcoin" is not a sane title to aspire to because it would make you the responsible party and valid target for all sorts of legal threats and obligations, and just having it would destroy the value of what you control.
That said, as a means for the economic salvation of the median person like OP seems to be talking about, it was never going to do that on its own, no one who thinks honestly about it would promise that, and anyone who did is full of shit. It's just a new type of p2p money with some cool properties, that obviously isn't going to be enough to fix the mess that is the world's economic and political systems.
“They can come down on you for a lot of things. They seized up the bank accounts for people who were protesting, the truckers. People who were donating to the truckers, they seized their bank accounts,” Rogan said.
I don't know what "a lot of things" is gesturing at, maybe he doesn't either. Use of payments censorship to shut down protests without legal proceedings is legitimately worrying, though this is something right wing commentators tend to fixate on to the exclusion of the same stuff when used against people who aren't their audience. Here's an article that I think has a good perspective on this.
All these cases happen somewhere distant to a person in the US or Canada, so could it be that the Truckers struck a nerve because this was the first time that citizens of a democratic Western nation were subject to payments oppression? The answer is no. Cashless payments censorship has a long and established tradition in Western countries. It’s just that it’s not recognized because it’s been focussed on marginalized groups such as welfare recipients.
Better but still pretty bad, in that case can only hope the software/trading ecosystems for p2p improve enough to be more generally viable and that once that happens there won't be reactive legislation to stamp it out.
Because of inflation, it's not going to stay 3k. All rules of this type have fixed amounts that never get updated and every year encompass more transactions.
It's important though because if that's the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.