I recently learned that one of my neighbors is a little bit of a woke activist. She’s not outspoken or loud. Her job prevents that. There would be consequences among her clients and people she works with. But she does quiet things. For example, she refuses to shop at businesses that have outed themselves as being supportive of non-woke ideologies. And she votes in every election, big or small, for the most woke candidates. She doesn’t have any kids, but she was very concerned about the upcoming school board election in the neighborhood.

One of the candidates lives on our street, and in a passing conversation, this candidate let her know that she wasn’t a fan of the fact that every single classroom in the neighborhood elementary school has a “choose to include” rainbow diversity sticker stuck on the classroom window.

So this neighbor, playing the dumb liberal language game, was telling me “I don’t get how anybody can be against inclusion.”

So I say like I’m lecturing a teenager, “You know that the rainbow sticker with the word inclusion is code for acceptance of gay and trans people, right? It’s not about inclusion. It’s about gay and trans issues, and our neighbor's a churchgoer. You're surprised by her view?” There was some big issue a couple years ago where some high school kid came out as trans, and people were in a tizzy over which bathroom and locker room this kid used, which is what led to the stupid sticker thing.

“Nuh uh!” she insists. “It’s about inclusion of everybody! Who can be against that?”

“Nuh uh!” I reply, mimicking her. “It’s about inclusion of everybody the same way ‘all lives matter’ is really about all lives mattering.”

“That’s completely different!” she exclaims.

Like most liberals, this woman is an unconscious victim of liberal arrogance.

Deep down, she knows that some people like our neighbor, even if she doesn’t agree with them, have a moral stance against alternative sexual lifestyles. Maybe they’re religious, or maybe they just have a non-religious but conservative set of family values they choose to follow and to impart to their children. And for these people, alternative sexualities are morally wrong, and people who allow and support these alternative sexualities are morally wrong. And in their world, teaching elementary school children to be “inclusive” about alternative sexualities is undermining the family values they’re trying to impart to their children. They believe teaching of these alternative values has no place in school, and school should focus on math and reading while leaving the teaching of values to the parents.

Even though these people are non-woke and against “inclusion”, which is clearly wrong in the eyes of any liberal person, they sleep well at night and believe themselves to be morally superior to these woke liberal people, which irritates the liberal people to no end.

The root problem with progressive liberal beliefs is that the progressive liberal people don’t recognize that their beliefs are just beliefs. They don’t consider their beliefs to be a moral position or a political position, or really a position at all. They consider their beliefs to be common sense. Something nobody could possibly oppose. They consider their beliefs to be a baseline moral standard that obviously applies to everybody, universal truths that nobody can deny. So obviously, in their eyes, there should be no problem teaching young children about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, because in their world, these are not beliefs or values or political stances, but are just common sense baseline universally-applicable truths that apply to everybody.

They have no sense of history, of course. Otherwise, they’d know that these common sense universal truths that are obvious to everybody were actually a very, very radical position less than 20 years ago. Within their lifetimes.

But never mind that.

So certain are they that their beliefs aren’t beliefs and are actually obvious common sense universal truths that apply to everybody, that they are willing to extend their beliefs across the globe. Other countries with their own cultures and sovereignty? Fuck that. They need to comply with the universal liberal truth. Whether it’s burning coal or enforcing dress codes or making certain sexual practices illegal, these cultures that are ten times older than the United States need to comply with these obvious woke universal truths that the woke people just came up with this decade.

So certain are they that their beliefs aren’t beliefs and are actually obvious universal truths that apply to everybody, that they are willing to extend their beliefs across time. George Washington, who was a scholar and hero by the standards of the 1770s, was actually an evil man by the standards of the 2020s. He owned slaves, and his 1770s viewpoints about sex and women were pretty backward by 2020s standards. Because these progressive liberal beliefs are not beliefs, but are instead an obvious universal standard that applies to everybody, it is okay to judge George Washington by today’s progressive liberal universal standards and declare that this hero and scholar who overthrew tyranny should have known better, and was in fact an evil man who represented all that is wrong with oppressive white male American culture.

How arrogant must a group of people be, to think that their mere beliefs, some of which they just came up with recently, are so obvious and so universal that they apply to anyone and everyone, across the entire globe and across all of time?

The second question most people ask when considering investing in a particular stock, cryptocurrency, or anything else (the first being “Is this thing going to go up in value”) is normally “How high can this thing’s value go”.

In considering that second question, a lot of people mistakenly look at the current price of something and try to guess how much “room to grow” it might have. For example, a crypto coin that costs 10 cents looks a lot more attractive than a coin that costs 20 dollars, because if that 10-cent coin goes up to $100, you just made 1000 times your initial investment, while if that 20-dollar coin goes up to $100 dollars, you only made 5 times your investment.

So people may invest some money into that 10-cent coin, then get frustrated when six weeks later, it’s gone up to 12 cents, one tiny fraction of a cent at a time, while that 20-dollar coin has doubled.

What these people failed to look at was market cap. Market cap is essentially just a measurement of how much value exists in the market for a particular thing. You take the total number of coins, shares, or whatever you're buying that are in circulation and multiply it by the price per thing, and that’s your market cap. So when the price goes up, market cap goes up, when price goes down, market cap goes down, if new coins or shares are created, market cap goes up, if coins or shares are destroyed, market cap goes down.

When you invest, what you’re actually investing in is a small piece of the market. That piece is represented by the coins or shares you buy and their current value, but what actually affects how much you gain or lose is the percent change in the market cap.

When something has a high market cap, it takes a lot more buying or selling to change that market cap by a significant percentage. That’s why you and me buying a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoin with its 1 trillion dollar market cap doesn’t change anything, but a bunch of kids getting together on Reddit can affect the much smaller 6 billion dollar market cap of dogecoin.

The price for an individual crypto coin or stock share doesn’t really matter that much. That’s just the total market cap divided by the number of coins or shares in existence. It doesn’t matter if your $1000 investment buys 100 ten-dollar crypto coins or 10,000 ten-cent coins. What matters is the percent change in value that occurs while you’re holding those coins. If bitcoin triples while your $1000 only buys 0.02 bitcoin, you still tripled your money. While if a cheaper coin like Stellar Lumens (XLM) goes up from 40 to 42 cents, it doesn’t matter if your $1000 buys 2500 of them. Your value still only increased by 5% to $1050.

So if a ten-cent coin has a 500 billion dollar market cap, you will stare all day watching it go up and down fractions of a cent wondering why it’s not mooning. Meanwhile, some random 5-dollar coin with a small 200 million dollar market cap may triple in value in a day while you thought it didn’t have room to grow.

Low market cap investments are volatile. They may moon out of nowhere, and they may crash to nothing just as easily. It doesn’t matter what the price per coin or share is; that is just a number you get when you divide the total market cap by the total number in existence. A $100 stock or crypto may moon if it’s a low market cap investment. Or crash suddenly.

Conversely, high market cap investments are more stable, which makes them less prone to rapid changes in value in either direction. It takes a LOT of buying and selling to change their price. It doesn’t matter if the price is only 10 cents. That’s just the number you get when you divide the market cap by the total number of coins or shares. Unless there’s a huge amount of purchasing or selling going on, that high market cap ten-cent crypto coin or stock share is going to spend most of its days being measured in fractions of a cent out to four decimal places.

So when people find themselves wondering why their Cardano (ADA) crypto has been stagnant for awhile or why XLM never moons, the answer is high market cap. And when people wonder why some obscure stock or shitcoin crypto they’ve never heard of just shot up from $20 to $44 in under a week, and then crashed back down to $18 in an hour as soon as they bought it, that was probably a low market cap investment.