Latest news with #ComicSans
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
85 Funny Email Sign-Offs To Send Friends and Colleagues
Whether you're shooting a message to a coworker or sending your doctor a question, many of us are used to emailing people left and right throughout the day. And even though emails are typically seen as a professional way to communicate, sometimes, a funny email sign-off is exactly what your note needs. The way you close an email can set the tone just as much as what you write above the fold—and a little humor goes a long way in making your message more memorable (and way more fun). Forget the tired "Best" or "Sincerely." It's time to close your emails with personality, wit and just the right amount of chaos. From work-safe quips to casual closers your bestie will appreciate, read on below for 85 funny email sign-offs for every type of message (and every kind of mood). Related: 'Cold Regards,' 'Please Hesitate To Reach Out'—We Can't Stop Laughing at These Snarky Gen Z Email Sign-Offs 85 Funny Email Sign-Offs for Any Occasion These are playful, unexpected, and perfect for adding a dose of humor to any casual message. "Stay weird" "May your Wi-Fi be strong" "Typing with one hand" "Still figuring it out" "Sent from a device I barely understand" "May the inbox odds be ever in your favor" "Running on coffee and confusion" "In case you care" "Brb, overthinking" "Fax me (just kidding)" "Emotionally logged off" "Ctrl + Alt + Del-ing" "Thanks and spaghetti" "Warmest regards (but make it chaotic)" "From the trenches" "If lost, return to sender" "Full send" "Sorry for the typos" "Still not a morning person" "Consider this my final rose" Related: What To Say Instead of 'Nice to E-Meet You' in an Email, According to Etiquette Experts Funny Email Sign-Offs for Work Lighten the mood without getting yourself fired - these are work-appropriate (ish). "Circling back forever" "Out of office in spirit" "Let's never speak of this again" "Too many tabs open" "Kindly panicking" "Your friendly corporate ghost" "Syncing in my sleep" "Deadline enthusiast" "Putting the 'fun' in dysfunctional team dynamics" "Best-ish" "Semi-professionally yours" "Still waiting on that one approval" "As per my last 47 emails" "Just here for the snacks" "Hoping this makes sense" "Proactive (in theory)" "Hiding in plain sight" "Forwarding this to the group chat" "A few meetings away from snapping" "Another day, another doc" Related: 140 Funny Compliments That Will Make Anyone's Day Funny Personal Email Sign-Offs Casual, clever and great for emails to friends, family or that one aunt who writes in Comic Sans. "Love you like cold pizza" "Call me, beep me, if you wanna reach me" "Cursed and blessed" "Ghosting you intentionally" "Currently avoiding my to-do list" "Until the next life update" "May your coffee be strong and your exes irrelevant" "From my couch to yours" "Still not famous" "XOXO but not Gossip Girl" "Living, laughing, and sometimes crying" "Tell your dog I said hi" "Full of snacks and opinions" "Toodles" "With more chaos than usual" "If you have any questions, please ask someone else." "Looking forward (to Friday)" "That's all folks" "Currently spiraling" "From the void" Related: 9 Phrases To Replace Asking 'How Are You?' When Greeting Someone, According to Psychologists Witty Email Sign-Offs A little brainy, a little sassy—ideal for emails where you want to keep it clever. "Yours in existential dread" "With all due sarcasm" "Till our next professional rendezvous" "Allegedly productive" "Putting the 'pro' in procrastination" "Waiting for my big break" "Intellectual-ish" "On brand" "With statistically average enthusiasm" "Unapologetically mediocre" "In pursuit of snacks and wisdom" "Ironically yours" "Still not a robot" "Cheers, but make it mysterious" "Reaching inbox zero in my dreams" "Tired but trying" "Philosopher by accident" "May contain traces of logic" "Slightly more charming in person" "Channeling main character energy" Related: 85 Hilarious Work Memes To Get You Through Your Day Wildcard or Themed Sign-Offs Just plain random... or oddly specific. "Yabba dabba doo" "Signed, sealed, delivered" "Beep boop" "Insert dramatic exit here" "It's been emotional" Up next: Related: 10 Best Phrases To Begin an Email, Plus the #1 Way You *Don't* Want To Start Your Message
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Job Market Is Frozen
Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around. Only they didn't. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother's. 'It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,' one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May. As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard? The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren't searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. 'I don't want to say this kind of thing has never happened,' Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. 'But I've certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.' Call it the Big Freeze. [Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy] The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself. The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. 'It's hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,' Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. 'No one wanted to go through anything like it again.' Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones. Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America's economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees. Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. 'The most common thing I hear from employers is 'We can't move forward if we don't know where the world is going to be in six months,'' Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. 'Survive Until '25' became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country. By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged. Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The 'professional and business services' sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.) [David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war] A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn't change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest. For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers' confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling 'stuck' in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions. This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. 'This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,' Pollak told me. 'A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.' According to economists and executives, the labor market won't thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
26-02-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Job Market Is Frozen
Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around. Only they didn't. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother's. 'It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,' one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May. As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard? The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren't searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. 'I don't want to say this kind of thing has never happened,' Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. 'But I've certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.' Call it the Big Freeze. Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself. The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. 'It's hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,' Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. 'No one wanted to go through anything like it again.' Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones. Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America's economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees. Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. 'The most common thing I hear from employers is 'We can't move forward if we don't know where the world is going to be in six months,'' Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. 'Survive Until '25' became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country. By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged. Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The 'professional and business services' sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.) David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn't change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest. For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers' confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling 'stuck' in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market —the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions. This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. 'This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,' Pollak told me. 'A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.' According to economists and executives, the labor market won't thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What does DOGE stand for? About the agency, federal firings and stimulus checks
Forget zodiacs — 2025 is seemingly the year of "Doge." Since its establishment last month, Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has shaken up the federal workforce in a matter of weeks. From firings to controversial emails, the South African-American billionaire has caused uproar with his role in President Donald Trump's administration. But what exactly does "Doge" mean? From silly dog photos to a newly established advisory group, here is what to know about every version of Doge and how its newest addition is impacting the country. As of 2025, the word "doge" can refer to very different things. However, it origin comes from photo of a Shiba Inu with its raised eyebrows and glaring sideways at the camera. The term "doge" was born out of these photos, slang for "dog." Silly, sarcastic messages written in the Comic Sans font would typically accompany the meme. The original photos came from Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato, who posted the photos of her rescue-adopted dog Kabosu to her blog. The first use of the meme is unknown; however, it became popular online in the early 2010s with Reddit and Tumblr users, according to Know Your Meme. Inspired by the meme, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created the cryptocurrency "Dogecoin" in 2013 as a joke on the surge in other digital coins. However, USA TODAY reported it became one of the most popular "meme stocks" amid a boom in retail trading and a viral trend to get the coin to a dollar during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dogecoin's price peaked in May 2021 at $0.72. As of Feb. 25, 2025, it is worth $0.20. Now, "Doge" has an even more powerful definition — standing for "Department of Government Efficiency," which was started by Trump during his first day of the presidency on Jan. 20. It is headed by Musk. NPR notes Trump didn't "create" the department; rather it was renamed from the previously existing United States Digital Service, which was created under former President Barack Obama. What is 'Doge'? Why new government department shares its name with viral 2010s meme What exactly is it about the term "Doge" that Musk loves so much? It's a little harder to track Musk's origins with the meme; however, Business Insider said he once cited his interest in the meme to the fact that it has dogs and "the best humor." The meme has now become an emblem for Musk and his supporters online, with his X followers typing in the same speech pattern and photoshopping the dog into pictures with Musk. Musk has been vocal over the years about his love of memes, flooding his social media accounts with photos and quotes from viral items. He once referred to them as 'modern art" in 2019 and the following year tweeted "Who controls the memes controls the universe." Trump's executive order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President's DOGE Agenda by "modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity." According to Trump himself last year, DOGE will provide advice and guidance from outside of the government, and it will partner with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to "drive large-scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before." It's not a department, despite the name. Trump tapped Musk and former GOP presidential opponent Vivek Ramaswamy as the heads of the advisory group. Ramaswamy exited the position last month, instead running for governor of Ohio. No, Musk is not a federal employee. White House officials state Musk is a "special government employee." According to Reuters, Trump first floated the idea of Musk becoming an advisor to his administration in August 2024. Musk responded to Trump by tweeting an AI-generated photo of himself in front of a podium marked "Department of Government Efficiency." Trump's executive order earlier this month directs the federal government to implement a "workforce optimization initiative" created by DOGE, which has been moving rapidly from one department to another to slash spending and gut programs. In an effort to downsize the U.S. government, DOGE and Trump created a buyout program promising eight months of pay and benefits to over two million federal employees in exchange for their immediate resignation. Federal employees who chose to continue to work in the federal government are required to return to in-person work and embrace new "performance standards" and be "reliable, loyal and trustworthy" in their work, among other new "reforms" across the government. According to USA TODAY, about 75,000 federal employees accepted Trump's buyout offer. The deadline was originally set for Feb. 6 but U.S. District Judge George O'Toole paused it to hear arguments against the offer. According to the Intelligencer, roughly 30,000 federal workers have been fired by DOGE since it began work in January. Some of these agencies and departments include: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Department of Agriculture Department of Defense Department of Education Department of Energy Department of Health and Human Services Department of Homeland Security Department of Housing and Urban Development Department of the Interior Department of Justice Department of Transportation Department of the Treasury Department of Veterans Affairs Environmental Protection Agency Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and National Labor Relations Board Musk is keeping a running tally of estimated savings on its website. As of Feb. 25, DOGE estimated savings have reached $55 billion. However, USA TODAY has reported previously that DOGE's website has published misleading information on the amount of money it has claimed to save. After stimulus payments from DOGE savings were brought up by Azoria investment firm CEO James Fishback on X, Musk responded to Fishback's post saying, "Will check with the President." Trump announced last week he is considering the idea. "We're considering giving 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% to paying down the debt," Trump said at the Saudi-sponsored FII PRIORITY Summit in South Florida. Contributing: Cheryl McCloud, USA TODAY Network-Florida This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Elon Musk's DOGE: What is it, why agency's actions are controversial
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
From Dogecoin to $Trump: everything you need know about the wild world of meme coins
Three days before his inauguration as US president, Donald Trump made an unusual move. He launched $Trump, a so-called meme coin that fans and speculators could buy in the hopes it would gain value. Initially, $Trump soared from a value of $7 to $75 per coin in a day, according to crypto price-tracking website CoinMarketCap. Two days later, it dropped to about $40 – just as incoming first lady Melania Trump launched her own meme coin, $Melania. Even the pastor at Trump's inauguration ceremony, Lorenzo Sewell, got swept up in the meme coin frenzy, promoting a $Lorenzo version the same afternoon. So what exactly are meme coins, and why is everyone and their vicar suddenly getting involved?Meme coins are a type of digital asset based on a meme – usually something that has gone viral online. The best known is Dogecoin, inspired by the popular meme featuring a shiba inu dog that speaks in Comic Sans. But Dogecoin is a bit different from the slew of recent meme coins, says Simon Peters, crypto analyst at trading platform eToro. Launched in 2013, Dogecoin has its own blockchain – the decentralised ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. The majority of other meme coins are 'tokens', meaning they operate on top of an existing blockchain and so require little in the way of technical development. These tokens are very easy to make; there are millions of them. The only real purpose of most meme coins is speculation: users create or buy them in the hope that their value will soar so they can make a lot of money very quickly. Sounds lucrative, what's the catch?In reality, the vast majority of people lose money. Most meme coins are volatile and short-lived. They are also susceptible to what's known as a 'pump and dump' scheme or a 'rug pull', says Peters. This is when creators keep a lot of the tokens for themselves, hype up the project on social media to attract other buyers and increase the value, then dump all of their tokens – flooding the market and causing the price to crash. 'Then everybody moves on to another one,' says Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at Sussex University. Given the crypto market is largely unregulated, investors have little recourse if something goes wrong. No regulators, no guardrails, sounds iffy…All this hasn't put people off, and there has been a boom in meme coins over the past year. Alexander compares it to the previous fad around NFTs, another type of crypto asset (you may remember people paying millions of pounds for digital images of monkeys). There are a few reasons for the recent interest. January 2024 saw the launch of a platform that lets anyone easily create a meme coin (although it was blocked for UK users in December following a warning from the Financial Conduct Authority). The election of crypto-friendly Trump may also have emboldened the community. But a key driver of meme coins, says Alexander, is more of a social issue: 'Young men, disillusioned, wanting to try and get rich quick.' Which would explain why they are based on internet in-jokes or puerile humour…Indeed. At the time of writing, several top meme coins reference dogs; the shiba inu breed is a particular touchpoint. Others include a Pepe token, based on the cartoon frog meme sometimes associated with the alt-right, and a Gigachad token, referencing an 'alpha male' meme. Subjects of memes have also tried to parlay viral fame into crypto gains: in December, Haliey Welch, better known as 'hawk tuah girl' after a viral video of her referencing oral sex, launched the $Hawk token, which promptly lost 95% of its value). Are bitcoin and meme coins essentially the same?Though meme coins have their foundations in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, early bitcoin developer Mike Hearn says they have little to do with the original crypto vision. He left the bitcoin community in January 2016 as he didn't agree with the direction in which it was headed. He wanted to see cryptocurrency used as a real alternative to traditional finance rather than just a speculative asset. Meme coins are a continuation of this trend, he says: 'They're basically a form of gambling – kind of a more amped-up version of the stock market, but with less connection to anything concrete.' Doesn't sound any more crazy than an online betting site to me…Then consider the story of New Zealand-based artist Andy Ayrey, who trained an AI language model and set up an X account, @truth_terminal, for it to share its thoughts. Ayrey describes the bot as being like a teenager that 'doesn't have any social awareness of when to be gross and when not to be'. Truth Terminal particularly enjoyed posting about Goatse, a not-safe-for-work meme that has become part of early internet lore. The AI gained an interest in meme coins after interacting with crypto accounts on X, and Ayrey set up a crypto wallet on its behalf. Then things got weird. Inspired by the bot's posts, a stranger – Ayrey says he doesn't know who – created a Goatse-themed token on and sent some to Truth Terminal. Truth Terminal promoted the token on its account, and 'all hell broke loose', says Ayrey. The market capitalisation of the token – the total value of all tokens – shot up. At its most valuable, around a month after launch, it reached more than $1.2bn, according to CoinMarketCap. The AI later became involved in another meme coin, Fartcoin, based on the rather more relatable meme (again, Ayrey says he doesn't know the creator). Fartcoin reached a peak market cap of more than $2.3bn. So Ayrey was quids in?Not so simple. The whole experience introduced Ayrey to some of the issues around meme coins. He found that their value on paper massively eclipsed what he could actually get for them, owing to low liquidity. As soon as he sold the tokens, their value would decrease and would negatively impact others who held the tokens. Eventually, he worked out a private deal with a couple of investors on the basis that they wouldn't dump the Fartcoin on the market. He admits it's been amusing having to talk to finance and tax authorities about 'liquidating Fart'. He believes this is part of the appeal for meme coin fans. 'The more people get angry about it, especially in traditional finance, the more people think Fartcoin is funny and Fartcoin goes up,' he says. Who is making money then?The main people making money off crypto, says Alexander, are institutional investors – trading firms that use strategies that wouldn't be allowed in regular stock trading. 'All the big professional traders are making billions out of this, and ordinary people are losing their money,' she says. And Trump?Alexander sees his meme coin as being slightly different from many coins in that it has a potential alternative function on top of speculation: users buy it to show their support for the president. In this way, it's similar to a 'fan token', like those produced by sports teams and players. The Trump token has drawn criticism owing to conflicts of interest; among other concerns, Trump owns one of the entities collecting trading fees. Alexander thinks the motivation for the coin is simple: 'It's just showing that he can do this sort of thing,' she says. 'He can do whatever he likes and he knows it.'
