Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This fight is for everything.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / KULCHA! / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: The ‘Art’ of the NFT

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: The ‘Art’ of the NFT

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Oh, sure, if you’re some kind of professional art critic, I guess. [Disclaimer: Mr. Smee is the best kind of art critic, someone who can make me appreciate particular images in a new way, and I have been reading his work since it appeared in the Boston Globe.]

Smee actually looked at the artwork, not just the price tag, to discuss the concept behind it. (“[The buyer] Metakovan’s claim — that “it represents 13 years of everyday work” — is weak tea. “Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable,” he continued in his statement, “but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time.”…”) But I kinda like flglmn‘s explanation, myself…


it’s basically a way of taking the vague abstract halo of prestige that surrounds Patronage Of The Arts, and melting it down into a quasi-physical thing that you can put on a thumb drive, and lose

an NFT is *like* the plaque that they put up when you donate to the museum, except if everyone involved implicitly agreed to treat the physical plaque itself as the valuable thing, not the prestige associated with having made the donation. also there’s some tech bullshit involved

the plaque they put up at the museum when you donate is also non-fungible, in the sense that if it gets stolen they can’t replace it with *exactly* the same plaque, it will always be a different plaque. it’s just that nobody cares

It gets… better?

(I seem to understand every individual word in Ms. Castor’s explainer, and yet the whole concept is beyond me.)


(Poor bastid had to take his account private, for some reason.)

I’m admittedly not the target audience, but… wouldn’t hoarding Pokemon cards or rare Funko Pops be more dignified? Or at least, more fun?

Reader Interactions

237Comments

  1. 1.

    Starboard Tack

    Old joke:
    Neurotics build castles in the air. Psychotics live in them. Psychiatrists collect the rent

    This shit’s nuts!!!

  3. 3.

    pat

    Sorry, but can someone please explain what the heck is an NFT?​
     

    I mean, I see something there but what does NFT mean?

  5. 5.

    Chetan Murthy

    I remember reading a while back, that printers were getting good enough that they could produce reproductions of paintings so perfect, that they would also print on the back of the canvas, that it was a reproduction.  That obviously would mean that they can reproduce the texture of the painting, so that when observed from close-up, it appears like the original.

    (1) I wonder if this is actually true (b/c I don’t see this discussed much, recently)

    (2) Let’s stipulate it’s true.  Suppose a “museum” fills its collection with such copies of famous paintings: The Mona Lisa, A Starry Night, etc.  Suppose that musem is close by.  Would you go to that museum to see these works, instead of going all the way to see the originals?  [suppose that all the works are also shown at The Louvre]

    (3) And let’s suppose that people are indifferent, and this eventually results in fewer visits to art museums.  Then what would this do to the price of the original paintings?

    I claim that the prices of the original paintings will drop.  Because it isn’t solely because they are the originals, but rather, that seeing one is different (so far) from seeing a reproduction, from seeing a photograph.  And to whatever extent it is different, people are willing to pay a price for that difference in experience.  But when the experience is *identical*, it cannot but lower the value of the “original experience”.

    And if this is true of real-life oil-on-canvas paintings, then it MUST also be true of digital artifacts, which can by definition be reproduced infinitely.

    That is to say: if cryptocurrency is the land of knaves and fools, then NFTs for “owning” digital artifacts, are doubly so.

  6. 6.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Prolly gonna take my stimulus check and get in on the magic money craze.

    In other great news, if we are reading it right, my daughter and her husband and their twins to be born in May will be getting $12800 from the stimulus bill. If we’d have had that kinda support when we had the girl and boy, we may have had more kids than the girl and boy.

  7. 7.

    Roger Moore

    Beeple’s digital ‘artwork’ sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael.

    That at least as much about how rarely those works go up for sale as it does about anything. If a major work by one of those artists went up for auction, it would very likely sell for a lot more than $69 million. But the people who have them don’t want to give them up.

  11. 11.

    laura

    Performative crypto amusement- it’s like running a factory town to light a bulb in a locked closet in an attic on an inaccessible island.

  12. 12.

    JMG

    I’d be very surprised if any Titians or Raphaels were owned by anything except museums or a few petrostate dictators and Russian oligarchs. And even those latter few individuals would be more likely to own fakes than the real deals.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    Yes, the brands are truly at it again: Charmin is selling its own, toilet paper-themed NFTs, which, of course, it’s branding as NFTP (non-fungible toilet paper). Source

    pat

    Makes the whole megillah as clear as mud: NFTs, explained.

  19. 19.

    Roger Moore

    @pat:

    Sorry, but can someone please explain what the heck is an NFT?​

    As best as I can understand, a NFT is a way of allowing an artist to use blockchain (the technology behind cryptocurrency) to sell “ownership” of a purely digital artwork.  The buyer pays the artist a bunch of money and in exchange gets a token (the “T” in NFT) that says they paid for it.  The ownership of the token is recorded in the blockchain, which in theory is supposed to make an effectively impossible to forge public record of the sale.  The token owner can then sell the token to someone else, though the artist may demand in the initial sales document that they get a commission on each sale.

    In practice, it’s a bunch of BS.  There’s plenty of evidence that while the blockchain may be nearly impossible to forge, the technology around it is still very fallible, so it’s quite possible for clever thieves to steal the digital token.  And the token is really just a prestige item. It doesn’t give the owner any kind of exclusive right to the artwork, just the right to brag that they’re the owner.

  21. 21.

    TomatoQueen

    @Chetan Murthy:  Putting on my daughter of librarian/rare books and fine arts appraiser hat: I’ll say no to devaluation in prices for originals. Yes, there are fine copies, excellent quality reproductions, and even more fun the world of amazing fakes, as well as whatever digital thinks it’s going to do. But none of those things has the one quality inherent in a valuable original, and that is provenance, or its verifiable history, from production to most recent ownership. The older a piece is, the more difficult to verify, you’d think, except that ownership of something fine tends to be on the record–the Medicis, for example, were very good about keeping meticulous records of art commissioned, art purchased, where and when and how much, so often a so-called lost work, is lost because there’s evidence in a written record of some purchase that doesn’t correspond with anything else in a known collection. Art market prices are insane because they operate as they always have, it’s a narrow market catering to the wealthy, and only rarely do copies of works retain value. As for fabulous fakes…they always get found out, sooner or later. There’s nothing like an original.

  23. 23.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @pat:

    I’ve tried, really conscientiously, to understand NFT, Bitcoin, and the entire concept of cryptocurrencies. I just don’t get it. And I finally had an epiphany that went something like, “I just don’t get it, and you know what? I DON’T EVEN WANT TO!”

  24. 24.

    Ken

    (I seem to understand every individual word in Ms. Castor’s explainer, and yet the whole concept is beyond me.)

    Taxes are too low. Morons have too much money.

    There may also be a longer-term scam involved here.  It depends on if the owners of NFTs can find a bank that’s stupid enough to accept them as collateral for a loan.

  25. 25.

    Elizabelle

    Mostly, I thought having some nitwit with that amount of coin to drop on “art” of this sort reminds me the very wealthy/super rich/tech bro barons need to be taxed.  A lot more.

  26. 26.

    debbie

    @Roger Moore:

    Can the person who purchases the NFT print the work and sell editions of it? Or is my nightmare of a bunch of tokens hanging on a wall coming true

    Is the art on a thumb drive or something similar? What if the media degrades?

  28. 28.

    RSA

    @Chetan Murthy:  Your hypotheticals seem plausible.

    Me, I’m shallow: I imagine the owner of an NFT showing me their piece of art. “Oh,” I sniff. “A reproduction.”

    Because of course there is no unique original.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @Chetan Murthy: ​
     

    I remember reading a while back, that printers were getting good enough that they could produce reproductions of paintings so perfect, that they would also print on the back of the canvas, that it was a reproduction. That obviously would mean that they can reproduce the texture of the painting, so that when observed from close-up, it appears like the original.

    They may be able to do that with a few kinds of paintings that don’t have much in the way of texture, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot of work for paintings that have a visible thickness of paint, like Monet or Pollack.
    It will also depend on the gamut of the printer. Most printers depend on having a relatively small set of pigments that can be combined to cover a large but incomplete set of what the eye can see. That’s fine for a lot of kinds of photography, where the film or digital sensor has similar limits to the inks, but it won’t work for artworks that use unique pigments outside the range of what the printer can reproduce. I’m thinking specifically of Sam Francis, who had someone make custom paints for him.

  30. 30.

    Starboard Tack

    @laura:

    It’s conceptual economics. Warhol said good business is the best art, though he was probably just bullshitting as usual.

  31. 31.

    Central Planning

    I think NFT will see a bigger use in places where you need to guarantee video or audio is authentic.

    I’m thinking bodycams worn by cops and surveillance cameras. If you can automatically generate a NFT for all that stuff, that kind of media will be much tougher to modify. Or, the PD can’t claim that “the officer forgot to turn the camera on” when in reality they just deleted a section of video.

    Of course, there could be problems with ensuring the NFTs themselves are authentic, so we will need NFTs for the NFTs.

    It’s NFTs all the way down!

    Also, too, if anyone tries to turn NFTs for video and audio into a product, I claim the idea as mine and you agree to pay me $0.0001 for every dollar of all your gross sales.

  33. 33.

    raven

    I’m headed out for a NCAA Tourney calcutta. We couldn’t do it last year so interest is high. I put together a consortium of Illini fans and  intend to buy them no matter what the cost.  The dicey part is what happened to several teams in their conference tourneys. If your team(s)  gets knocked out by covid you are SOL. Wish me luck!

  34. 34.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Pentagon awards Billie Eilish contract to design new camouflage uniforms (photo)

  35. 35.

    Roger Moore

    @JMG: ​
     

    I’d be very surprised if any Titians or Raphaels were owned by anything except museums or a few petrostate dictators and Russian oligarchs.

    Even the old masters are still in the price range where ordinary billionaires can still afford them. AFAIK, the most expensive artwork ever sold was a Leonardo that went for less than $500M. And that’s ignoring the fortunate people who bought them- or whose ancestors bought them- before the prices went into completely insane territory. People like J. Paul Getty and Norton Simon were able to put together very impressive collections in the post-war era with oil company billionaire money. There are probably some private collectors out there who did the same but haven’t turned their collections over to museums.

  36. 36.

    Central Planning

    @TomatoQueen: 99.999% of people won’t care if the picture of the Mona Lisa they just copied off the internet has an NFT attached to it or not.

  37. 37.

    Starboard Tack

    @Roger Moore:

    Theoritically, a 3D printer with the right pigments could come quite close. If someone could produce an almost perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, what would that be worth?

  41. 41.

    Ken

    @Alison Rose: Ah, see, that’s what saves you.  There are lots of people who listen to the technobabble and don’t fucking get it. But rather than admit that, they go full Emperor’s New Clothes and spend $69 million for a data file that could fit on a 3.5″ floppy.

  42. 42.

    Central Planning

    @Starboard Tack: As long as the original Mona Lisa continues to hang in the Louvre, it probably won’t be worth much more than the cost of the time and materials to make it.

  46. 46.

    Alison Rose

    @Ken: And this is what makes me hate rich people. Imagine having that much money that you can just throw around at whatever, and choosing to do THIS with it. What the fuck.

  47. 47.

    germy

    Sharon Osbourne calling Holly Robinson Peete ghetto with that vapid, drug addict husband and those demon spawn children of hers, let’s you know the depths of white supremacy

    — Corey Bu-Shea (@coreybking) March 12, 2021

  48. 48.

    Starboard Tack

    @Central Planning:

    I think NFT will see a bigger use in places where you need to guarantee video or audio is authentic.

    Source encryption with chain of custody, maybe using blockchain, is probably better, at least until quantum computers are readily available.

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JMG:

    a few petrostate dictators

    I read that as “prostate dictators” and it actually made a kind of sense for a couple of seconds.

  51. 51.

    Mike in NC

    Washington Post:

    A dozen House Republicans voted against a resolution to award three Congressional Gold Medals, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, to the Capitol Police, the D.C. police and the Smithsonian for display in recognition of those who protected the U.S. Capitol when it was attacked Jan. 6.

    The GOP lawmakers, who objected to the use of the word “insurrection” in the resolution, are: Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Andy Harris (Md.), Lance Gooden (Tex.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.), Michael Cloud (Tex.), Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.), William Steube (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.) and John Rose (Tenn.).

    So, the usual assholes. Where is Gosar?

  52. 52.

    germy

    Thread:

    1. Exclusive: Sharon Osbourne, co-host of the CBS daytime panel show “The Talk,” would frequently refer to then-co-host Julie Chen, who is Chinese American, as “wonton” and “slanty eyes,” according to multiple sources. https://t.co/6A4DrRnSVx

    — Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) March 16, 2021

  54. 54.

    Ken

    @Starboard Tack: New conspiracy theory:  Quantum computers will never be allowed to succeed, because they would destroy the financial system by breaking all our crypto algorithms. Existing research programs are shams, funded by the financial system to make sure nothing useful is ever produced.

  56. 56.

    Elizabelle

    @Starboard Tack:

    If someone could produce an almost perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, what would that be worth?

    Not much, because the big deal with the Mona Lisa is the provenance, right?  Leonardo da Vinci ain’t painting much these days.

    I don’t know why a copy made by a machine would be more valuable than a copy done by a person, which we call an homage or, if with deception in mind, a forgery.

    Brave New World.  The house in Bong Joon-ho’s best picture winner “Parasite” does not exist.

  62. 62.

    RSA

    Something I haven’t looked into, but someone here doubtless knows: Suppose I wanted to establish ownership of a very, very large digital artifact? Say, an exabyte. Is there a standard way a blockchain block connects to the data?

  63. 63.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    As I understand it, the token is kept in the same kind of “digital wallet” as cryptocurrency would be.  I don’t understand all the details of how the sale is authenticated, but the basic idea is that the blockchain records that the new owner of the token is the person with a specific digital key.  To transfer ownership, you need to sign the transfer using the digital key.  This works because public key cryptography allows someone to sign things in a way that’s easily verified but not easily duplicated*.

    The problem is that public key crypto is only as good as your ability to keep your key secure.  It’s often secured with some kind of password, which leads to the classic problems of forgetting the password, in which case you effectively lose the contents of the digital wallet, or someone guessing it.  Both of these things have already been serious problems with cryptocurrency, so you can expect them to be with NFTs, too.

    *Public key crypto works with a public key and a private key.  Anything encrypted with the private key can be decrypted with the public key and vice versa, but it’s effectively impossible to reverse engineer one key given the other. Documents can then be “signed” by encrypting a cryptographic hash of the document.  Anyone can prove the signature is valid by decrypting it using the public key and comparing it to a hash of the document, but they can’t fake a signature using the public key.

  64. 64.

    PsiFighter37

    I started reading up on NFTs towards the end of January…suffice to say, that was earlier than most by already too late to really be able to make meaningful money without taking more risk than I cared for. I do get the concept, though – in my view, it’s the same thing as collecting art or baseball cards, but doing it in digital format on the Ethereum blockchain. To me, at least, it is a more rational explanation for the whole cryptocurrency/blockchain world than Bitcoin itself is, IMO.

    I don’t think I will bother with NFTs, simply because I do not have much of an artist’s eye myself, but I do own some Bitcoin and Ethereum now and will continue to buy more over time.

  65. 65.

    different-church-lady

    As I said yesterday: essentialy someone paid 69 million dollars for metadata.

  66. 66.

    germy

    The Georgia sheriff’s official who said the man accused of killing six Asian women and two others in shootings at spas in the Atlanta area had “a bad day” previously shared a photo of racist T-shirts on social media.

    In a Facebook post from April 2020, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Capt. Jay Baker shared an image of T-shirts based off the Corona beer label that said “Covid 19 IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”

    “Love my shirt,” Baker wrote. “Get yours while they last.'”

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/spa-shooter-bad-day-racist-facebook

  70. 70.

    Nora Lenderbee

    @debbie: ​
      I think the only art for which you can buy an NFT at present is the little icon that represents the NFT.

  72. 72.

    Mary G

    Politico-Morning Consult poll:

    Biden approval
    62% approve
    34% disapprove

    Handling virus
    66% approve
    27% disapprove

    COVID relief bill
    72% support
    20% oppose

    Biden uniting the U.S.
    55% more to unite
    30% more to divide
    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 17, 2021

    GQP going to need to suppress a LOT of votes.

  73. 73.

    Roger Moore

    @RSA: ​
     

    Something I haven’t looked into, but someone here doubtless knows: Suppose I wanted to establish ownership of a very, very large digital artifact? Say, an exabyte. Is there a standard way a blockchain block connects to the data?

    I think you would use a cryptographic hash of the digital object rather than the object itself. A hash is a way of reducing an arbitrarily large digital object to a fixed size “digest”. Any digital object will produce a specific hash, so two people who hash the same digital file will get the identical digest. A cryptographic hash is one that means the tiniest change to the original, even a single changed bit, will result in a completely different output in a way that we don’t know how to reverse engineer. This is a standard way of making it practical to prove that a large digital file hasn’t been changed, and it’s used in digital signatures for that reason.

  75. 75.

    Baud

    @Roger Moore:

    Another question. Where is the digital art file kept to which the NFT is attached? I’d imagine the owner wants to ensure than his investment is protected in some way.

    ETA: You’ve partially answered my question above.

  76. 76.

    PsiFighter37

    @Mary G: We can only hope that low-information white voters with no education continue to no longer be engaged in the political process when their con man is not on the ballot and is de-platformed.

  83. 83.

    Ken

    @RSA: I think the idea is that, just as the county records office is the final source of truth when it comes to title to land, the blockchain records are the final source of truth for digital ownership.  Where that analogy breaks down is that there’s only one county records office, but anyone can start up their own blockchain system; though I may be missing something

    As for how it proves ownership, the hash could be your digital signature, which would prove that you were the one who applied the hash algorithm (or that you were careless with your keys).  But again, anyone could do that with their own digital signature, establishing “ownership” to exactly the same extent.

  84. 84.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Roger Moore: The most popular NFT sites sell JSON objects that contain a description and a link and stuff. You could use a hash to verify authenticity, but I’m not seeing people buying base64 strings or anything.

    @Baud: People are buying pointers to the art. The art itself is usually hosted at a public URL. Needless to say URLs aren’t known for sticking around forever…

  85. 85.

    Geminid

    @Mike in NC: Bob Good (VA-5) is a new asshole, and was just elected running as a self-described “Biblical Conservative.” He won the 5th by five points, and local Democrats will work hard to make him a one-termer.

  87. 87.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Really disappointed in Biden’s Twitter game. This is why I opposed electing an 80 year old. Maybe he’s forwarding chain emails around and I’m just not on the distribution list?

  89. 89.

    dmsilev

    @Ken:

    New conspiracy theory:  Quantum computers will never be allowed to succeed, because they would destroy the financial system by breaking all our crypto algorithms. Existing research programs are shams, funded by the financial system to make sure nothing useful is ever produced.

    As a Jewish quantum scientist, I, uh, can neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a conspiracy. Also, this comment may or may not exist, depending on how you look at it.

  90. 90.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Geminid: The 5th is just a ridiculous district, from the border of NC up to the beltway around DC. Hopefully we get that fixed soon.

  91. 91.

    Baud

    @Ken:

    Where that analogy breaks down is that there’s only one county records office, but anyone can start up their own blockchain system; so I may be missing something.

    As I understand it, the blockchain is interconnected.  Kind of like how multiple servers coordinate a consistent list of web addresses assigned to particular IP addresses.

  92. 92.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ken:

    I think the idea is that, just as the county records office is the final source of truth when it comes to title to land, the blockchain records are the final source of truth for digital ownership. Where that analogy breaks down is that there’s only one county records office, but anyone can start up their own blockchain system; so I may be missing something.

    One of the core concepts of blockchains is that each block includes validation of all the previous blocks. Once a chain gets long enough it’s computationally prohibitive to change the history without the buy-in of ~a majority of the network. Obviously this can happen, just like somebody can burn down the records office, but it probably won’t happen to the Ethereum or Bitcoin blockchains.

  93. 93.

    pat

    OK, so I finally googled NFT and found out that it stands for Non Fungible Token.
    That’s all I needed to know. I don’t care what an NFT actually is. Ha.

  94. 94.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud: ​
     
    I think a digital file is kept on a server somewhere, but the whole point is that it’s a digital work. You can make as many copies of it as you want. In fact, other people can make copies of it; people have been posting copies of it. The point is that you can prove you’re the one who has the digital token for that artwork. Unfortunately, AFAIK that’s all you can do.

  100. 100.

    Baud

    Isn’t this just rich people’s version of using real money to buy useless stuff in video games?

  101. 101.

    Roger Moore

    @Starboard Tack:

    The idea is that you’d record the hash in the blockchain as proof of ownership rather than the whole original file.  That way you can record ownership of arbitrarily large digital objects without breaking the system.

  105. 105.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Baud: I’d guess the “buying stuff in video games” is an attempt to expand out of the rich people cohort. :)

  106. 106.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Starboard Tack: So the way mining works is that if you guess the right random number while you’re processing other people’s transactions, you win the next block’s worth of coins. But you don’t really control it. A block is just a unit of storage in the database.

    An NFT usually points to a public URL… not sure what to make of the second question.

  107. 107.

    Ken

    @Baud: @Major Major Major Major: What I meant was that if you have established “ownership” of a digital artifact by recording a hash into the blockchain of company XYZZY, nothing prevents me from doing the same thing but using the blockchain of company PLUGH.  If a dispute arises, we each point to the company we used and have exactly equal claims.

    I suppose for the NFTs now in play that doesn’t quite work, since the “artists” are saying the ownership records are with company XYZZY.

  108. 108.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    But again, anyone could do that with their own digital signature, establishing “ownership” to exactly the same extent.

    But only the one true chain of ownership will go back to a transaction signed by the original creator.

  109. 109.

    zhena gogolia

    I have a former student who’s somehow involved in bitcoin. We just agree to disagree (I mean we just agree she won’t try to explain it to me).

  110. 110.

    Starboard Tack

    @Roger Moore:

    I get it. How does one prove ownership? Is there an object in the same entry that is encrypted with the owner’s public key?

  112. 112.

    RSA

    @Ken: Ah, I hadn’t thought of those variations. Thanks.

    Because there are many popular blockchain systems around right now, I imagine it would be possible for an unscrupulous person to sell a singular NFT multiple times, on different systems

    ETA: … which you just mentioned in a follow-up comment.

  113. 113.

    Mike in NC

    @Geminid: We lived in NoVA when Virgil Goode was a Congressman and lobbyist for Big Tobacco. He was a Blue Dog Dem until he finally switched parties. Probably considered mainstream compared to current GQP.

  114. 114.

    Geminid

    @germy: An electrical pricing system discriminating against these data mining operations would rebalance the economics of this wasteful practice. This would not be hard to do. These folks can always pay for their own wind generators and photovoltaic farms, but those can be taxed if a public interest can be asserted.

    Similarly, a nickle or more tax per transaction on a securities  exchange would change the economics of computer trading, probably to the benefit of the real economy.

  115. 115.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ken: Ah, yeah, the artists would presumably have the final say in something like that. NFTs don’t actually solve the problem of provenance. But, XYZZY’s blockchain is timestamped, as is PLUGH’s, so that helps. (This is one of the reasons that everything is on Ethereum.)

  117. 117.

    Viva BrisVegas

    I suppose this is one way to redistribute wealth from the obscenely rich yet surprisingly gullible. However, I do think that taxation is probably more efficient.

    It was asked above if you would go to a museum to see exact copies. The answer is, how do you know you aren’t? Most of the old masters have passed through many private hands in the last few centuries, the provenance of these works is largely a matter of faith. As to authentication, that is a matter of consensus that generally forms around the opinion of one or two experts. Many of whom have been fooled by forgeries in the past.

    So maybe enjoy what you like and don’t worry too much about where it came from or the form it takes. Unless you are investing rather than appreciating. In which case caveat emptor.

  118. 118.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud: ​
     

    As I understand it, the blockchain is interconnected. Kind of like how multiple servers coordinate a consistent list of web addresses assigned to particular IP addresses.

    Yes and no. The idea is that anyone can get a copy of a particular blockchain, and they’ll all agree on what that chain says. But it’s possible to have multiple chains recording different stuff. Each cryptocurrency has its own blockchain. In theory, it’s possible to record different stories about digital ownership on different blockchains- one story on Bitcoin, a different one on Ethereum, and a third on Dogecoin. But if the chain of ownership has to go back to the original creator, that can only happen if the creator sells multiple tokens to the same object.

  120. 120.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    @dmsilev:”I am unaware of any such activity or operation – nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist.” ~ Apocalypse Now​​

  121. 121.

    Dan B

    @germy: The comments about this Cherokee County Sheriff are blowing up.  Also some local attorney and judge who posts dogwhistles on Facebook.  They’re getting fried on social media.  Good!

  122. 122.

    JaneE

    This sounds like a new take on what Veblen called conspicuous consumption. Except that what was being consumed back then was actually fungible money and at least some of what was purchased had at least nominal utility, if only using your hundreds to light cigars.

  123. 123.

    Ken

    @Roger Moore: But what if I claim that I was the original creator of the artifact?  I do this by copying the artifact, signing it with my digital signature, and sticking a record into a blockchain.  Oh, and this is on a blockchain I set up myself, running on virtual servers with their clocks turned back a month, so the blockchain records show that my signature was made three weeks before that of the so-called creator.

    I wonder, if someone actually tried this stunt, would it lead to an “emperor has no clothes” moment?

  124. 124.

    John S.

    Speaking as a product manager with a patent for a commercially functioning platform built on blockchain, I have to say this NFT business is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard of.

  125. 125.

    Just Chuck

    @Ken:

    There are already crypto algorithms thought to be quantum-resistant, including ECC, which even this very site is using (for the cert — the stream itself is doing AES128).

    Problem is we just don’t know for sure: quantum computing is such a new field that there’s almost certainly new discoveries to be made in terms of system architecture. The right one could be The Master Key, but what seems more likely is that quantum computers themselves will be able to generate even better quantum-resistant algorithms. And the nature of crypto is that you wouldn’t need anything close to as powerful of a computer to encrypt something as you would need to crack it.

    Heck, we can’t even prove for sure that classical crypto is bulletproof, at least until we can prove P != NP.  Which is probably the case, but it’s maddening to still not have a proof of that.

  129. 129.

    Bill Arnold

    It’s simultaneously money laundering, pay-to-play, and a pump and dump. Inspiring!— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) March 16, 2021

    Nice description of the NFT “markets” in one sentence.

  134. 134.

    Roger Moore

    @Starboard Tack: ​
     
    I think the basic idea of blockchain is that it’s used to prove transfer of ownership. So the transfer is signed by the previous owner to prove the transfer is valid and the new owner as proof of the identity of the new owner. I’m not sure the details of how NFTs get added to the chain originally. If I were designing the system, I’d have a third party sign as evidence they had verified the item’s provenance.

  135. 135.

    Baud

    OT Thank God Biden won Part ∞ +1.

    The Army has rejected an appeal to return medals for valor to retired Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, a Special Forces soldier former President Donald Trump pardoned for alleged murder in Afghanistan. It was one of three high-profile cases in which Trump interceded on behalf of troops accused of war crimes.
    The decision regarding Golsteyn, reached last June, was not announced by the Army in Trump’s final months as president but is revealed in documents released to USA TODAY. The Army also denied Golsteyn’s request to restore his Special Forces tab, marking his service as a member of an elite unit, and the letter of reprimand placed in his personnel file

  136. 136.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @zhena gogolia:

    the Frick

    Haven’t been to NYC in decades, but during the years I lived there I visited the Frick at least once a month. I have several favourite museums. The Frick might just be at the top of that list.

  137. 137.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @John S.: No one ever wants to step out and say, “yo this shit is really stupid”, particularly when it involves technology.

  139. 139.

    Jeffro

    @Mike in NC: I saw that!  I’d say ‘unbelievable’ but everything is believable with these lowlifes.

    Gosar knows he’s in the crosshairs of the 1/6 investigation already (same with Boebert).  They think that somehow not being two of the twelve ‘no’ votes will help them. I think not.

  142. 142.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Baud: People could have already been paying stupid money for badly drawn cartoons of cats. They weren’t.

  143. 143.

    Just Chuck

    @Ken:

    Oh, and this is on a blockchain I set up myself

    Which is a lot like a certificate of authenticity from a certification authority you created on your own.  The point of a blockchain is that everyone on the blockchain agrees that it’s the same blockchain and verifies that fact every time something is added to it (actually a majority, so a state actor could “take over” one of the smaller blockchains.  Bitcoin and Ethereum are unlikely to fall to that without a lot of people noticing.)

    ETA: And I see M4 beat me to it and even mentioned the same names.

  146. 146.

    Ken

    @Baud: Public digital ledgers are a useful technology, as is the blockchain method for implementing them.  The “mining” added to that by Bitcoin and others is stupid, since it deliberately slows the rate and increases the cost of clearing transactions.

  147. 147.

    Jeffro

    @Geminid: yer darn straight we’re gonna make him a 1-termer!  ;)

    He really is a complete nut job.  It just dawned on me that Good is – by far – the worst Representative I’ve ever had in my entire adult lifetime.

  148. 148.

    Geminid

    @Mike in NC: The  incumbent Congressman Good beat out for nomination was a Republican similar in politics to Goode. But a radical alliance of tea party types and political evangelicals were able to roll him through caucuses and a convention. Good worked at Liberty U., which I suspect has a political machine that they keep on the down low. The incumbent had officiated at the wedding of two of his campaign volunteers, both men. The bible thumpers took that especially hard.

    Virginia will have an independent redistricting commission that may make the Republican-drawn 5th district more neutral. The western boundary now runs along the Blue Ridge until it does an eastern jog around Lynchburg, leaving that Democratic city in the 6th District. Straightening out that kink would help a Democratic candidate.

    But the Commission may go big, and combine the northern halves of the Piedmont 5th and the Shenandoah Valley 6th into one compact district. The southern boundary of this district might be the James River.

  149. 149.

    Starboard Tack

    @Just Chuck:

    Which is a lot like a certificate of authenticity from a certification authority you created on your own.

    Like Rand Paul’s board certification.

  154. 154.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    I wonder, if someone actually tried this stunt, would it lead to an “emperor has no clothes” moment?

    Only for the specific chain this happened to.  The basic idea of a blockchain for use as a public ledger is technically sound, so people are unlikely to give up on it because some idiot thought he could forge NFTs by setting up his own blockchain.  There are some really bad ideas underlying cryptocurrencies, but the basic technology is not one of them.

  156. 156.

    There are those who call me...tim... (Still posh)

    Honestly. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, but most basic concepts I will, eventually, “get”. But this.  Explain it like I’m Michael Scott, age 5, until the cows turn blue, and I will never. Ever. Understand. What “it” actually “is”.

    Sleepy now.

  157. 157.

    Ken

    @Just Chuck: Which is a lot like a certificate of authenticity from a certification authority you created on your own.

    Oh, definitely. I’m just playing with ways around the claims made by NFTs, insofar as establishing ownership. The technology doesn’t of itself solve the problem, it still eventually relies on people agreeing “yes, this is the one valid way that we record ownership.”

  158. 158.

    Ken

    @Roger Moore: Agreed. I didn’t mean it might undermine the idea of blockchain or other public ledgers. Rather, could it make people question the idea that NFTs have some special properties that make them valuable, or at least worth $69 million.

  160. 160.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Just Chuck:

    Oh, and this is on a blockchain I set up myself

    Which is a lot like a certificate of authenticity from a certification authority you created on your own.

    So is this like Rand Paul certifying his own ophthalmology credentials by an ophthalmology board he himself created?

  161. 161.

    PsiFighter37

    @Geminid: It will be interesting to see how the VA independent commission plays out. But no matter what, I do think that both Luria and Spanberger should be shored up by having more natural district lines drawn, and VA-05 maybe becomes competitive. VA is already at a 7-4 D/R split, which, given its tilt, matches the statewide composition/vote pretty closely. Even if Democrats were to gerrymander the state in a manner that they do in Illinois, I don’t think they would get more than one more seat out of it. I could be wrong, though. I would protect what we have there more than trying to stretch, though – getting Spanberger and Luria meaningful tenure and making them increasingly harder to vote out would be great, because both of them are very good (I am partial to Spanberger, despite some of the ‘mean’ things she says about the Squad, etc.).

  162. 162.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @SiubhanDuinne: So is this like Rand Paul certifying his own ophthalmology credentials by an ophthalmology board he himself created?

    No, that’s blockhead, not blockchain.

  163. 163.

    Jeffro

    By the way, here’s the very definition of “rooting for injuries”: Tucker vs the former guy

    “…trumpov is no longer the guy simply throwing bombs from the outside, as he was in 2015. He’s the guy who has a legacy to defend, and he’s the guy who now has a political record that will need to be reframed over time to maintain the same support from his base.

    The problem is that there is a trumpov-like figure out there causing friction. He showed up on Fox News a few minutes later to host his own show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

    Carlson took over his regular slot on the network a few days after trumpov won the presidency in 2016. Since then, he’s been one of the less trumpov-obsequious hosts on the network, sufficiently confident in his own bomb-throwing that he has at times deviated from orthodoxy. There’s a reason that trumpov had a lot more interviews with Sean Hannity and the hosts of “Fox & Friends”: Their agenda was mostly whatever trumpov wanted to talk about. Carlson’s was at times only tangential to the president’s.

    Over the past few months, Carlson has engaged in the same sort of culture war stuff that has dominated on his network. But he has also stepped out to specifically encourage the sort of vaccine skepticism that’s now embraced by about half of the Republican men who tell pollsters that their favorite news source is Fox. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake walked through the line Carlson tries to balance on vaccines on Tuesday, showing how the host masks his obvious efforts to boost skepticism with a “just asking questions” veneer. Among his more regular guests is a former New York Times reporter who has revitalized his career by focusing on pandemic skepticism; he, like Carlson, serves largely to cast (broadly unfounded) doubt on the inoculations.”

    It’s weird but given Carlson’s anti-vax assholishness, I am actually…(gag)…rooting a little for the orange moron?  No…no, that can’t be…I’m just anti-Carlson…ugh…

  164. 164.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Jeffro:

    It’s weird but given Carlson’s anti-vax assholishness, I am actually…(gag)…rooting a little for the orange moron?  No…no, that can’t be…I’m just anti-Carlson…ugh…

    I read a similar article – maybe that one – and couldn’t figure out where Carlson differs from Trump.

  165. 165.

    Captain C

    @Roger Moore: So, kind of like if, say, the Mona Lisa was programmed into a Star Trek replicator by da Vinci rather than painted, so anyone could make one, but he only sold one “certificate of ownership” NFT so whoever had that could say they kinda-sorta owned the not-exactly-original, or something.  Like someone above said, a glorified receipt; one that contributes a lot more to human-induced climate change than a handwritten and notarized piece of paper.

  166. 166.

    slightly_peeved

    @Ken:

    The uselessness of NFTs, and Blockchain in general, is that any dispute over ownership must end up in a court and be resolved by a nation’s legal system. In which case NFTs and Blockchain, at their idealized best and neglecting all externalities, are inferior to a signed notarized contract scanned and stored in a OneDrive somewhere.

  167. 167.

    Starboard Tack

    @Jeffro:

    That’s a tough call. It’s like having to choose between an incessant whine and a flatulent walrus in a noise contest.

  169. 169.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    As I mentioned elsewhere, the thing that public ledgers are really good for is recording transfers of ownership.  Adding new items to the ledger will typically require some organization that has authority over those items to guarantee the new items are legitimate.  Their legitimacy in the system is only as good as the authority vouching for them.

    One of the interesting features of Bitcoin is the whole mining angle.  It’s a way of adding new coins to the ledger without requiring an external authority.  That’s an important part of its whole decentralized nature.

  171. 171.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @PsiFighter37: I do like Luria. We generally go back and forth between Democrats and Republicans in CD-2 because it’s (mostly) Virginia Beach and Norfolk and Norfolk will vote Democratic and Virginia Beach – until recently – is slightly Republican. I’m hoping we’ve turned the corner and CD-2 stays Democratic. The weird thing about Virginia is a generally genteel population who are by and large put off by someone like Trump. I worry with Trump no longer a factor, the suburbs will return to Republicans. And suburbs pretty much rule Virginia. Virginia Beach itself is a suburb created by white flight from Norfolk over the last 50 years.

  172. 172.

    Major Major Major Major

    @slightly_peeved:

    The uselessness of NFTs, and Blockchain in general, is that any dispute over ownership must end up in a court and be resolved by a nation’s legal system. In which case NFTs and Blockchain, at their idealized best and neglecting all externalities, are inferior to a signed notarized contract scanned and stored in a OneDrive somewhere.

    Come on now, that’s silly. Mathematically it’s trivially easy to demonstrate that you are the holder of a coin. Unless you mean something else by “dispute over ownership”.

  175. 175.

    slightly_peeved

    @Ken:

    The ease with which NFTs/Bitcoins are stolen, and the inability to retrieve stolen or lost NFTs/Bitcoins as a design feature, have established the nudity of the emperor pretty well already.

    It turns out 100% immutability is more of a detriment than a feature in most applications. Even, say, registers for transfer of ownership requires some method dealing with disputed land, forged documents, or someone not spelling a name right.

  178. 178.

    slightly_peeved

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I mean theft, or transfer in error. Someone else gets access to a wallet, and they are the owner. Get a number in the address wrong in a transfer, and the bitcoin is gone.

  179. 179.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ken:

    Existing research programs are shams, funded by the financial system to make sure nothing useful is ever produced.

    Existing research programs are not shams. And some of the funding is by sources/interests that cannot be named. (Physicists aren’t trained in coyness, so it’s fun to pry. :-) And the cryptocurrency community is quite paranoid about it too, though they … underestimate the vulnerabilities. :-)

    Also, NIST has had an active program leading development of QC-resistant cryptosystems. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography_Competition (And NIST has a bunch of good pages.)

  180. 180.

    Jeffro

    @Just Some Fuckhead:I worry with Trump no longer a factor, the suburbs will return to Republicans.

    True, but a) it was turning blue before trumpov, and b) the VA GQP is still gonna keep nominating nutballs for the foreseeable future.

    Even Smilin’ Ed Gillespie couldn’t help himself in the end and went right off the rails.  Literally right off the rails.

  181. 181.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    @Just Some Fuckhead: 

    my daughter and her husband and their twins to be born in May will be getting $12800 from the stimulus bill. If we’d have had that kinda support when we had the girl and boy, we may have had more kids than the girl and boy.

    Now that’s what I call Pro-life

  183. 183.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Jeffro:

    VA GQP is still gonna keep nominating nutballs for the foreseeable future.

    That’s the nut. The VA GQP is a fucking mess. Even so, I think it will take a few more elections to determine if we are staying in the blue state category.

    (I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank NOVA for their contribution.)

  184. 184.

    Ken

    @Major Major Major Major: Ah, but you don’t need an army to seize control of Bitcoin.  Just have more than some fraction of the servers — I forget if that fraction is 1/2 or 1/3 for their consensus algorithm.  I think a couple of years ago one consortium got close to that, but it would be more difficult now.

  185. 185.

    Ken

    @Bill Arnold: Existing research programs are not shams.

    I know. That was part of the conspiracy theory I was trying to start. But I guess that’s spoiled now…

  186. 186.

    PsiFighter37

    @Just Some Fuckhead:  On a statewide level, VA is blue. Even if they reverted back to the ‘soft corruption’ GOP types like McDonnell, I don’t think they would get elected anymore. I am interested to see whether this hypothesis holds true, though – the VA gubernatorial primary will be an interesting proxy. My take is that Terry Mac is going to run away with both the primary and general election.

  187. 187.

    Major Major Major Major

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I was thinking more along the lines of “a consumer product I bought” (or “a painting”, to stay on theme) than “land” or what have you. Even for land, the state’s coercive power only applies if the state chooses to use it. All property is a social construct.

    Like, what percent of property transfers are recorded by the state? 0.1%? Less?

  188. 188.

    Martin

    @Ken: That one doesn’t make sense for two reasons.

    1) There have been major breakthroughs in quantum computing in just the last few weeks.
    2) Banks aren’t that smart. They don’t know dick about encryption.

  189. 189.

    Geminid

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Democratic House  leaders must like Elaine Luria (VA-2) also, because they put her on the Armed Services Committee as a freshman. Luria is young, maybe 45 years old. Now that she has won her first reelection, Luria will likely serve 20 more years and end up as chairman of Armed Services. The Navy might name a ship after her when she retires, in gratitude for her defense of the shipbuilding budget.

    You are right about the crazy shape of the VA 5th District. I liken it to a brontosaurus with its feet planted on the North Carolina border. Its neck snakes through Charlottesville, and Fauquier County is it’s head, getting ready to eat Fredericksburg.

  192. 192.

    Martin

    California administered just under half a million vaccine doses yesterday. I’d suggest that CA alone might hit Biden’s 1M doses per day by 100 days, but I think we’d run out of people needing to be vaccinated before we could get there.

  194. 194.

    Geminid

    @PsiFighter37: Luria definitely is qualified for Armed Services. I just had the impression that freshmen did not usually get a seat on that committee, but that Democratic leadership wanted to keep that seat blue and made an exception. I may be wrong about this, though

  195. 195.

    slightly_peeved

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I think you’re low-balling the state’s involvement, especially once you look at more valuable property transfers and not, say, buying groceries.

    Even if the state isn’t recording the transfer, the transfer is conducted according to state-defined protocols (car registration, contracts, license rights) with the state as the resolver of any disputes as to ownership.

    With digital art in particular, state laws on reproduction and licensing seem like a big deal.

    (As a pedantic side note, there are a significant number of countries, and some US states and Canadian provinces, where 100% of land transfers are recorded by the government.)

  197. 197.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @something fabulous: Over the moon. We can’t even fathom their decision to have a kid – that turned out to be two – at this time. We certainly wouldn’t have done it at the age of 25. We had the first kid at the age of 27 and we were in financial dire straits. They bought a house less than a year ago and immediately set about having a kid. In the age of Covid no less, another deal-breaker had it been us. Whatever my daughter’s motivation, didn’t get it from me or the wife.

    My daughter wanted to be married, own a house and have kids and she did it, everything else be damned.

  198. 198.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @PsiFighter37: Yup, McAuliffe is going to be an interesting test case. I went into McAwful hating him and came out on the other side his biggest fan.

  199. 199.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Geminid:

    You are right about the crazy shape of the VA 5th District. I liken it to a brontosaurus with its feet planted on the North Carolina border. Its neck snakes through Charlottesville, and Fauquier County is it’s head, getting ready to eat Fredericksburg.

    No one will miss Fredericksburg.

  200. 200.

    Roger Moore

    @slightly_peeved: ​
     

    The ease with which NFTs/Bitcoins are stolen, and the inability to retrieve stolen or lost NFTs/Bitcoins as a design feature, have established the nudity of the emperor pretty well already.

    Yep. It turns out governments have some uses after all. Designing your financial system to completely exclude the government comes with some pretty serious drawbacks.

  201. 201.

    Mary G

    @Just Some Fuckhead: I didn’t have my own kids, but I want other people’s children to have a better country. Your daughter is part of why I worked so hard to get TFG out and Biden in and grateful to Georgia voters who eked out the Senate for us. That money and the ongoing child (credits/more money, not sure which) will make a huge difference in your family’s peace of mind.

  202. 202.

    Mike in NC

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Now wait a dang minute. We loved the art galleries and gift shops and even some of the restaurants in Fredericksburg. The Visitor Center was also interesting since it incorporated the part of the battlefield called Mary’s Heights, now a subdivision.

  203. 203.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Mary G:

     Your daughter is part of why I worked so hard to get TFG out and Biden in and grateful to Georgia voters who eked out the Senate for us. That money and the ongoing child (credits/more money, not sure which) will make a huge difference in your family’s peace of mind. 

    You made me verklempt.

  204. 204.

    Roger Moore

    @slightly_peeved: ​
     

    I think you’re low-balling the state’s involvement, especially once you look at more valuable property transfers and not, say, buying groceries.

    Even buying groceries has more government intervention than many people realize. For example, all the scales used by the supermarket have to be checked by the government to make sure they are giving an honest weight. And that’s ignoring stuff like nutritional labels and FDA regulations on cheese production.

  205. 205.

    Mary G

    The jerk on the gurney looks familiar, not sure who he reminds me of:

    San Francisco, California

    My heart literally can’t ?

    An Elderly Asian woman survived an attack by defense sending her attacker to the hospital.

    I am so glad she was able to fend him off but it’s is so gutting that she had to

    WOW! FUCK YOUR RACISM ??
    pic.twitter.com/2N68OKmFek
    — StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) March 18, 2021

    ?

  206. 206.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Mike in NC: Fredericksburg is just a place we drive through to get somewhere else. :) If you like battlefields, look at the ones around southeast Richmond.

  210. 210.

    Mary G

    @Geminid: She’s a navy veteran representing a district that includes part of Norfolk, where the world’s largest naval station is. It’s rated R+3 by Cook.

    (Wiki) In the November 6, 2018 election, Democrat Elaine Luria defeated Republican Scott Taylor. It is now considered one of Virginia’s most competitive congressional districts.

    I wrote a bunch of postcards to voters for her in 2018 when she squeaked in, and she won more comfortably last fall by 51-44. She’s on the conservative side, was cheering on Abigail Spanberger when she picked a fight with AOC over messaging like “defund the police,” but she votes the right way. Smart of Nancy SMASH to put her in that committee.

  212. 212.

    slightly_peeved

    @Roger Moore: 

    All true. And most pertinently to bitcoin and NFTs, try and take stuff from the grocery store without paying and see how quickly the state gets involved.

  213. 213.

    Roger Moore

    @slightly_peeved:

    And most pertinently to bitcoin and NFTs, try and take stuff from the grocery store without paying and see how quickly the state gets involved.

    For that matter, just try paying with a non-approved currency and see how well it works.

  217. 217.

    Another Scott

    @Starboard Tack: Sounds like an old library tautology that goes something like:

    Is the index book of the library of all the world’s knowledge contained in that library?

    IOW, if I have N books, then make a book that indexes all those books, then I have N+1 books so the index book isn’t correct.  So I need a new index book.  Repeat, repeat…

    :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  218. 218.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Mary G:

    I wrote a bunch of postcards to voters for her in 2018 when she squeaked in, and she won more comfortably last fall by 51-44. 

    Thank you! As I mentioned earlier, VA CD-2 bounces back and forth because Virginia Beach is the largest population area in CD-2 and it’s a white flight suburb. Things look to be changing, as Biden was the first Democrat to carry Virginia Beach since LBJ.

  220. 220.

    Starboard Tack

    @Another Scott:

    It would just need a recursive reference in the book to the book. The referring object would also be the base case. You might need a check to avoid infinite recursion.

  221. 221.

    James E Powell

    @debbie:

    What would they have it called?

    TrueAmerican® Patriots crying out for justice in a peaceful demonstration that was hijacked by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. A majority of Republican voters believe this has been established as fact.

  225. 225.

    Roger Moore

    @Starboard Tack:

    Yeah, the classic is something like the library has two indices.  One is a book that lists all the books that include themselves in their index and one is for books that don’t include themselves in their index.  Should the index of books that don’t include themselves in their index include itself or not?

  226. 226.

    Jay

    @Yutsano:

    once the adrenaline hits,…..

    it gets tough.

    I have had to fight back the temptation to curb the assholes.

    I am only allowed to use reasonable force, which does not include breaking stuff.

  231. 231.

    Dan B

    @Yutsano: The video shows the cops talking her back as she is screaming at the guy on the stretcher.  She picks up the board she beat him with and waves it around.  There is no question she’s ready to put him in the hospital for a long time.

  233. 233.

    Amir Khalid

    @Roger Moore:
    I’ve never seen a McRib. They’re not sold in markets like Malaysia, where McDonald’s is all-halal. What we get here is the Prosperity Burger, a seasonal item offered between Christmas and Chinese New Year: available with beef, chicken, and now fish.

  234. 234.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Amir Khalid: That looks just like a McRib. Does it come with pickles?

    FYI, for the gluten-intolerant, the McRib is probably safe without the bun. The sauce uses modified food starch but in the US, wheat must be called out in modified food starch as “modified food starch (wheat)”. On the other hand, McDonald’s hamburgers actually use wheat in the burger.

  235. 235.

    Jinchi

    @Chetan Murthy: ​
     

    Suppose a “museum” fills its collection with such copies of famous paintings: The Mona Lisa, A Starry Night, etc. Suppose that musem is close by. Would you go to that museum to see these works, instead of going all the way to see the originals?

    I’m not sure if this is common practice for artworks, but this is definitely done at natural history museums.

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/30/what-exhibits-in-a-museum-are-genuine

  237. 237.

    Denali

    The thing about standing in front of an original is the sense of closeness to the artist, even if he/she is long gone. That is what cannot be reproduced. The original colors may have faded or need cleaning- nearly all originals have to be retouched after a period of time. I have just discovered that Rockwell Kent left all his paintings to museums in Russia, due to the McCarthy witchhunts of his time, and it is a great loss not be able to see them here(not planning a trip to Russia anytime soon). Thank goodness there has been a book that documents his landscapes and thank goodness for my local library!

Comments are closed.