Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

This fight is for everything.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

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

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Everybody saw this coming.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Friday Evening Open Thread: The Eternal Fantasy of An Elite Haven

Friday Evening Open Thread: The Eternal Fantasy of An Elite Haven

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That $ART tag made me suspicious, so I checked the associated website — sure enough, “We use a social token called $ART to enable our community’s decentralized and autonomous governance”.

What’s a social token? — why, it’s the Next Massive Crypto Trend! :

Cryptocurrency isn’t going anywhere soon with the next biggest craze after NFTs being social tokens.

So what are social tokens? These are a type of cryptocurrency that is based around a brand, community, or influencer. Basically, it’s a way for internet groups or celebrities to further monetize themselves beyond the typical means…

Either @MoreWoke is planning to scam a bunch of ‘artistic’ innocents, or he’s about to get scammed by less gullible Kree8tivs who know more about the long history of ‘we’re gonna run away and build our own utopia!’ failures. Quite possibly both!

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163Comments

  4. 4.

    RoonieRoo

    Clovis?  Oh boy.  This should be fun to watch.  I am very familiar with Clovis and this is definitely not going to go how they think it will.

  10. 10.

    RSA

    “I would be totally successful, if not for the Man keeping me down.”
    “I’ll help you escape, brother.”

    It’s the American dream.

  15. 15.

    Roger Moore

    @Alison Rose:

    I still don’t understand cryptocurrency and I’m okay with that.

    This is a very sensible attitude.  I understand a fair bit about the technology, but mostly so I could argue with cryptocurrency fanatics from a position of actual knowledge.  It’s a terrible idea being used for awful purposes.

  16. 16.

    germy

    White House press secretary Jen Psaki will throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals' game Sunday.— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 16, 2021

  17. 17.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Josie: There is no doubt that the people using it, don’t understand its properties.  By which I mean: “sure, you might even understand the low-level tech, the algorithms, protocols, let’s even say you understand and can maintain the *code*.  But that doesn’t mean you understand the economic and social implications.”  These yutzes truly have no idea what they’re fucking around with.

  18. 18.

    Barbara

    @Kent: Wasn’t there a town in NH that also tried this? Apparently, things went sideways when they started receiving a lot of ursine visitors and not everybody’s libertarian responses were compatible.

  22. 22.

    germy

    @dr. bloor:

    You beat me to it.  I was trying to formulate a joke about Doocy, but all I could come up with was the image of the ball bouncing off his noggin.

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    @Alison Rose: It’s simple, really.

    Digiconomist:

    Bitcoin now negating a decade of progress in deploying electric vehicles June 27, 2021 Latest, Sustainability

    “The total Bitcoin carbon footprint exceeds the total greenhouse gas emission reductions of electric vehicles (51.9 Mt CO2 in 2020) as reported by the International Energy Agency’s EV Outlook 2021.” This was noted in a new article titled “The true costs of digital currencies: Exploring impact beyond energy use” released in the science journal One Earth on June 18, 2021. The article is a collaboration between Digiconomist, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Lena Klaaßen and Christian Stoll and primarily urges “the adoption of a more comprehensive view in assessing the externalities of investments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”

    Despite the focus on other aspects than the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the previous is a painful observation for governments around the world that have invested billions in electric vehicles trying to make the roads “greener”. In particular, the article focuses on Tesla’s contribution to Bitcoin’s environmental impact. The electric car company started accepting Bitcoin earlier this year, only to stop doing so 50 days later. Additionally, the company bought around 43,000 Bitcoins (of which it has sold 10%). The article quantifies how the carbon footprint of only holding these Bitcoins negates 4% of Tesla’s annual carbon emission savings. As Elon Musk recently tweeted the company may reconsider accepting Bitcoin transactions in the future, this would further push up the company’s Bitcoin-related emissions to account for.

    […]

    Beyond energy

    Meanwhile, as also argued in the new One Earth article, investors shouldn’t forget about the network’s impact beyond the carbon footprint associated with energy use. It is noted the “entire network generates as much electronic waste as a country like Luxembourg does annually, which results in an electronic waste footprint of almost 135 g of equipment (equivalent to the weight of an iPhone 12 mini) per transaction processed on the Bitcoin network.” No amount of renewable energy can ever address this. Similarly, other aspects like grid-stability and the network’s impact on the global semiconductor supply chain shouldn’t be overlooked either. For details on these and others aspects check out the full paper here (free to access up until August 5, 2021).

    Cryptocurrency is speculation, and it’s destroying the planet.

    HTH! ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  27. 27.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Alison Rose:  Imagine a pie.  Now imagine that people think your imaginary pie is money.  Now imagine that people are paying real money for smaller and smaller pieces of the imaginary pie.  It’s kind of like that but dumber.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I suspect most of the people using it don’t really understand the tech, either.  For example, lots of people think it’s untraceable, when every transaction is recorded on a theoretically unforgeable public ledger.  Yes, the transactions are pseudonymous, but you can still be identified when you put money into our take money out of the system.

  31. 31.

    Gin & Tonic

    @germy: If she throws it into Pete Doocy’s face, the stadium will sell out

    ETA: I see I’m way late with the Doocy jokes.

  33. 33.

    trollhattan

    Every virtual crypto Quatloo will be spent trucking NFT water to this desert Clusterfuckberg. (NFT water is an ipad loaded with photos of water.)

  34. 34.

    Brachiator

    More conventional elite insanity. From NPR

    $73,499-Per-Guest World Cruise Sells Out In Less Than 3 Hours

    A 132-night “world cruise” sold out in under three hours, despite pandemic worries that have hobbled the cruise industry and steep prices that start at $73,499 per guest — and range up to $199,999 per person for a master suite.

    Regent Seven Seas Cruises released the fares for sale at 8:30 a.m. ET Thursday. By 11 a.m., all the spots had been snapped up by people eager to spend more than four months on a cruise ship. The strong interest may be a positive sign for the cruise industry as it tries to rebound from the pandemic.

    The voyage, which will span 34,500 nautical miles, includes 66 ports of call, as the Seven Seas Mariner will visit 31 countries and four continents. Passengers will also see 61 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

    The epic round-trip cruise will depart from Miami in January 2024. The company also has round-the-world cruises slated for 2022 and 2023, but it says the tickets for its 2024 trip sold out faster than for any other year.

  36. 36.

    Citizen Alan

    @Kent:

    “the guy in charge [of Galt’s Gulch] is a sociopath and a con man.”

    What, did none of them read the fucking book?

  38. 38.

    Kelly

    @germy:White House press secretary Jen Psaki will throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ game Sunday

    and will bean Fox’s Peter Dooc

     

    eta: and this was obvious to many of us

  44. 44.

    Captain C

    @Alison Rose: The best description I’ve seen was roughly “imagine if idling your car all night produced solved sudokus that you could use to buy heroin.”

  47. 47.

    James E Powell

    @Baud:

    We should form a community in the desert.

    Why does it have to be the desert? Can’t we find an island with a hollowed out mountain somewhere? Some serious made scientist place? I’m willing to be a henchman if the hours aren’t too onerous.

  48. 48.

    Raoul Paste

    @Omnes Omnibus: Monaco is a haven, and there is so much money there that you will never see a gum wrapper on the street.  We encountered a number of stores, and a park, that were for members only

  49. 49.

    Kent

    @Citizen Alan: Yep.  I mean seriously.  Who wants to actually go in on a communal project with a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies.  Who, by definition are going to be a bunch of sociopaths.

  50. 50.

    dmsilev

    @Alison Rose:

    I still don’t understand cryptocurrency and I’m okay with that.

    Think of it as a teaching tool, demonstrating to a new generation of suckers why financial regulations exist.

  51. 51.

    Bupalos

    It’s appropriate to point and laugh here but I’ll just go ahead and poop in the punchbowl by noting that all y’all on here who are like “I ran away from Wisconsin or Ohio to Boston or DC I AM VERY SMART” kindasorta did a version of this even if it was way more (short-term) viable than $hart is going to be.

    #stayandfightyoupussies

  52. 52.

    debbie

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I read it. I know mining is about computers doing complex mathematical calculations; I just don’t understand how that creates a currency. I doubt I ever will understand this.

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    @debbie: The very simple explanation for any sort of crypto (whether it’s data encryption or the basis of cryptocurrency) is that multiplying, say, 102,563 and 946,223 to get 97,047,469,549 is computationally easy. Starting with the number 97,047,469,549 and trying to determine its factors is computationally very difficult. If multiple people are working on factoring 97,047,469,549, and whoever gets it right gets a prize, that’s the essence of Bitcoin “mining.”

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Bupalos: ​
    Oh, go blow a goat. If you can’t see the difference between moving to an existing place that is a better fit and trying to create one from scratch, I doubt we can help you.

    Sincerely,
    A Wisconsin resident.

  57. 57.

    Chetan Murthy

    @debbie: That’s actually pretty easy.  Ignore the tech completely.  Focus on this one design rule for all these cryptocurrency systems: they are designed to produce new “coins” at a fixed rate, to mint new “blocks” (full of transactions) at a fixed rate.  So if there are more miners spending kWh to try to mine the next block, that doesn’t change that the rate of block production is fixed.  Since you get paid if you successfully produce a block that other miners accept, this means that, the more miners there are, the less you get paid (on average).  But more miners equals more energy consumed.

    So in a counterfactual where people didn’t flock to set up mining rigs (so only a few miners), BTC could be, y’know, less energy-wasteful, while still minting blocks just like today.  The problem is, that those few miners would get paid.  So other miners would want in.  You can see how this goes downhill to where we are today.

    Again: it’s a design rule of these cryptocurrency systems, to behave this way, and the *details*of how they achieve this are …. mere details.  This is a great example of how a person can understand intimately the code/algo/etc of these systems, but not understand what will happen In Real Life.

  58. 58.

    James E Powell

    @Roger Moore:

    A guy I respect for his skills not related to blockchain technology or cryptocurrency has become convinced they are the future we’ve all been waiting for. He directed me to this Anatha guy who has several videos that purport to explain what crypto is and why it’s so cool.

    Spoiler alert: the videos do not explain that. They are filled with the kind of vague but important sounding language one gets from every multi-level marketing scheme. Freedom, empowerment, no longer slaves to the Man! It will be great! Act now or you will be left behind!

    I’m not interested in the crypto but the website has photos of a volcano, a woman looking at mountains, and more, so maybe I should be.

  59. 59.

    dexwood

    @debbie:  I doubt I’ll ever care about understanding cryptocurrency.

    A creative utopia in Clovis? Oh, man, will they ever get an education. Stay out of Albuquerque, assholes.

  60. 60.

    dmsilev

    @Gin & Tonic: There’s a decent chance that quantum factorization algorithms will be actually feasible in the next ten years. Won’t that be fun for everyone?

    Actual cryptography should be fine; there’s been a lot of work in developing algorithms that aren’t susceptible to attack by a bunch of physicists standing around in a circle chanting ‘entanglement!’, but anything based purely on factorization could be in for a world of hurt.

  61. 61.

    CaseyL

    Aside from the usual problems with trying to create a customized utopia – in a desert, no less – these folks never think they’re the ones who will have to keep the place clean, the water potable, and the sewage processed.*

    *Assuming their plan isn’t simply to cart nightsoil out of town and dump it in the desert.  (I’m sure NM and BLM will love that.) In which case, who’s going to have the honor of doing the collecting, carting, and dumping?

    ETA: And even septic systems are a little more complicated than, “Dig a hole and fill it with shit.”

  63. 63.

    dmsilev

    @Chetan Murthy: Another issue: By design, the total number of bitcoins that can ever exist is fixed. It is thus an inherently deflationary currency. Running any sort of economy off such a currency would be Bad.

    (it’s actually worse than that. As people lose their ‘wallets’ because a disk failed or they forgot the password or whatever, those coins are gone from circulation. So, over time, the total pool of bitcoins available to circulate  is bound to get smaller.)

  65. 65.

    Chetan Murthy

    @debbie:

    I just don’t understand how that creates a currency.

    Again, this can be understood without actually knowing anything about the tech.  In this case:

    1. imagine a bunch of guys (let’s call them “accountants”) who decide that they will mint a new currency.
    2. they decide that they’ll get together every 15min on a con-call, and decide who gets the mint the next coin.
    3. And of course, the coins are unforgeable — say they’re numbered.
    4. They also manage who owns each coin, again on this call.
    5. Don’t worry about how they manage to agree — that’s a technical detail.
    6. Somehow, they convince somebody to exchange ownership of a coin, say for $1, with the promise that they can exchange it back for whatever the going rate is for coin, and they can transfer that coin to others, using the accountants to record who owns the coin.  Again, remember that coins are numbered.
    7. Did I mention that the “somebody” identifies himself with a public key?  So no need to actually be flesh-and-blood.  Or a decent person.
    8. At this point, we have a “hawala” system.  Guy#1 can convert $1 into coin, then transfer it to Guy#2 (electronically), and Guy#2 can convert that coin back into [whatever the going rate is for $1] in a different place, by going to an accountant in that other place and presenting his coin.

    As you can see, at no point did a bank get involved.  So in principle, Guy#1, Guy#2 have an untraceable way of moving money around, worldwide.

    How do these accountants manage to agree on who owns which coins?  And how do they do it when in fact, anybody can become an accountant at any time?  That’s all part of how the “mining” process works.  But really, you don’t need to understand that, to understand how it works.

    The truth is, that the reason this “coin” is convertible with dollars/yen/yuan/whatever, is that there are people who are willing to accept coin in exchange for dollars.  Period.  Those people are either criminals, or idiots who think they’re speculating, when what they’re really doing, is greasing the rails of those criminals.  You need a lot of innocuous activity, to hide the criminals’ transactions, eh?  B/c, oh, I forgot, the accountants publish their accounting-books continuously.  All the trans are public.  So the only thing that makes it “untraceable” is that the people transacting are identified by public keys.  But that sort of stuff isn’t really enough to prevent being found out, for lots of reasons.

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Alison Rose: I’m pretty sure the reason you can’t understand most applications of it is that there’s nothing to understand because they don’t make a lot of sense.

  68. 68.

    trollhattan

    @CaseyL: ETA: And even septic systems are a little more complicated than, “Dig a hole and fill it with shit.”

    Yup. For starters they require water from flushing toilets, an interesting proposition in a remote desert “community.”

  73. 73.

    debbie

    @Chetan Murthy:

    But that sort of stuff isn’t really enough to prevent being found out, for lots of reasons.

    Which is why I don’t understand why people keep using it. People are nuts.

  74. 74.

    Roger Moore

    @debbie:

    I read it. I know mining is about computers doing complex mathematical calculations; I just don’t understand how that creates a currency. I doubt I ever will understand this.

    The problem isn’t that you’re too dumb to understand how it works; the problem is you haven’t drunk the Kool-aid.  There is really no reason why Bitcoin are a good choice for a currency any more than Beanie Babies or Pokemon trading cards.  They’re a made up token that a bunch of people have decided are valuable, and their collective delusion has sucked more and more people in.

  76. 76.

    artem1s

    These people are seriously stoopid.  Have they never heard of Company Towns?  I guess they are becoming a thing again though.

    In 2021, the governor of Nevada, Steve Sisolak, announced a plan to launch so-called “Innovation Zones” in Nevada to attract technology firms. The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services. The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature. Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address on January 19. By allowing tech corporations to establish their own governments, the plan is hoped bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the state cutting taxes or paying economic rent that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.

    In March 2021, Elon Musk announced plans to incorporate the Boca Chica area of far southeastern Texas, the site of a SpaceX rocket manufacturing and launch facility, as the city of “Starbase”. Some commentators have labelled that planned incorporation, and SpaceX’s existing operations in the area, as an example of a company town.

  78. 78.

    dmsilev

    @Matt McIrvin: Classical algorithms that are quantum-proof aren’t too bad. It’s outside of my area of expertise, but as I understand it, they’re more annoying and expensive than the standard techniques we’ve been using for a while, but it’s a difference in degree, not a massive shift.
    Actual quantum communications is a very different question and will involve fundamentally different hardware; it’s not coming soon to your web browser.

  79. 79.

    Chetan Murthy

    @debbie: An economist would tell you [correctly] that if there’s a payout of $N for solving some puzzle [which in the case of cryptocurrency is otherwise pointless] then people will spend up to $N-1 to get that payout.  In aggregate,  I mean.  So yeah, as long as enough miners out there are profiting, then some yutz will think to himself “I’ll get in on this, and profit too”.  And thereby, he decreases the *profit* for all, b/c the payout remains fixed, while the amount of money spent increases (by the amount this yutz is spending).

  82. 82.

    Roger Moore

    @James E Powell: ​
     
    Blockchain is an interesting technology, and applying it to make a public ledger is a nice application. But the stuff to take that good idea and turn it into a currency is utter bullshit. I understand that libertarians really, really want to find a way to create a currency that isn’t controlled by the government, but this is as terrible an idea as the rest of the things the libertarians want to take away from government control.

  84. 84.

    Chetan Murthy

    @debbie:

    People are nuts.

    Well, perhaps you remember the bank heist from the Central Bank of Bangladesh’s account at the Fed?  That didn’t involve bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency (that I know of).  Even the regular old banking system, with all its accounting, and regulations and all, can be used by criminals to move money around faster than the regulators can catch up.  Combine that with “until recently, the Feds weren’t cracking down”, and, well, you can imagine how weak-minded people [even extremely clever techs can be weak in the head about the real world] could be fooled into thinking they’d get away with it.  And they make up stories for themselves, for why what they’re doing is completely legal.  Y’know, like Uber/Airbnb investors *grin*.

  85. 85.

    FlyingToaster

    @Baud:

    We should form a community in the desert.

    By definition, that would be too far away from the Willow™, and therefore unsuitable.

    Also, you’re forgetting that those of use in the People’s Republic of San Francisco, the People’s Republic of Cambridge, and most of the state of Vermont have already done this.  And other than Vermont, look how things ended up…

  86. 86.

    Another Scott

    @debbie:

    See #44, as OO said. Or, Digiconomist:

    What kind of work are miners performing?

    New sets of transactions (blocks) are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain roughly every 10 minutes by so-called miners. While working on the blockchain these miners aren’t required to trust each other. The only thing miners have to trust is the code that runs Bitcoin. The code includes several rules to validate new transactions. For example, a transaction can only be valid if the sender actually owns the sent amount. Every miner individually confirms whether transactions adhere to these rules, eliminating the need to trust other miners.

    The trick is to get all miners to agree on the same history of transactions. Every miner in the network is constantly tasked with preparing the next batch of transactions for the blockchain. Only one of these blocks will be randomly selected to become the latest block on the chain. Random selection in a distributed network isn’t easy, so this is where proof-of-work comes in. In proof-of-work, the next block comes from the first miner that produces a valid one. This is easier said than done, as the Bitcoin protocol makes it very difficult for miners to do so. In fact, the difficulty is regularly adjusted by the protocol to ensure that all miners in the network will only produce one valid block every 10 minutes on average. Once one of the miners finally manages to produce a valid block, it will inform the rest of the network. Other miners will accept this block once they confirm it adheres to all rules, and then discard whatever block they had been working on themselves. The lucky miner gets rewarded with a fixed amount of coins, along with the transaction fees belonging to the processed transactions in the new block. The cycle then starts again.

    The process of producing a valid block is largely based on trial and error, where miners are making numerous attempts every second trying to find the right value for a block component called the “nonce“, and hoping the resulting completed block will match the requirements (as there is no way to predict the outcome). For this reason, mining is sometimes compared to a lottery where you can pick your own numbers. The number of attempts (hashes) per second is given by your mining equipment’s hashrate. This will typically be expressed in Gigahash per second (1 billion hashes per second).

    tl;dr – Do lots and lots of calculations trying to guess some random number that satisfies various rules, faster than anyone else. If you aren’t fast enough, start over.

    HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  87. 87.

    Roger Moore

    @debbie:

    And since it’s not as lucrative because too many are doing the same thing, they keep doing it?

    It isn’t lucrative, but one can make a small profit on the transaction.  At least that’s what one would expect based on standard market economics.  The basic problem is that 6.25 Bitcoin, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $200K at current exchange rates, are being created every 10 minutes.  The primary expenses in producing those Bitcoin are computing resources, so computers, space for those computers, and electricity to keep those computers running.  Assuming, as a rough guess, that half the total cost goes into electricity that costs $0.05/kWh, that means bitcoin mining would be expected to consume about 12 GW.  That estimate may be off in either direction by a small multiplier, but it should give a good idea of the general scale of Bitcoin mining.

  88. 88.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Roger Moore:

    Blockchain is an interesting technology, and applying it to make a public ledger is a nice application.

    True.  And it was all figured-out by Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Brian Oki, and others, back in the 80s-90s.  [Google “Paxos”]  By the year 2000, it was “old technology”.  The basis of many of Google’s distributed systems, including Spanner.  The only difference between Spanner and blockchain, is that Google doesn’t publish the log.  Otherwise, basically every distributed/replicated database has a “blockchain” at its heart.

    P.S. OK, one other difference: in blockchain, blocks are hash-chained to each other, so you can’t corrupt a block in the log; in databases, they don’t do that.  But there’s no good reason why they couldn’t — it’d be a minor change at most.

  89. 89.

    MomSense

    @Kent:

    I think similar assholes ran the same experiment in NH.  Ended up with the water supply contaminated by sewerage.

  90. 90.

    PAM Dirac

    @persistentillusion: I was going to say I think she would be more clever than just beaning him. I see her throwing a big hook that starts at his head and after he jumps 10 feet out of the batter’s box whimpering in fear, it breaks right over the heart of the plate and everyone laughs at him

  91. 91.

    Chetan Murthy

    @MomSense:

    Ended up with the water supply contaminated by sewerage.

    One of the necessary problems with libertarianism is that they dismiss the difficulty of acquiring expertise, and the necessity of that expertise to run anything other than the most primitive society.  There’s a reason we want the government to standardize weights and measures, to regulate pollutants, etc: b/c each of us cannot afford to do the work ourselves to ensure that we’re not getting cheated/poisoned, and if we hired some third party to do that job, we’d *still* have to do the work to ensure that that third party wasn’t cheating us.  Viz. the Champlain Towers condo board vs. the condo owners: how are the owners supposed to know that the condo board was falling down on its duties?  It’s complicated stuff!

  93. 93.

    Elizabelle

    @Kent:   I love the Atlas Mugged title.  That could be a blog, with recurring examples.  Will read the Vice article.

    Quel surprise.

  96. 96.

    Chetan Murthy

    @debbie:

    There’s enough of an honor system

    Not an honor system.  Each block has to contain the hash of the previous block (which contains the hash of the previous block, etc): hence the term “block CHAIN”.  Which means that once enough other miners accept the new block, any miners that don’t accept it, are doing work that can never [with caveats] lead to getting paid. So they have an *economic incentive* to stop working on the block before them, accept the new block, and start working on the NEXT block after that.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I think the core problem with libertarians is that they are great at lying to themselves.  They truly, desperately want to believe that life is simple and we can solve all our problems by just letting people do as they please and letting the market sort it out.  So they’ll happily ignore any evidence to the contrary.  This kind of thing permeates every aspect of libertarian thought.  Their need to believe trumps any kind of knowledge or experience.

  98. 98.

    Richard

    @RoonieRoo: i am not familiar with Clovis but i also live in desert America. We have seen this scam 100s of times. Let’s put it this way- it will be a life changing experience.

  100. 100.

    MomSense

    @James E Powell:

    I’ve got the perfect place picked out.  It’s near a National Monument.  Room for us to spread out (I think we are a need our own space kind of people), mountains, rivers, lakes, and ocean a short drive away.

  101. 101.

    Roger Moore

    @debbie: ​
     

    There’s enough of an honor system that others discard their blocks and start over? smh.

    There’s a system to enforce this. Basically, there’s an agreement that the longest chain is the one that counts. So it’s better to start with the most recent completed block rather than try to work from the previous one. In any case, the way the system works, you have to start over every time a new transaction comes along anyway.

  102. 102.

    Kayla Rudbek

    Since this is an open thread:

    Lazy vegan ice cream pie recipe (caramel almond brittle variation, as inspired by Lauren Ko’s Pieometry)

    3 cups Ben & Jerry’s nondairy caramel almond brittle ice cream
    One chocolate cookie pie crust (store bought)
    1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut 

    Microwave each pint of ice cream for 30 seconds to soften the ice cream.  Spread softened ice cream into pie crust. Sprinkle shredded coconut on top of the ice cream. Cover the pie and freeze for about six hours (three hours should be sufficient).

    For next time, try also sprinkling chocolate chips onto the ice cream…

  103. 103.

    Morzer

    Speaking of libertarian paradises that weren’t:

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling

    It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.

  106. 106.

    jnfr

    I lived in an intentional community in the 70s, on a farm in the Ozarks. It was hard, and fun, and a lot of work, and definitely not elite.

    It’s still there, too.

  107. 107.

    PsiFighter37

    Hard to believe our week in Maine is almost done. Time goes quite slow while simultaneously fast while at home, but on vacation, time only moves quickly with a toddler. Tomorrow is our last full day – seeing some good friends coming up from Boston for the first time in-person in a couple years.

    Then it’s back to the airport Sunday and back to NYC. Things will stay relatively exciting, I suppose, if spending loads of money counts towards that – our date for closing on the apartment is just about set (in less than 2 weeks), and once that is done and dusted, I go off to the exciting environs of Northern New Jersey to pick up our hybrid SUV. Last but not least, we still have to speak to our renovation firm and finalize our renovation designs so we can put together our alteration application for approval as well. I feel like this is our last major milestone for some time…it really does feel like my wife and I are just going through the motions and grinding at this point. We really need ‘us’ time, and there’s been little to none of that. Frankly put, our physical condition both speak to that – we have both definitely gained weight this year, so I think neither of us have been putting our well-being at the forefront of our thoughts at all.

  109. 109.

    MomSense

    @PsiFighter37:

    Try and be gentle with yourselves and each other.  Having a child changes everything.  It’s stressful, confusing, and exhausting.  And you did this during a pandemic when the baseline uncertainty was extreme.  Please try and honor yourselves for doing all this in the actual worst of times.
    On a personal note, I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you.  One of my waaay undervalued skills is being a baby whisperer.  Next time you’re in Maine, let me know.

  111. 111.

    Geminid

    @Delk: Clovis is not exactly in the desert, but that may just be a matter of time. Norman Petty had a recording studio there in the 1950’s, where Buddy Holly recorded his first hit, “That’ll be the Day.”

    Buddy Holly’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas is 100 miles southeast of Clovis. Santa Rosa, New Mexico, home of the Comet II restaurant, is 100 miles northwest. And Roswell, New Mexico is 130 miles  to the southwest.

  112. 112.

    different-church-lady

    Basically, it’s a way for internet groups or celebrities to further monetize themselves beyond the typical means

    Now that ain’t working… That’s the way you do it…

  113. 113.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Not a city but my first thought was the Fyre Festival. No big sad about peeps spending thousands of dollars for FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches.

  117. 117.

    different-church-lady

    I used to think people were dumb as rocks. Now I’m pretty sure the rocks have the upper hand.

  121. 121.

    Another Scott

    A good thread.

    There's been a lot of talk about inflation, especially on days like today when we get consumer-price index data.

    The top driver of price increases right now is cars. I know a few things about the auto industry, so let's look under the hood at what's going on with inflation. 1/

    — Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) July 13, 2021

    (Beyer owns several car dealerships.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  122. 122.

    burnspbesq

    @Chetan Murthy:

    The one point you forgot to mention in your otherwise excellent description is that if you’re the holder of a coin that you bought from Guy #1, and Guy #2 tells you to GFY when you try to redeem it for real money, you have no legal recourse against Guy #1, Guy #2, or anyone else.

    Which is the non-legal-mumbo-jumbo way of saying that the coin isn’t legal tender, and is backed by the full faith and credit of nobody.

  124. 124.

    Alison Rose

    @Kayla Rudbek: I am…………..not a fan of coconut. Love the smell, hate the taste/texture. I tried one of the non-dairy versions of B&J, don’t recall which one, and it seems like an acquired taste.

    Not meaning to (literally) yuck your yum or anything, though :)

  125. 125.

    James E Powell

    I just now saw on twitter that some dick-less piece of shit judge in Texas ruled DACA unconstitutional. We really need to win the midterms. Big time.

  126. 126.

    trollhattan

    This fuckin’ guy.

    “I want everyone in South Carolina and across America to know I have Chick fil-A’s back. I hope we don’t have to, but I will go to war for the principles Chick fil-A stands for.”

    — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), responding to University of Notre Dame students opposing an effort to open a Chick-fil-A on campus.

    https://politicalwire.com/2021/07/16/quote-of-the-day-2938/

    Can Pompeo take time from his busy schedule and show Lindsay on a map where South Bend is? “Now senator, this is your state, and this is Indiana. Can you say it with me? ‘Ayeun, dee, Anna.'”

  128. 128.

    stinger

    Funny — I was cleaning out old emails this afternoon and came across a Balloon Juice link I had sent my sister back in 2013, where Tom Levenson posted about The Citadel, a proposed community in Montana (or possibly Idaho), and all the hilarious Juicer comments on that post. This was more about guns rather than “creatives”.

    Haven’t read today’s comments yet, so probably someone has already remembered that post. Somebody has this getawayfromitall, yourenotthebossofme, stickittoTheMan idea every year or so; sometimes it involves an island, manmade or natural. And it’s always obviously unworkable.

  129. 129.

    raven

    The credit to Jefferson Starship reflected many things: the ad hoc all-star line-up; the album being an evolutionary progression from Jefferson Airplane; and finally the story it relates of the hijacking of a starship.[6] The album is a narrative concept album that tells the story of a counter-culture revolution against the oppressions of “Uncle Samuel” and a plan to steal a starship from orbit and journey into space in search of a new home. The original vinyl release is divided into two album sides. “Mau Mau (Amerikon)” launched Side One, a counter-culture manifesto and call to arms. In the context of the narrative, this is the free music being performed in the park, drawing everyone together.

  130. 130.

    Another Scott

    In other news.

    Today, history was made. For the first time in forty-five years, the Hyde Amendment—which restricts abortion access and disproportionately hurts women of color—was NOT included in a labor and health appropriations bill.

    This is progress, plain and simple. https://t.co/kQiUAyF2qY

    — Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) July 16, 2021

    This is another long overdue Big Biden Deal.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  132. 132.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Alison Rose: not harshing my yum at all! To each their own…the recipe that inspired me had an Oreo crust, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and Andes chocolate mints on top of the ice cream.  I think that I am going to have a lot of fun playing with different crust, vegan ice cream, and vegan topping combinations, as this was very easy and didn’t require heating up the oven at all.

  133. 133.

    trollhattan

    @JWR:

    Gilligan with twoseven AR-15s and 20,000 rounds. Ginger and Maryanne, being smart, nowhere to be seen.

  135. 135.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Another Scott: Thank you for that. I’m patting myself on the back because this is what I’ve been saying, just without charts and graphs to prove it. Seemed just common sense to me

    ( I am employed in the collision repair industry, so was tuned in to the auto issue. We are having problems getting.parts, btw)

  136. 136.

    Morzer

    @stinger:

    The Citadel never.. took off, if that’s what citadels do:

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Citadel

    The Citadel was a proposed planned community in the mountains of Idaho, designed to be a “bastion of liberty“, complete with a pseudo-medieval curtain wall and towers.

    As of March 2016, after four years of promotion, it seems to exist only as promotional materials on a website, which has since expired and has become a parked domain as of November 2018. It is fairly clear it was a failed publicity stunt for its creators, III Arms Company.

  137. 137.

    raven

    What you gonna do when you feel your lady rollin’
    How you gonna feel when you see your lady strollin’
    On the deck of the starship
    With her head hooked into andromeda
    C’mon hijack
    Gotta get back and ahead to the things that matter
    Amerika hates her crazies
    And you gotta let go you know
    Gotta let go you know
    Gotta let go you know
    Gotta let go you know or else you stay
    Spillin’ out of the steel glass
    Gravity gone from the cage
    A million pounds gone from your heavy mass
    All the years gone from your age
    Hydroponic gardens and forests
    Glistening with lakes in the jupiter starlite
    Room for babies and byzantine dancing astronauts of renown
    The magician and the pantechnicon
    Take along the farmer and the physician
    We gotta get out and down
    Back into the future
    Beyond our own time again
    Reachin’ for tomorrow
    It’s so fine starshine
    The melting acid fever streakin’ through my mind
    Makes it oh so difficult to see you
    And oh so easy to touch you
    I melt with you
    Feel with you
    Make love for you

  138. 138.

    Morzer

    @trollhattan:

    “It’s spelled ‘ethics’ but pronounced ‘buckraking white supremacism’.”

     

    We owe Judge Hanen to the Dubya ‘ministration.

  143. 143.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    @James E Powell:

    I tried to watch the trailer and I felt I was watching the New Age version of an old friend of mine who a few years ago was a Ron Paul supporter and a goldbug.

    My friend, however, has much better hair. (Last time I saw him he was eating nothing but meat; we did not touch on cryptocurrency or Donald Trump.)

    @dmsilev:

    Remember QuadrigaCX? That was a crypto exchange where the owner died a couple years ago and allegedly no one knows the password to his digital wallet with a couple hundred million dollars worth of bitcoin. If this is true, then all those bitcoins are likely gone.

    Of course, it’s entirely possible that the money has simply been stolen. There is also speculation (particularly from people who lost money) that the owner faked his death, and of course no one would be surprised if organized crime of some kind was involved.

  144. 144.

    Ben Cisco

    @germy: I spent a year in Clovis one week.

    Stationed there by mistake. Thought I was going to be stuck there but the squadron XO took pity on a poor rook and got me the hell out of Dodge.

  147. 147.

    Ruckus

    @Chetan Murthy:

    A lot of people don’t actually like real life. I think the primary (but not the only) reason is that life can suck donkey balls on occasion. And to do it well requires more than a bit of work/effort/pain/loss/retrospect/effort/luck/understanding and the biggie – accepting that at the end, it’s a losing proposition with no guarantee whatsoever that is still made better by participation and a smile.

  149. 149.

    Ruckus

    @Roger Moore:

    There have always been, and likely always will be people who think that everyone else is the problem. They often confuse the world around them as the problem, not realizing that the world around them is always their problem, while not realizing that people like them are what make the problems. They want to create a world that is made up of people like them, but as soon as they do they find that they don’t like any one else because they are selfish people who don’t like them.

  151. 151.

    James E Powell

    @Obvious Russian Troll:

    I tried to watch the trailer and I felt I was watching the New Age version of an old friend of mine who a few years ago was a Ron Paul supporter and a goldbug.

    Perfect description. I am a stupid man, but I would never do anything that guy wanted me to do.

  152. 152.

    Ruckus

    @Alison Rose:

    It is exactly the conservative political concept. Take something of value and hoard it. Don’t care if it hurts others, that’s their problem. And because you are hoarding something, you have to be selective in who participates and who is outside the circle. Libertarians just want a smaller circle. (OK they want a smaller circle because no one wants to be in their circle, except people like them, who are shit)

  159. 159.

    Ramalama

    Well another creative start-up seems to be doing ok. I don’t think they have crypto currency, but they are artists who have joined together for a ‘creative union’ and it seems interesting to me: Marfa, Texas. One of my old poetry profs lives there, which is how I started learning about it.

  161. 161.

    J R in WV

    @Geminid: ​
     

    So… Clovis is at least 100 miles from anywhere, then ?

    Or Clovis is at least 100 miles from nowhere~!?~

  162. 162.

    Just Chuck

    @Chetan Murthy: Git is also a blockchain, though not a distributed one (distributing it involves replicating it, there’s no consensus protocol, etc).  IIRC some filesystems also use hash chains of nodes to verify integrity.

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