I’m sure you’ve noticed that NFTs are ‘in’ right now, among a certain set. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this means that they may also be in some of our stockings. The WSJ, naturally, has included them in their “cash gift guide“, which also includes sections such as “meme stocks” (remember GameStop?) and “financial products for children”, because of course it does. Bloomberg, ever the more serious financial publication, merely has a trend piece about this.
This is just depressing. As an art lover, I’d be pretty mad if somebody gave me a certificate of authenticity for an ugly doodle of a smoking monkey, instead of like, a piece of art. And how do you even wrap an NFT? You’re essentially giving them the private key to an online wallet, i.e. a long string of nonsense characters. Maybe you give them a slip of paper with login instructions? I doubt many givers will include the instructions the recipient will actually want: how to dump this crap immediately upon receipt so they can convert it into actual money–you know, something fungible.
This is my favorite part of the Bloomberg piece, though. The woman they interview isn’t even pretending this is something people want; she just wants to proselytize, and will spend a good chunk of change doing it:
Educating family about NFTs is part of Jessica Walker’s motivation for giving the tokens as gifts this year for Christmas. […] Her budget is about one Ethereum, or $4,100 U.S. dollars. […] “My brother will look at me slightly disappointed that I have not bought him food or alcohol.”
This Christmas, why not spend thousands to give your loved ones the gift of disappointment?
Open thread!
Book Club Information for Adam Schiff’s Midnight In Washington
Old School
Bad news everyone – MMMM isn’t going to like the gift we got him.
Roger Moore
The bubble isn’t going to inflate itself!
Nora Lenderbee
Totally OT, but better news: Josh Duggar was convicted on child porn charges.
guachi
I mean, I could how see someone like John Cole might enjoy having someone buy him an in-game pet or mount for WoW. But an NFT of something stupid for someone who doesn’t even want it is madness.
SiubhanDuinne
@Nora Lenderbee:
My surprised face, let me find it.
TeezySkeezy
I feel like the NFT concept is a cute gimmick that could let you support a struggling artist by paying a little more to essentially get their digital signature (I’d def want a physical print with it, though). But that just amounts to a nice gesture, not much more. However, the idea that NFTs should somehow be lucrative is a bunch of stupidity. I’m sure some grifters are going to make a lot of money off the idea though for a long time, sadly. Speculative bubbles on worthless things are nothing new.
Brantl
I think NFTs are an intelligence test that the human race is failing spectacularly.
Fair Economist
If I got an NFT as a gift I’d sell it on the spot.
And yeah, why are they all so ugly?
Litlebritdifrnt
The “Financial products for children” probably include one of those rip off credit cards which pretend to teach kids about money but are just a sneaky way for credit card companies to get hold of kids pocket money. I had a twitter argument with one of them when they first came out and accused them of that very thing and they responded “no we’re not, the parents pay the fees not the children” as if that was some sort of redeeming quality on their part. Damn monsters.
Poe Larity
Well, I guess that throws my LilyCoin idea out the window with the mustard.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Brantl: Tulips! Beanie Babies!
TeezySkeezy
@Litlebritdifrnt: Humans are awful. So much of our mathematical talent is just used to extract wealth from each other under shady pretenses.
Ken
Put the NFT on a USB drive, then print a copy of the underlying GIF, blowing it up or tiling it to fill an 8.5×11 sheet, and wrap the USB drive in that.
Plus this way, the recipient at least gets a USB drive.
matt
Kind of like someone into birdwatching giving all of their relatives bird guides. It’s about you, not about them.
Tim C
Generally speaking, this kind of crap is why I hate getting presents and the obligatory wealth exchange aspect of this holiday.
Festivus would be better at this point.
Ken
There was a science-fiction short story where the aliens were testing us, so scattered a few million matter duplicators around the planet with the warning “each use is a chip at the foundations of your society”. Much of the story was set in a department store, and how they adjusted to the machine. No cash purchases, for one….
EDIT: Thank you, internet: Ralph Williams’ “Business as Usual, During Alterations”, Astounding July 1958.
Princess
Aren’t NFTs just a big tax dodge?
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist:
I don’t know it’s so weird!! Maybe because real artists with talent won’t touch this with a ten foot pole?
I would, personally. Money is money.
Grumpy Old Railroader
NFTs? No thank you. Dumbest speculation ever. I shall continue to invest in Tulip Bulbs
Brachiator
Ethereum. Jeez. I can’t keep up with this crap.
Actually, I can, I just don’t want to. I have to keep up on the IRS regulations for this stuff.
Thanks for the interesting post.
eclare
@Nora Lenderbee: Very good news. Thank you.
eclare
@SiubhanDuinne: You never know with juries.
How is your brother? Apologies if I missed an update.
Leto
Considering most artists see this as simply another way to steal their artwork (which it is), it’s not surprising that only grifters are engaging with this. It’s also not surprising that most “financial” magazines are also starting to push the grift to the masses. As with everything regarding the internet, it’s just another turd in the punch bowl.
Miss Bianca
Oh, M4, you got me good with this one! LOL! Ah, if only I actually had enough money to Make It So!
eclare
@Tim C: Airing of grievances? Check. Now on to Feats of Strength!
J/k…totally agree.
lowtechcyclist
@Tim C:
Ten or fifteen years back, my family decided it was time for us to stop buying presents for each other, as we were likely to have already bought anything we wanted to have.
The kids still got presents, but even most of them have grown up now, so basically we get together at Christmas for socialization, drinks, and dinner.
JCJ
I hope this isn’t a duplicate
For fans of DS9 Quark and Odo explain things well
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_r2ppe8tl8w1qgz7mu_720.mp4
trollhattan
I’d like my food and alcohol now, please.
Heard a BBC interview of someone’s time in one of the Uighur prison camps. After an extended “reeducation” and slave labor stint, he somehow emerged, scarred and starved nearly to death. Horrid, simply horrid. Naturally, China’s UK embassy had the usual “FAKE NEWS and also HOW DARE YOU INTERFERE WITH OUR INTERNAL AFFAIRS?” responses. They truly have run out of fucks to give and I have zero ideas on what effective pushback might be. Once the Uighers are dispersed and the region repopulated with Han Chinese, they’ll effectively cease as a culture.
Ksmiami
At least tulips are pretty and smell nice in your vase…
Kent
@matt: Yep. Same thing as when you make donations to YOUR favorite charities in someone else’s name and give them a card to that effect
In our clan we long ago stopped giving gifts to adults or anyone in the extended family that isn’t your on children. Makes Christmas so much easier.
Ken
SKEPTIC: How can you call it a currency, when it doesn’t meet any of the three functional properties required of a currency?
CRYPTO ENTHUSIAST: That’s an old definition! It’s a currency even without those three properties!
SKEPTIC: So transactions are taxable like any other currency transaction?
ENTHUSIAST: … Four, those four properties.
TheOtherHank
I keep saying that if you send me $100, I will enter your name on a world-readable Google spreadsheet saying that you own the jpeg of your choice. It’s just as good as an NFT without the massive carbon footprint of blockchain bullshit.
Jeffro
Along with bitcoin, the pandemic, and the failure to shift to a carbon-neutral society.
We just aren’t going to make it to the next level. Sorry, fellow Milky Way Galaxy civilizations…you’ll just have to stumble across the occasional Voyager and other space detrius and wonder what that was all about…
Kent
@Princess: I thought they were essentially a way to mint more free bitcoin without needing a server farm the size of a Wal-Mart and nuclear reactor to power it.
White & Gold Purgatorian
If one of our Republican relatives gives us an NFT for Christmas, all I want to know is how to turn it into cash before it turns into a pumpkin. Most of them are getting packets of seeds from us this year, which we hope do not disappoint too much.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan:
I just listened to a podcast about early (Medieval and Tudor) Christmas feasts in England, and it all sounded pretty gross, actually, but I could cheerfully sit down at the Ghost of Christmas Present’s magic table and go to town on some Victorian roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a tunne of good claret.
@Kent:
So I should cancel your donation to The Human Fund: Money For People?
Geminid
@Ksmiami: And in a pinch, you can eat tulip bulbs. Dutch people ate them during the hard winter of 1944-45.
Ken
@White & Gold Purgatorian: It occurs to me that giving away seeds and receiving NFTs in return is practically goading every trickster god in the multiverse to bring about the collapse of society, so we see which keeps its value. (Hint: Not the NFTs.)
Kent
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
As always, Seinfeld was ahead of its time. I can’t imagine what those writers would have done with Trump and all this new stupidity.
Leto
@JCJ: Hahahaha
delk
You can wrap mine in a maxed out Mac Pro ($50,000+ yikes!).
mrmoshpotato
@Nora Lenderbee: He was the dad on A Bazillion Kids And Counting, right?
Brachiator
@Ken:
Morons and libertarians (but I repeat myself) think that they are creating untraceable and nontaxable free money.
But the IRS already has a long detailed FAQ on this stuff.
Kent
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Christmas Caroling back in the ancient times was an excuse for the lower classes to get rip roaring drunk and then march around town to the higher class neighborhoods belting out songs to annoy and antagonize. That is one reason the Puritans banned Christmas Carols and much of Christmas.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jeffro:
What do you mean “failure”?
mrmoshpotato
@guachi:
So many unnecessary words! FTFY ?
scav
At least no one in Jessica Walker’s family will have any lingering ambiguity in future as to her a) giving a shit about their pleasure / enjoyment / happiness and b) basic sanity.
Ken
@mrmoshpotato: No, the son. The one who started molesting younger girls when he was 14. So the child pornography conviction isn’t exactly a surprise…
Xavier
I’ll take a picture of my butt and call it an NFT. I have a certain relative in mind who is most deserving.
Geminid
@Kent: The Puritans would go around Christmas Day and confiscate roasted geese. Too celebratory. People were happy to see the easy going Charles II restored to the throne.
Yutsano
@Nora Lenderbee: shockedfry.gif
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah, the idea that we’ve failed at 100-year plans in year, ah, twenty? Kinda weird.
We’ll be geoengineering our way out of climate change in 30-50 years anyway.
Which is the plot of the new Neal Stephenson book, saw him speak on it last week, was interesting. Excited to read it!
delk
@mrmoshpotato: Tony Perkins hired him to be the Executive Director at Family Research Council even though he had zero qualifications. Every major republican politician rushed to get their pictures taken with him to show their “family values”.
eldorado
jokes on you. i don’t need to spend money to disappoint my friends and family
mrmoshpotato
@Poe Larity: The mustard broke. Go get the mop.
Major Major Major Major
@eldorado: lol
tom
At least if you get a lump of coal in your stocking, it has some utility.
Ken
I’m particularly excited by the plans to fill the stratosphere with fine dust to block sunlight. True, the last time this happened the dinosaurs went extinct. But this time for sure!
Brachiator
OT. This is wild. From BBC News
cmorenc
My 4yo grandson will no doubt be delighted Christmas morning with the NFT I’ve wrapped up for him in a pretty box. There’s nothing tangible I can put in the Xmas gift box, but if I could enclose a piece of paper telling him he’s got e.g. 10 units of NFT – since he can’t read yet, I’ll have to tell him it’s 10 NFTs, I just hope he doesn’t know a four-letter word starting with the ‘F’. His parents might not be pleased with either him or me.
Sure Lurkalot
@Litlebritdifrnt: My niece and her spouse worked for Tyco and rode the beanie baby wave. They made quite a bit of cash and bought big houses and fancy cars with it.
Knowing when to get out is key.
The downside…still has a couple of trashbags filled with all sorts of worthless plush.
RepubAnon
@Litlebritdifrnt: Great idea: NFTs of tulips, beanie babies – and lollipops.
Brachiator
@Xavier:
I think that only the butt crack, not the entire butt, qualifies as an NFT.
geg6
@mrmoshpotato:
No, eldest son. The one who molested his sisters.
H.E.Wolf
His sisters were 4 of the 5 “younger girls”, per news reports at the time. [insert 27 doctoral dissertations’ worth of commentary on the sickness of authoritarian religiosity]
Major Major Major Major
@Ken: when I saw Stephenson speak he went over all the times it’s happened in recorded history and how the world responded, was very interesting. Hopefully we’ll go recapture, but even the nuclear autumn option might be better than where we’re headed.
cain
I might be willing to do NFTs as long as I am the content creator – if I’m creating art and people want to pay me big bucks for a scribbling something – I’m game!
senyordave
If I received an NFT as a gift my first thought would be “how can I get rid of this piece of shit”.
My second though would be “what asshole gave me this piece of shit”.
Gravenstone
That’s only because the children would be too young to legally enter into the contract, and thus incur the fees themselves. You know damn well those companies would hook the kids into lifelong debt right from the womb, if they could manage it.
cain
@Ken: hey just launch a few nukes – we’re done!
Geminid
@Ken: Putting dust in the atmosphere to reduce surface temperatures is a non-starter. But there are more promising avenues to use geoengineering to reduce CO 2 in the atmosphere. They aren’t talked about much by climate scientists, I think because that might detract from the urgency of reducing carbon emmissions. In the meantime, there will be a lot of afforestation, and a little bit of direct air capture.
Gravenstone
With the proper branding (survival cache!) even seeds can be made appealing to the conservative mind.
topclimber
@Jeffro:
Yeah, I was already pissed that I PROBABLY won’t be around when Star Fleet Academy opens. But now my backup plan to go into cyrogenic sleep looks like a bust too. Thanks for giving us all that damn oil, dinosaurs!
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: one concern is a single trillionaire deciding to build a particle cannon or do a giant algae bloom.
Jeffro
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@Major Major Major Major: yes…my bad…we certainly look like we’re on track to pull this off, absolutely, you bet.
Major Major Major Major
@Jeffro: what are we trying to ‘pull off’ though? As a species we’ll be okay. Scientific progress will continue. Even losing half the population, which won’t happen, is in no way an impediment to Starfleet. Star Trek starts in 2151 following a horrible nuclear war. Yes, it’s fiction, but that’s all I have to work with since I don’t know what you think we’re trying to pull off.
We already know how to make carbon-free energy that’s too cheap to meter. Agricultural tech is good. Medical tech will see huge advances in the next twenty years. Nanomachines are already here. I’m very skeptical of artificial general intelligence, at least with the current paradigm, thanks to the curse of dimensionality, but either way, shit’s gonna get weird.
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
We do?? Please enlighten us ignorant masses.
Ken
And for that we have Batman.
Major Major Major Major
@lowtechcyclist: It all started with a pile of hot rocks underneath Chicago…
yellowdog
@mrmoshpotato: No, the oldest son.
JoyceH
@Brachiator:
I had always thought that was the whole point of cryptocurrency, to have secret and untraceable money for Nefarious Doings. But a while back, I read an article about some indictment or other (can’t even remember what the crime was), and feds detailed a very clear trail of the cryptocurrency involved. So – since it IS easily traceable by law enforcement, and it doesn’t have any central bank type protection from wild value swings, what IS it good for?
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
Now that’s a cogent explanation of how we’ll get to “too cheap to meter” nuclear power.
IOW, you don’t know nothing, but you’ve been taken in by other people’s fantasies, and you’re spreading them. Better than ivermectin, I suppose, but still, what a pile of crap.
Brachiator
@JoyceH:
Absolutely nothing.
Chetan Murthy
@Ken: Whoa, that is one *prescient* SF story. Wowsers. Well-worth the read. Thank you!
Major Major Major Major
@JoyceH: smart contracts are pretty interesting. Of course, the first big modern one had some… implementation difficulties…
Decentraland and other toys, while undergoing bubbles right now, are also interesting.
There are various other legal and financial concepts that lend themselves to blockchains, such as international money transfers.
Major Major Major Major
@lowtechcyclist:
You can get it with this One Weird Trick: building lots of nuclear reactors.
ETA: Might as well ask how we can get to “too cheap to meter” solar. Here’s a hint: there’s One Weird Trick.
guachi
Starbucks workers in Buffalo unionized. That’s pretty exciting.
Peale
Note: if you find yourself spending $4,100 on gifts you know the recipient won’t like, you’re failing as a gift giver. You might as well give them socks from the corporate swag box.
Sure Lurkalot
@Major Major Major Major: Have you read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything? She devotes a section of the book to various market and tech/science solutions to climate change. The section is called Magical Thinking.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: uh, as long as the government takes all the long-term spillover costs, sure. I mean, if what you say were true, then there’d be companies lining up to build them. And if they really were so cheap, they’d buy up enough acreage around each site, that nobody could complain. But somehow it never works out that way …..
lowtechcyclist
So we’re losing money on every nuclear reactor, but making it up in volume.
You’re trolling now. You can keep on spinning out cryptic bullshit phrases like this until the cows come home, without saying anything solid enough to verify or refute.
Yutsano
@guachi: That’s crazy awesome. I wonder what corporate is going to do here.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy:
Right, which is sort of what governments are for. France just decided to start building plants again. China is planning 150. India is doing exciting things with thorium. This is a political issue, not a technological one.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Ok, so you really are saying “lose money on every sale, make it up in volume”.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I think that’s why the U.N. banned ocean fertilization, and no one is even doing it for research. Scientists will get plenty of data from of volcanic eruptions anyway. I don’t have my notes with me, but I read an article in Physics.org that reviewed a paper by a Columbia University Carbon Lab researcher and a Scripps Oceanography Institute researcher, about the Mt. Pinautubo eruption. They found a considerable effect on CO2 levels caused by the fertilizing effect of the ash.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
Oh, bollocks to both. We’ve know how to do this thorium thing for fifty years, and yet nobody has done it. You should be enough of an engineer to know that when people talk about how something is a sure-fire thing, can’t-miss, for decades, and nobody does it, that means that there’s a snag, and nobody wants to talk about it.
You should also be enough of an engineer to know that actually doing a thing at scale is very different from sketching it out on engineer’s paper.
Major Major Major Major
@Sure Lurkalot: Extrapolating current political trends to how technology will be used in fifty years is a fun fiction exercise, but that’s about it.
Leto
@cain: Here’s how most of the “content” is being created: NFTs are generating huge paydays for some artists, others feel under siege
“Content creator” = “I stole this from you, am making tons of money, go fuck yourself”
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: I think I don’t understand your thesis here?
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: So you think the current generation reactors that large countries are beginning to build out at scale are… what exactly?
Major Major Major Major
seeing now why cheryl had a rule against writing anything about nuclear power here
Ken
@JoyceH: The crypto ledgers are publicly readable and everyone, including the Feds, can inspect every transaction. That’s how the system works, and the crypto enthusiasts even brag about it sometimes, apparently under the impression that we’re all fine with everyone being able to see our MasterCard bills.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: While energy generated by photovoltaic and wind generation is certainly not too cheap to meter, it’s now cheaper than natural gas generation. Those technologies reached cost parity a few years ago, but natural gas prices have gone up a lot since. That’s the important thing. Decarbonizing the electrical grid is now just a matter of financing, not cost or technology.
That’s the lowhanging fruit. Heavy transort and industrial sources of CO2 emmissions like concrete production* are soluble problems, just tougher.
* some estimates are that concrete production accounts for 8% of worldwide CO2 emmissions. There is promising work being done in that field.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
There’s a standard story about how, when you have a competitive market for a product that has very high fixed costs, but very low variable costs (let’s say, a movie that costs $100m to make, but you can copy the MP4 for nearly-free) then it makes sense for the government to award a monopoly (“copright”) so that the producer can amortize their fixed cost across all the units sold.
That make perfect sense. Moving now to power production, we see that this is already how it works: utilities typically get monopolies, b/c of their massive fixed costs. But even on top of that, for nuclear power, utilities want the government to take on massive spillovers. And why? Because nobody actually knows what those costs will be — everybody is just guessing. If you actually knew what those costs would be, then you could price that into the price per kWh.
That is the problem: you don’t actually know what the cost is, b/c you don’t know what future liability you’re incurring. Which is why companies what the government to take that bit on.
Tony Gerace
I’m old enough to remember the very-short-lived Pet Rock craze almost a half-century ago. These goddamn NFTs are a couple of orders of magnitude stupider.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: My parents in Denver have rooftop solar and it even offsets their gas bill. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
Another Scott
@JCJ: Very well done. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
Either you can put a fair price on nuclear power (in which case, any monopoly utility [that is to say, all of them] can build and sell it without government subsidy) or you cannot. This is a simple matter of economics.
geg6
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m no expert on nuclear power, but I am an expert on living next door (not quite, but close enough that we are required to have iodine doses on hand and the state/county provide new ones every year). It’s being decommissioned now, but I never want to live near another one. We basically had a military occupation here for several weeks after 9/11, just as one drawback I’ve had to live with. Fuck nuclear power.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: I’ve been curious about what the navy is doing these days, but haven’t actually looked it up yet.
The fact remains that we have the technology–and I will happily include renewables, especially distributed solar, especially with upcoming leaps in battery technology. It’s a complicated engineering challenge, but one that we’re perfectly capable of figuring out, and that I’m confident we will.
Climate change will happen, it will suck, fortunately we’re on a glide path to avoid total cataclysm, and we will get through this.
eclare
@Chetan Murthy: The public utility that I used to work for had two gen plants. It priced the power
And when you go before a public utility commission, be prepared to justify every penny of that rate.
Chetan Murthy
@eclare: yes, but they are able to do so, only because the government covers all long-term costs. It has been well-documented that power companies refuse to build nuclear plants without that long-term open-ended subsidy.
Leto
@geg6: we lived within 4 miles of the Limerick Power Station, now live within an hour of 3 Mile Island, and spent multiple years working within 15ft of the most destructive weapons ever created, which essentially we’ll never be able to get rid of (much like the leftovers of the above two). I share your sentiment.
lowtechcyclist
I’m missing the ‘too cheap to meter’ part.
You’re still just bullshitting. I could spout a bunch of equally meaningless and non-refutable statements about some other magical-thinking solution if I cared to.
@Major Major Major Major:
The problem isn’t about nuclear power. The problem is you’re spinning fantasies about it in meaningless little dribs and drabs of hints and suggestions that there’s some actual substance behind what you’re saying, while keeping at a distance the point at which you might have to provide any. “It all started with a pile of hot rocks underneath Chicago…” Yeah, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
Oklahomo
This morning on my commute the AR Lottery was running ads telling one and all that scratch off tickets make great stocking stuffers (but only if the recipient is over 18!). So basically give your loved ones a few useless pieces of card stock.
trollhattan
@Brachiator: Heard a Beeb interview with the NZ health minister and was amused at how quickly she swatted down the, “And what would you say to the libertarians who maintain…” question.
They’re doing this smartly: freezing new tobacco addictions at an age group and younger means smoking should age out of the population permanently. Good for you, government actually working to make people’s lives better.
Marc
This is, of course, the entire point of what they’re doing, they’re just not bothering to be hypocritical about it. Just as it was the entire point of the decimation, dispersal, and cultural destruction of numerous indigenous American cultures. We just like to pretend that those horrid acts are long-dead past history, that we’ve somehow repaid the debt by acknowledging that we once did bad things, ceremonially returning bits of land, and remembering to send some federal money to the reservations.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: It’s my understanding–and I am not a power grid person–that you’ll want constant-output/surgeable plants at your disposal in case something goes wrong with your renewables+batteries smart grid. This can be gas, it can be nukes, it can be a combination, but it has to be something.
I actually think gas is a better compromise here given the overall political infeasibility of nuclear power. Zero carbon is a nice dream, but recapture is a more likely way to get there than zero-emission generation, IMO. We have some decent proof of concept sinks operating now in Iceland. And a very long time horizon.
lowtechcyclist
@Major Major Major Major:
A glide path? More fairytales. I already have the complete Brothers Grimm, thanks.
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: British climate scientist Miles Allen wrote a good overview of the challenge of meeting the UN’s IPCC goal of reaching a carbon neutral world economy by 2050 in his article “The Green New Deal: a View from Across the Atlantic,” published by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists February 2019. Allen helped write the IPCC’s October 2018 report.
Allen says that technological initiatives by the developed countries were probably essential to reach that goal. He speaks generally and does not detail them, but Allen does not seem like a magical thinker. His article is not long and anyone interested in climate change can read it and decide for themselves how serious Allen is.
Chetan Murthy
@Marc: We did it to Native Americans, alright. We’ve had no news of Tibet for over a decade. I wonder if the Han-ization is sufficiently complete, that it’s a dead letter.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: I also recommend the recent NYMag article “After Alarmism”
topclimber
@Geminid: Does nuke power do anything about generating heat rather than just electricity? I mean, short of what bombs do within a given radius of where they explode.
geg6
@Leto:
Shippingport for me. The first nuke. We were the guinea pigs.
randy khan
I posted recently on a social media thread in which a friend asked for a simple explanation of NFTs, and then had some follow-up discussion, so I’ve actually given this some thought recently.
For me, as someone who collects art (although not remotely at the scale of the people you read about in the news), I think a big part of the idea of NFTs is to solve the problem of what’s an original when the art is digital. In the regular art world, the original is the thing that has value, and all of the copies (of whatever kind, and there are lots of kinds) don’t have the value. In the digital world, where every copy is the same as the original, the NFT marks one thing as the actual original, the unique work of art. (This, by the way, is not at that different from the problem of what’s an original photograph or print.)
So far, so good, but in the analog world the copies necessarily are imperfect in one way or another, so there is an actual difference to the viewer between the original and the copy. (For me, this really was driven home the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock drip painting in person – photos simply don’t give you an understanding of what the work is about.) In the digital world, the NFT signature – which you can’t see at all – is in fact the only difference, so literally the value they create is staking out one copy as the origin of all of the others.
In the long run, I have no idea whether this will be enough for people to continue to value NFTs. I do know that in the more traditional art world, 99.999% (and maybe add some 9s there) of all art has its highest value on the day it’s first purchased, and I’m pretty confident we’ll see the same thing with NFTs. Nearly all of them will decline sharply in value, and only a few will end up being worth what people pay for them. So as an investment, they’re likely to be not so hot. Whether the aesthetic value of owning the original is sufficient for people to keep buying them seems like, at best an open question to me.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major:
Hmm…
TheBulletin (from 2018):
TANSTAAFL.
Cheers,
Scott.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I have decided that all my adult relatives will be getting gift cards for their favourite restaurants . I will buy toys for the grand nieces and nephew but nothing fancy supplemented by very nice chocolate selection boxes. I simply do not want to spend money on “things” that they will not use for more than a few hours on Christmas morning.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not as optimistic as you are, but I do agree that we have a chance of getting thru this with modern industrial civilization intact. I agree we have the technologies in development. To my mind, the problem is the coordination problem. We’re relying on “markets”, without neither providing proper pricing to reflect the actual state of spillover harms, nor proper incentives to reflect our desired end-state. It’s all completely haphazard, and that means it all happens much slower than it needs to.
And meanwhile, the world’s manufacturing systems are spread all over; if we don’t get the conversion going far enough and thorough enough in a large-enough region, we don’t get the chance to do it at all, b/c long-range transport networks *will* break down under climate and energy pressures.
Again, I’m merely less optimistic than you: there is a massive distance between ‘we have the tech in the lab’ (or even ‘we have the tech deployed in small quantities’) and ‘we have the tech deployed at nation-scale and it’s replaced fossil fuels’.
I guess other people’s kids will see (I haven’t reproduced and don’t plan to).
geg6
@Marc:
Yep.
eclare
@Chetan Murthy: I know. Haven’t worked in the industry for a while, but when I did Yucca Mtn was proposed to hold the rods. Don’t know what the present status is.
eclare
@Oklahomo: To be fair a relative none of us knew very well used to drop by every Christmas day and give everyone around $5 worth of scratchers. It’s innocuous, and at least in my state, don’t know about AR, supports higher ed.
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeah, this is the part that worries me. We’ve seen how supply chains have held up under the much less stressful circumstances of this pandemic. When we have substantial areas of agricultural land becoming too arid to cultivate, or too hot and humid for humans to survive in, it’s gonna make 2020-2021 look like a walk in the park.
I’m sure that the human race will survive, given all the harsh environments our Neolithic ancestors survived in. But in terms of a technologically advanced civilization surviving, I’m a lot less sure. Once things start breaking down, it could be cascade failure from then on.
Fair Economist
@Chetan Murthy:
There’s no secret to why Thorium isn’t used. Processing it to U233 produces significant U232 contamination, which decays producing hard gamma rays. As a result, unlike U235 or P239, which can be handled with moderate shielding and contamination control, no living thing can be anywhere near U233 processing, fuel, or waste. It’s a nuclear system where everything involved is the nastiest kind of radwaste. Super costly, super dangerous. I’d think the secondary waste produced by everything getting irradiated by all those hard gammas would just add to the fun.
This is in Wikipedia. Like I said, hardly a secret.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist: Water resources worry me. I partially chose to move where I did in 2004 due to the water supply.
Major Major Major Major
@eclare: Harry Reid made sure to shitcan our best bet for waste disposal on his way out.
Fair Economist
@randy khan:
An NFT used to prove authenticity and establish a chain of custody could be quite useful. A great system to prevent counterfeiting of branded merchandise. But just the NFT by itself? Worthless.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: manufacturing worries me a lot too, not particularly due to climate change, but because the modern supply chain is just so susceptible to disruptions, of which climate change is just one. (See semiconductors.) Like, there’s the popular fact that only a few places on earth can make ballpoint pens. Modernity is fragile in so many ways. Things will definitely go wrong, and the worse climate change is the wronger they’ll go.
But I also think framing it as an existential threat isn’t especially helpful. It’s inducing a lot of despair and doesn’t lend itself to thinking about realistic interventions.
Humanity will muddle on through, intact. Politics will dictate just how intact. I hold no illusions that this is easy or simple—but neither have been any of our other astounding accomplishments.
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist: one thing some artists are doing is including with the NFT a copy of the underling Illustrator file/whatever layers/sketches/etc. so that you do actually have something unique to collect.
If the purchaser decides to put that up online for free, idk that’s their right I guess.
Geminid
@topclimber: I am not sure why you are asking me this question. I have no special knowledge about nuclear energy, and have not mentioned it in this thread.
I do know that the two North Anna, Virginia nuclear plants forty miles from me have a cooling tower for their water, so I guess it is recycled. And I know the operators like to keep the plants going at a constant rate. There is a pumped water storage plant in Bath Clunty, Virginia that pumps water uphill from one lake to another at night with excess power, then runs turbines to generate power during the day. All this stuff was built in the 1960’s and 70’s.
Sure Lurkalot
@Geminid: Thanks, that was an interesting article. I agree that we shouldn’t limit solutions by conventional wisdom and that ingenuity and invention can and perhaps should be relied upon in addressing long term problems. Just not sure I want to live in a dark world covered in volcanic ash.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I liked the Miles Allen article I referenced above because it gave a good general view of the global challenge, and quantified it, that is, a requirement that we reduce carbon emissions by 2 billion tons year over year. And like I say, Allen helped write the IPCC report and knows what went into it.
The year 2050 seems like an arbitrary target for a carbon neutral world economy. But it’s a nice round number, and I get the impression that Allen and the other experts on the panel thought it was practical.
I’m hoping that once the Build Back Better bill finally is passed, this forum will have regular threads on the clean energy transition and the environment, and what the Biden administration is doing in these areas. There are many other climate change initiatives by various Departments including Energy, Agriculture and Defense, as well as in the physical infrastructure bill passed last month. They’ll be worth discussing too.
Generally, I find that the I more research this area, the more realistically positive I am about the issue. And it’s easy to look up clean energy, or afforestation, or decarbonizing transport. But I’m not sure the pessimists want to know more. It’s like they are happy to persevere in a pity party.
JoyceH
@Chetan Murthy:
I think that’s happening already. I just learned recently that the coal power plant near me had shut down several years ago and is currently being converted to a solar power plant. Just due to the nature of how long these things take, that means that creating a solar power plant in rural Virginia started during a Republican administration with very clear hostility to renewables, so that government assistance was off the boards. If that got started during the Trump administration, and I’m sure there are other projects elsewhere, I think the abandonment of fossil fuels for renewables is picking up a head of steam that will be unstoppable.
Ksmiami
@Geminid: I look forward to the collapse and the whining to Congress to save the suckers from their own stupidity
Ruckus
@Old School:
Ok that was good for a hardy laugh.
Thank You
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: No one is talking about accelerating volcano activity. I only said that we don’t need to research man made ocean fertilization when volcanoes periodically spread a lot of ash onto the oceans, and we can study that
But now I see you were referencing the Miles Allen article. Another good one in the Bulletin focuses more on the clean energy transition in the U.S.That one is “We Need a Better Green New Deal,” by Robert Pollin, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 2019. Pollin is a U. Mass. economist who has worked on clean power plans for several states.
J R in WV
@Nora Lenderbee:
I saw that too. Two counts, each one good for up to 20 years, in Federal court, so the fact that he’s formerly part of an evangelistic Arkansas family won’t cut him any slack. There’s a big old thick Federal Sentencing Guideline book which is required to be thrown at him!
Since he’s been molesting little girls (his sisters!) since forever, he will probably get two consecutive 20 year sentences, which is less than he deserves.
different-church-lady
I believe that would be the “more money than sense” set, yes?
When I think about the things I need that I don’t have the money for… >:-E
Ruckus
@TeezySkeezy:
I’ve often wondered which came first the concept that we fight to be the richest person in some terms, in your own home town or in a state, or a country or the world. And that being that person, or just stomping on others to attempt to reach the goal was admirable.
different-church-lady
I USED THE C-WORD AT WHAT WILL BE 148. WHEN YOU SEE THE COMMENT, YOU WILL UNDERSTAND WHY!!!
different-church-lady
@Nora Lenderbee:
Well, it’s not like he shot someone at a protest or anything…
Roger Moore
@Kent:
It’s all part of Ye Grande Olde English holiday tradition of blackmail. Just check the traditional lyrics to “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and try to tell me it isn’t blackmail as blatant as “trick or treat”.
different-church-lady
@Brantl:
Nominating for comment of the year.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major:
We are? When did this happen?
J R in WV
@lowtechcyclist:
You are too dumb to know who you’re talking about! Much less what you are talking about.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major:
But enough about your time in The Smashing Pumpkins…
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
My nephew is a LT in the USN and runs the nuke plant on a fast attack boat. He can’t say a word about the boat and esp. not a word about the power plant. They disappear for months at a time on spooky missions. He has visited the North Pole once, don’t recall if they surfaced thru the ice pack or not, but he was there.
I’m pretty anti-war liberal Democrat so he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me, he takes after my brother (his dad) who can barely speak to me once a year on my birthday.
I’m actually glad about that, bro is a RWNJ, NRA life member, loves living in TX. Thinks shooting a deer from a blind with corn bait 45 yards away is hunting. Naw, bro, that’s harvesting, not hunting. Illegal in WV to bait game…
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
As I understand it, cryptocurrency is best described as pseudonymous. Every transaction is recorded for everyone to see, but the parties to the transaction are opaque. That sounds really cool, but it breaks down as soon as you create interactions between the cryptocurrency and the rest of the world. Each one of those transactions is a potential place for the authorities to unmask one of the parties. If you’re only dealing with a black marketeer, maybe you can keep your identity secret, since they’ll do their best to hide everything from the authorities. But if you ever deal with a legitimate business, the authorities can get them to divulge who was involved in the transaction, and the jig is up.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
I JUST WANT TO BUY COFFEE WITHOUT INVOLVING COMMUNICATION SATELLITES OR A SIX HUNDRED DOLLAR POCKET COMPUTER AND NOBODY WILL LET ME!!1!
different-church-lady
@Ken: All of modern technology is amounting to Porky Pig saying, “Now I gotta get me a d-d-d-dog!” halfway through the cartoon.
J R in WV
@Geminid:
Nope, that just cools the water down enough so that it doesn’t cook the fish when discharged. I may be a little off on temps, but regulators won’t let them discharge hot water into a stream, it has to be near stream temp to be discharged. Same as chemistry, needs to not be acid or base, poison is right out, etc. In theory anyway.
Ken
@Roger Moore: So as long as I’m careful to anonymize my internet traffic, the Feds won’t know I’m behind all those numerous shady QuarkCoin transactions with Uzbekistan, because they’ve got no way to connect me with the wallet that’s visible on the crypto ledger. But the instant I realize that QuarkCoins can’t be spent on anything and convert some of them to unexciting but useful currency, they’ll be able to connect the sale of 14.8 QuarkCoins from that wallet with the appearance of $13,280 dollars in my bank account, and the jig is up.
Roger Moore
@randy khan:
Shorter: the point of NFTs is to create artificial scarcity for digital objects.
topclimber
@JoyceH:
I wonder if the economics work differently in China. They are the ones Manchin is probably deferring to, not the handful of rich coal operators in dinky WV.
A coal-burning China looks like part of the mix for the next 10 years, amirite?
Villago Delenda Est
Phillip K. Dick nailed this idiocy 59 years ago with Man In The High Castle. What utter garbage. And the vile parasites of the Wall Street Journal are in on the grift, it seems.
Geminid
@J R in WV: Interesting. Now I am reminded that people like to fish the lake near the reactor, on account of the warmer water. When the plant was built, it was thought that the area had little seismological risk. Then there was an earthquake ten years or so ago, and it turned out there was a fault fairly close to the plant. But the earthquake did little damage to the plant. I think a couple of those big concrete spent fuel casks had to be put back up on their blocks.
But up in DC, that same earthquake did damage to the National Cathedral that took millions to repeir. I think it knocked a couple pieces off of the Washington Monument too.
Marshall Eubanks
@Grumpy Old Railroader: At least, if times get really rough, you can eat tulips (prepare like onions).
In the “hungerwinter” (1944-45) almost all the tulip bulbs in Northern Holland were eaten.
Geminid
@JoyceH: The Obama administration did what it could to accelerate the clean energy transition. Economist Robert Pollin described these efforts as “Green New Deal 1.0.”* A lot was done by shifting money within the vast Department of Defense budget. I traveled west a couple years ago, and I saw as many solar panels at Monaghan Air Base, near Tuscon, as I saw on the rest of the trip.
The DOD also did work on biofuels. Now I read that the Union Pacific Railroad intends to make biodiesel 10% of their fuel by 2025.
*Robert Pollin, “We Need a Better Green New Deal, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 2019. An excellent, short read.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
On a similar note, on my walk yesterday I passed a 76 station with a sign below the gas price sign that a pack of cigs is $8.69 per if you buy 2. I think taxing the crap out of them is intended to achieve a similar result.
Ruckus
@JoyceH:
Well it gave rise to an entire post on BJ…..
billcinsd
@JoyceH:So – since it IS easily traceable by law enforcement, and it doesn’t have any central bank type protection from wild value swings, what IS it good for?
Washing drug money, grifting rubes
Procopius
@Jeffro:
There was a period during the late 1950s when SETI (Search for Extra Terrestial Intelligence) was a big deal. Among science fiction fans there was discussion of possible reasons why we did not detect radio traffic. My favorite explanation, an intelligent species is most likely to evolve from a predator. Predators are territorial, aggressive, and violent. The argument was if an entity with such characteristics reached a level of civilization where they could develop nuclear fission, they would inevitably destroy themselves. We see this working out with the lunatics in our foreign policy establishment apparently trying to start wars with the other two biggest possessors of nuclear weapons.
HarlequinGnoll
actually when the tulip crash hit most people just ignored their “debts” because no court would enforce payment of a contract, since judges regarded the debts as contracted through gambling, and thus not enforceable by law.
xjmuellerlurks
This Christmas, why not spend thousands to give your loved ones the gift of disappointment?
I can give my grandkids books for way less money and still achieve this goal.