if I were a malevolent AI who needed lots of cheap processing power widely available to further my evil plans for world domination, a crypto bubble with a subsequent crash would be ~ideal
just saying
— post malone ergo propter malone (@PropterMalone) June 14, 2022
A key part of crypto marketing is telling people, primarily young men, that they're savvy survivors in a post-apocalyptic adventure, or noble explorers boldly charting the future (as per the Matt Damon ad), rather than just people betting that a speculative asset will go up. https://t.co/1P8Tsvqgtp
— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) June 16, 2022
when crypto collapses it's going to take the entirety Our Fake Economy with it and probably herald a vast rise of fascism beyond our current ken, but it will also be REALLY funny
— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) June 13, 2022
War For Ukraine Day 114: The EU Council Recommends Ukraine For Membership, BoJo Visits Kyiv Again, & a Hero Is Returned Home
Fair Economist
Tether had another billion in withdrawals today. They are very secretive about their investments, but we know they invested in the collapsing Celsius pyramid scheme and Chinese real estate. No way they can pay it all back, and at the current rate they’d be gone in 2 months. They will probably blow up well before that.
James E Powell
I can’t keep track of the various cryptos, I only check on Bitcoin value from time to time for schadenfreude. I feel a little sad for the less than swift who got taken in.
mrmoshpotato
@James E Powell:
I only roll my eyes – yet again. And sigh, “Mining Bitcoins was good for what other than wasting massive amounts of electricity?”
MattF
Strongly recommend reading Dan Davies’ book Lying For Money. As the review notes, it’s not officially about crypto, except, of course, it is. But it’s also a more general analysis and dissection of the basic types of financial fraud. Written in a breezy style, but should be read carefully.
OzarkHillbilly
@James E Powell: Yeah, I don’t.
eta: Like all suckers, each and every one of those mf’ers thought they were smarter than everyone else. Guess what? They aren’t.
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato:
Hey, Russian spies in unfriendly countries gotta eat too, buddy!
piratedan
well, perhaps they can move those investments to something safer, like Theranos, Trump Industries or WeWork…..
Darkrose
@MattF: I’ll have to check that out.
I finally sat down and watched all of Line Goes Up. It was 2 hours well spent: Dan Olson is smart and funny and he explained not only crypto but the 2008 crash of the global economy in a way that I mostly understood.
Darkrose
Hmm…my comment was awaiting moderation, but now it’s gone?
Mai Naem mobile
I was talking to a young guy early this year who was planning on starting an expensive grad school program this fall. He was putting all his savings into bitcoin and he was trying to sell me on it. I told him it sounded too risky to me and it sounded like tulipmania to me. He had no idea what tulipmania was. I told him to look it up. I hope he did and took some advice from that.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Ever since AL brought crypto to my attention (a year ago?), it was interesting in a mild way (Gee, Mary, look what the city tech folks have come up with now) but TBH it sounded like pure BS (especially the NFTs) to me, so obviously not something for me to invest in. I was willing to accept it might prove not to be BS and that lots of people who were smarter and more open-minded than me would make money by investing in it, but I knew it was something to stay away from. I’m not feeling like I was wrong. And wasting all that electricity to “mine” bitcoins was really offensive, given the state of the world (climate change etc.)
Brachiator
All this ramble about crypto is a mere distraction as the Google AI prepares to subjugate humanity. //
Yes, I snark. For now.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Mai Naem mobile: I just watched a Jeopardy episode where one contestant could not ID a photo of Sir Michael Caine. Sigh. Sometimes that show makes me feel old, like whenever I know an answer which is obvious to anyone who lived through the 1970s etc. when all of the contestants were not alive then so it is all ancient history. Even so, I remember being astonished a while ago when no one could ID Clark Gable
ETA: being a history buff, I learned about tulipmania years ago on my own, although I expect it is covered in econ classes. It is astonishing (not) how human behavior doesn’t change over the centuries, although the scams and technology do.
Ksmiami
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
At least tulips were pretty to look at and can be eaten- there’s no legitimate use case for crypto
Mai Naem mobile
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I was working with a bunch of people one Thanksgiving and I mentioned The Sound of Music because NBC used to run it around Thanksgiving. Granted most of these coworkers were in their early twenties but not one knew The Sound of Music. I didn’t even watch the movie at a movie theater, I watched it on teevee.but,man, did that make me feel old. Also this same.bunch of people were not aware that pre-texting and cell phones you didn’t need the three digit prefix if you were dialing in the same area. They had no clue what I was talking about.
MattF
Bitcoin has just fallen below $20,000. Ooooopsie.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: Makes you wonder just how Naturally Intelligent this engineer is, eh? Also, “Senior Software Engineer” is …. not a high rank. It’s below the point at which you have “tenure” (or perhaps “people take you seriously”). I’m not surprised they booted his ass.
Rob
@Mai Naem mobile: And, the first three digits of the seven-digit number revealed the location of the phone, i.e. 270 was for Takoma Park, 314 was for College Park, 549 and 548 were in Alexandria, and so on.
kalakal
@MattF: Thanks, I’ll take a look at that
NotMax
‘@Rob
The big band classic PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
;)
Baud
@Mai Naem mobile:
“Hey, thanks. So … how can I get in on these tulips?”
JPL
@Baud: You missed out, so you might look into buying silver.
Barbara
I find the crypto craze to be doubly infuriating because there are true deficiencies in financial services for many people — e.g., punitive fee-based banking, high interest cards, and expensive check cashing operations. There have been a number of companies trying to tap into the need for better service, but instead of evaluating them and whether they actually help to solve real people problems, all the focus is on the idea that crypto is the “solution” to a problem that most crypto enthusiasts can’t even articulate.
JPL
Justice Sotomayor gives us all a needed pep talk. link
Rob
@NotMax: I don’t know that song. Off to listen.
Chetan Murthy
@Barbara: I have never met anybody who worked in financial services who cared one *whit* for serving real needs. All they cared about was robbing widows and orphans. The only time financial services firms actually serve the public, is when the government forces them to
ETA: John Bogle might be the exception that proves the rule. And his company (Vanguard) is going down the path of robbing its clients, too.
Rob
@Rob: Ah, I have heard this song before. Thanks!
lowtechcyclist
@Ksmiami:
Fortunately NFTs are different: you can decorate your living room with all those soon-to-be-worthless ugly pix of bored apes.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
The only that concerns me is if the Fed has to step in to bail these assholes out the way they bailed out the S&L fuckers and the apocryphal named Long Term Capital Management
Chetan Murthy
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch: jesus, that would piss me off
Mimi
@NotMax:
That was the phone number at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Covid closed it and it’s slated for demolition.
lowtechcyclist
@Mai Naem mobile:
I’ve told this story here before, but a year or two before the pandemic, I inadvertently discovered that Wernher von Braun is buried in the same cemetery where we’d buried my father a few years earlier.
I mentioned this to two co-workers, one mid-20s, the other pushing 40. “Who’s Wernher von Braun?” they asked. I explained, and mentioned that he was the subject of a song by Tom Lehrer. “Who’s Tom Lehrer?” Ouch.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
If they had only listened to Larry David
Baud
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
Who’s Larry David?
lowtechcyclist
@Rob:
And that 549 and 548 were really KI9 and KI8, with KI being the first two letters of King (as in King Street, I guess). I grew up south of Alexandria where everyone had 765 and 768 prefixes, which was really SOuth 5 and SOuth 8.
Abnormal Hiker
@Rob: I’m old enough that I remember the Anti-Digit Dialing League
Salty Sam
A co-worker once told of a conversation she’d overheard between her teen daughter and a friend-
“Who were the Beatles?”
”Oh, some band Paul McCartney was in before Wings”
Double ouch!
Baud
@Abnormal Hiker:
Never should have gotten rid of human switchboard operators.
Baud
@Salty Sam:
I heard Paul is currently on tour. About to finish up at the Meadowlands, I believe.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I recently had an exchange on Reddit with someone who said they were not taught about Watergate and had no idea why people of a certain age hated Nixon.
Ken
@Salty Sam: I could swear that was a commercial a few years (decades?) ago, with a second punchline: “Paul McCartney was in a band?
On reflection, probably decades, since IIRC the conversation was between two girls who were browsing the bins in a (vinyl) record store.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@lowtechcyclist: I remember our family phone number being OL2-xxxx and I remember adults would say “Olson 2” or “GRanite 4” but they changed to all digits when I was still quite small.
No longer useful skills: I know how to dial a dial phone that has a dial lock on it preventing the dial from turning.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I just looked up his age. Today is his 80th birthday.
Mick Jagger, who was on tour until he got Covid recently, turns 79 next month.
The notion of 80 year old rock n’ rollers just weirds me out.
Ken
@Brachiator: I’m hoping for a followup report where Google HR explains that their administrative leave policy was recently automated and is being run by an instance of the LaMDA bot.
Kropacetic
I find that especially offensive considering that all the cryptobugs I know who are politically active are fascists of the faux-libertarian variety. Ron Paul fans. They always said crypto would take down the government, they just had mechanism of action wrong.
Ken
Even when I was young, the American History classes never got to the last chapters of the textbook (say, post-1945) by the end of the school year. And they haven’t added days to the school calendar.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
The drugs part of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is now lipitor and Viagra.
Brachiator
@Mai Naem mobile:
I was watching a British TV quiz show, QI.
One of the questions was about The Sound of Music. One of the younger comedians on the panel had never even heard of the movie before.
I was watching some YouTube channel where people in their 20s refer to films like Alien and The Godfather as films of Hollywood’s classic era.
For some younger people, the only Michael Caine movie they know is Batman Begins or The Dark Knight.
Another YouTube film fan was reacting to Casablanca. As the credits rolled by, she noted, “I don’t know who any of those people are.”
ETA. There are YouTube channels where people record themselves watching and reacting to TV shows and recent and older movies. One person admitted that they had never seen a black and white movie. When I was a college film buff I had friends who had never seen or purposely avoided silent movies.
Abnormal Hiker
.@Baud: Actually I remember that too. Our phone number was 510W1
Rob
@lowtechcyclist: Yep! I learned KIx for one of those numbers, in the early 60s. The next 54x number, I just learned the number (I think that was in the 1980s).
Rob
@Abnormal Hiker: Huh. What’s that?
Math Guy
Crypto represents nothing more than an increase in entropy so has no intrinsic value.
HinTN
@lowtechcyclist:
“The rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
“‘That’s not my department,’ says Werner con Braun.”
azlib
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
I doubt the Fed will do that. The crypto market is just not that big.
Rob
@lowtechcyclist: The notion of 64-year-old rock & rollers would have weirded me out … 40 years ago. Now that I’m 64, it doesn’t at all.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
@Baud: this guy (video)
Steeplejack
@JPL:
She also rhapsodized about Clarence Thomas.
Kropacetic
One thing that I’ve loved to see as I’ve gotten older, the notion of “you’re too old for X” seems to be flying out the window.
Abnormal Hiker
@Rob:nickvsnetworking.com has “the strange history and triumphs of a group formed to protest the removal of letters from the dialing plan”
kalakal
@Salty Sam:
A few years back in England Prince Charles went on a rant about modern architects etc ” Town planners have done more harm to our cities than the Luftwaffe”. Friend thought it was a pretty good joke, told it at work to his juniors who all laughed. As he walked out the office he heard the whisper
“What’s the Luftwaffe?”
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
I am OK with this. I remember when the Stones would include old blues legends as guest performers. And of course many of these artists continued to perform for years.
It’s odd or fun to think that Mick Jagger has been around since rock and roll was a baby.
Rob
@Abnormal Hiker: Ah, thanks!
germy shoemangler
Security has tightened!
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
@lowtechcyclist:
I can’t blame them. He stopped working for all purposes in 1967.
Every so often I would read about Lehrer, but I never looked up his songs until he appeared on a PBS American Experience documentary in 2019.
Salty Sam
Hmm- I never saw or heard such a commercial, but maybe my co-worker was riffing off it? That conversation with her took place in 1981…
kalakal
@Brachiator:
I’ve known quite a few people ( within about 10 years of my age and I’m 62) saying that.
“Oh no that’s really old, can’t be any good” said one when I mentioned binging the night before with Some Like It Hot and Arsenic and Old Lace
lowtechcyclist
@Steeplejack:
[quoted tweet]
Not only that, but he could have objected to what’s become the excessive use of the shadow docket for very non-routine decisions, not to mention their gutting of the 14th and 15th amendments, or the recent rationales of their decisions being the legal equivalent of shouting “Catch-22, Catch-22” while on the rampage.
I think he only cares about the Supreme Court as an institution to the extent that having others respect it enables him to further his ideological objectives. Fuck him sideways.
lowtechcyclist
@kalakal:
I played some Marx Brothers movies for the kiddo a few years back, and he enjoyed them at the time. (Who knows what he’d think, now that he’s in his mid-teens.) So at the very least, he won’t be able to say he’s never seen a B&W movie.
Brachiator
@kalakal:
RE: One person admitted that they had never seen a black and white movie
Most people in my social circle have been film Buffs and so have seen a wide range of films. But there was a time when I had coworkers who had not seen any film older than Star Wars.
Yeah, I see that a lot among younger film buffs. I used to listen to a film podcast where one of the hosts admitted that he had to fight an urge to dismiss older films as “grand dad movies.” He also admitted to being weirded out if he watched a film where none of the cast was still living.
Another frequent complaint is that older films are too slowly paced. They want to get to the action right away.
Just One More Canuck
@Baud: they say it’s his birthday
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist: heh, good for you
@Brachiator:
Never thought of that, certainly never bothered me but then I’m an insensitive clod.
It does get to me sometimes when I think that the vast majority of the films, books, plays & music I grew up with might as well date to the Elizabethan era to people under 30. Only natural, I never went for my Grandparents stuff, but then a lot of that wasn’t readily available and was in low quality format.
I’m not talking of the more obscure stuff, eg Caravan, Faust & The Pink Fairies were never that popular but if you think that practically every movie Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway or Julie Christie was in is unknown to people under 30 it’s quite sobering
Uncle Jeffy
“Those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” – George Santayana (among others)
Ksmiami
@JPL: @David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
No effing way – these guys operated outside the purview and safety of the US financial system. There will not be a bailout
Brachiator
@kalakal:
Yeah. It’s crazy. A 20 something YouTube personality was watching Top Gun, to prepare for the sequel. She said that she had never seen a movie with Tom Cruise. Some other people who had watched Rain Man wondered what other movies Dustin Hoffman had been in.
When I was a college age film buff, Casablanca would have been from 30 years earlier. For a college kid today, the equivalent Golden Age would be 1992.
This would be the year of My Cousin Vinny, The Bodyguard, Wayne’s World, and Unforgiven.
Trine
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan) Granted my MBA is 20 years old, I will say that my Econ courses did not cover Tulipmania. I learned about that on my own, as well. I looked at BTC when my kiddos were little and concluded I was fast too risk-averse to gamble on it.
My boy just turned 20 and back in Feb/March, based on Elon, decided crypto was The Thing (honey, no.) Thank dog he didn’t have enough money to “invest.” He is sure Mom, who spent a career in IT, is old and just doesn’t understand technology like our jeenyus Musk-boi.
pluky
@Mai Naem mobile:
How does someone become well enough educated to get into graduate school without ever learning of the Dutch tulip bubble? Oy!
kalakal
@Trine: Tulipmania was in passing part of my (Uk equivalent of high school ) history classes. We focussed more on the South Sea Bubble* and Sir John Law’s* * fun & games in France & Mississippi a century later . Tom Levenson is the Jackal for this stuff, he wrote a book on it
* Often described as the World’s first Ponzi scheme with the sadly probably apocryphal prospectus “A Company for carrying on an undertaking of Great Advantage, but no one to know what it is.”
** A man who I dearly hope is a distant relative
Bill Arnold
@lowtechcyclist:
Since this is a crytocurrency thread, Dr. Wernher von Braun wrote a sci-fi book in the 1948 (published in English several years later), in which the ruler of Mars is called “Elon”: : Project MARS(Das Marsprojekt) (Dr. Wernher von Braun, English translation by Henry 1 White, Lt. Cdr. USN)
Chapter 24 How Mars is Governed
…
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
The Lodger
@lowtechcyclist: so it was 16 years ago that Paul was 64. Great day in musical history.
Wapiti
@Mai Naem mobile: I remember, about kindergarten/early elementary school, the public service campaign pushing zip codes. It actually started in 1963, so the campaigned continued for several years or my memories are off.
eta: checking online, zip codes were made mandatory in 1967.
Kevin
@Ksmiami: unless you hack someone and need to get paid in return for giving all their data back.
opiejeanne
@Ken: It was a joke Billy Crystal told, pretending to be a very old man because his daughter asked him if he knew that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.
opiejeanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: My dad was giving out the phone number for a Los Angeles municipal building when I was small, and was asked by the person on the phone, how do I make a Capital 2?
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
Perry Mason’s phone number is MAdison 5-1190 (“The Case of the Fugitive Nurse,” February 1958).
Ksmiami
@Kevin: Due to Russia’s invasion, there’s been a quiet but widespread crack down on the hacker shops tg
kalakal
@opiejeanne: When I first moved to the US I was on the phone trying to activate some service or other and was asked to enter my birth date followed by “the pound sign”. Stopped me dead, I’d never heard the # symbol referred to as pound. I was desperately looking for a Sterling symbol.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: Our prefix was Edgewood, our last name was Edgeworth, and my grandmother had a funny conversation with an operator who kept getting the two mixed up.
We got a phone when I entered Kindergarten, a party line. We used Grandma’s if we had to phone someone before that. She lived next door.
opiejeanne
@kalakal: I had a similar reaction, because that symbol meant “number” to me, and I grew up in the US. I wondered if they wanted me to punch in “lb”.
Tony G
Other people can judge whether this makes me a bad person — but the level of my sympathy for people who were stupid and arrogant enough to invest a significant amount of actual money in “cryptocurrency” is close to zero. There are plenty of people in the world who actually deserve sympathy. Those idiots are not in that category, as far as I’m concerned.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
My grandparents were on a party line on their Tennessee farm. On visits in the ’60s, we kids were fascinated that you didn’t just answer the phone but had to wait to see if it was your ring pattern.
Ruckus
@Baud:
My job in the navy was called internal communications. We had the switchboard for all incoming phone calls. (Yes I was in the navy a long time ago) The switches were all mechanical, had those wire/jack plugs that you pulled out of the table and plugged into the number you needed. And it only worked when the ship was docked and plugged in to the dock. (Yes I was in the navy a long time ago. The damn ship was launched 60 yrs ago, it was considered almost new when I showed up, the new ship smell was still there……) (And yes the new ship smell after 2 weeks of having crew was body odor. You try having 80 people sleep in the same room with limited running water….)
James E Powell
@Baud:
My sister & her husband saw him at SoFi last month. Said he was fantastic. Neither one is a huge Beatles fan, though my brother in law was somewhat influenced by watching parts of the Get Back series with me.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@opiejeanne:
I figure there’s an updated version of that joke involving Dave Grohl and his band before Foo Fighters.
James E Powell
@Ken:
When I was in high school (class of ’73) the textbook ended with the Cold War & had nothing about the 60s, not even JFK. The only African American in the book was Booker T Washington and the only thing they said about him was peanut butter.
If you are hoping it’s better now, I have something to tell you that will make you sad.
James E Powell
@kalakal:
It is an excellent book. A fascinating subject & very well written.
Dopey-o
Until Trump came along, Nixon was the greatest American mass-murderer. Nixon sent 25,000 American boys to die in the war he knew was unwinnable.
Genius Nixon won 49 states in 1972, so Watergate was a complete waste of time, an own-goal of massive stupidity.
SteverinoCT
@James E Powell:
Peanut butter was George Washington Carver.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
George Washington Carver.
J_A
@Rob:
This past Wednesday, I ended in a microbrewery where a Police cover band was playing (called Badcops, hehe, probably because they were not as good as Police).
In any case, I’m sure the servers were the youngest people there. And the only ones who didn’t sing along. Probably they hadn’t wikipediaded “Police (band)” either. All the rest, we were jumping, and clapping, and dancing and having fun. I’m sure our children and grandchildren would have disapproved. But they hadn’t been invited to the fun.
Me, I’m 59, and was having a blast, even posting pics and videos for my jealous friends who were missing on beers and music.