The problem of not knowing how powerful or weak certain weapons/attacks are has been a major problem since the second Avengers movie. There are just too many characters with too many different types of powers. So in one movie, Vision is basically a god that can defeat someone by himself that six Avengers working together cant defeat, and then in another movie he is far less powerful than Iron Man by himself. None of it makes any sense.
Tanking is so overrated. As a Mavs fan I am watching the team lean on a second rounder (Jalen Brunson) and an undrafted player (Dorian Finney-Smith). While the first round pick from two years ago barely plays (Josh Green). Maybe if NBA teams could competently draft it would make sense, but I would rather build a winning culture then hope to win the lottery. I think building a culture like the Spurs or Heat who are expected to be competitive no matter whose on the team is underrated and the idea of magically losing your way into drafting the next Lebron is way overrated.
Matt, given your point about NGDP futures & rich philanthropists it may be worth tweeting at SBF about this given that he follows you on Twitter (and presumably doesn't read SB) and is interested in futures markets (and creating them!) and presumably at least partially futarchy (I presume).
Is there enough plot in Moby Dick to justify a series? Wouldn't you have to have entire episodes of Ahab giving chapter-long speeches, or documentary-style disquisitions on (inaccurate) whale anatomy?
For the $60k question, work was good these last two years, we had more income in our household that we had to do something with. The cellular/mobile internet industry did very well during Covid and remains strong.
We did what we always do with income increases or unexpected windfalls - allocate 20% to charity, 30% to various saving goals and the rest depending on a running prioritized list we keep. In our case, we opted to get solar put on our house which should be installed in a month or two. Not a trivial expense by any means, but one that should pay for itself in 7-10 years and maybe sooner thanks to inflation. While that spending is nominally consumption and inflationary, I also consider it an investment that improves our resiliency and takes one drop of water out of the ocean that is the problem of climate change.
About the Russia question I think a lot of people including me really underestimated the pent-up rage Europe had against Putin. Germany and the UK are mad he murdered people on the streets of their capital cities. Poland hates Russia even more than it hates gay people. Half of Eastern Europe’s leaders seem positively delighted at the opportunity to shovel lethal aid into Ukraine if it kills Russian soldiers. Europe seems to collectively have reached a “enough with this guy’s shit” moment and really taken Ukraine as an opportunity to stick it to him.
Regarding the Fed managing checking accounts for all Americans, I read the link to the Morgan Ricks discussion and my conclusion was . . . not convinced.
The Fed has a bit over 2000 staff members, largely professional economists and the like. On what planet do we see a Fed that can be transformed to manage more than 300 million checking accounts with all the churn and turmoil this entails (you know, people being born, people dying, people who are not online, etc etc). There is no way the Federal Reserve could ever do this (and still be something we recognize as "the Fed.")
Maybe some kind of Fed/Social Security Administration partnership? I'm not sure SSA would be up to this either. Handling active checking accounts would still be an order of magnitude (at least) harder than tracking people's Social Security contributions.
It just seems the theoretical benefit of such a thing is far outweighed by the enormous complications of creating and managing such a program.
You might be selling the Fed a bit short. I mean, they are the central bank of the US, they probably have some idea of how to track accounts. Plus I suspect they would have a very narrow focus (basically just risk-free deposit accounts). I think the main concern is that they would displace checking accounts at traditional banks, which would make the business of commercial banking riskier and make it harder for businesses to take out loans.
> NFTs are not in any particularly clear way “more useless” than gold jewelry.
NFTs (and I'm sure I'm getting this subtly wrong, because they are _weird_), are not akin to gold jewelry. They are more akin to a reservation slip to go look at a piece of gold somewhere. You own that slip, sure, but other slips for the exact same thing can be printed, and there's nothing you could do about it. You know where the gold is, because the slip tells you, but it could be moved, and again, nothing you could do about it.
I don't own NFTs and have no interest in them, but I've never understood how the "I could just right click this" objection is totally different from owning art, or buying a famous photo, or whatever. For the cost of a large-format printer you can have basically any painting or photo you want in your house, provided a hi-res photo exists of it. But people who are fans of the artist value having the original.
This is also true (and closer to the point, I think) in lower-brow collectibles—Pokemon cards, posters, etc. Or ebooks—you could just right click and save as an EPUB, provided somebody else has stripped the DRM for you. (And they certainly have, in most cases.) Digital music back when people bought that a la carte. Subscribing to Nintendo Switch Online instead of buying one of those new Steam handhelds and filling it with ROMs. (This happens, in fact, even in cases where you're no longer directly benefiting the original author—like, why do I buy a used copy of an out-of-print videogame instead of downloading it? People spend hundreds of dollars on Super Nintendo games I've been able to emulate since 1998.)
I think the "right click" objection demonstrates that for people who don't care about whoever is making the NFT (or whatever it represents), the NFT has no value. Which makes perfect sense to me. But if you DO like the artist or weird collective or whatever, having the "real" version of a thing, or a specific version of the thing that's yours and yours only, has an appeal that I think fans and fandoms have demonstrated over and over.
Right now it's way too toxic, and for good reason, but if the huge climate/energy cost gets loudly and publicly solved—big if!—I suspect that a few years down the line more artists and creators will dabble with this kind of thing. They might call it something else because the brand is permanently fried, but "digital merch with a serial number" maps onto a lot of the physical-world stuff people have bought and cherished for irrational reasons for hundreds of years.
> but I've never understood how the "I could just right click this" objection is totally different from owning art, or buying a famous photo, or whatever.
> having the "real" version of a thing, or a specific version of the thing that's yours and yours only, has an appeal that I think fans and fandoms have demonstrated over and over.
I didn't mention this, but I can speak to it. With an NFT you don't "own the original". Or rather the original that you actually own is not the thing the artist made. It's a pointer to the thing. Kind of. My "reservation to see the thing" analogy is closer.
As a really obvious example, when you own that photo or pokemon card, you can resell it. When you own the NFT of a *thing*, you can't sell the *thing*, just the NFT. Just the reservation.
In a very real sense, it's just a number. A unique number, for sure. But you bought a number.
I'm not sure I see why you think that's inherently the case about NFTs—if you *believe* the numbers minted by the original artist or creator are real and represent unique instances of the "thing," which you do if you are in this inherently irrational collector or art-supporter's market, you effectively do own the thing *within* that market or fandom, which is why Ape Club (or whatever it is) people will not buy your JPG but will buy your Official Verified Thing.
Like, with a little trouble I could print a Charizard card that is indistinguishable from the original, but people wouldn't buy it from me for $5000. (Or they'd be really mad if they found out they had.) That's totally irrational—my card looks the same, you can put it in your deck and play with it, you can sell it yourself later on when you get into Magic, and I can make a million of them. But people want "the real one" and within the "people really interested in Pokemon cards" market the definition of "the real one" is very particular. (For people who only casually enjoy it, as with people who only casually enjoy art, a bootleg or a copy to hang on your wall is great and serves exactly the same purpose, just like I could have a goofy profile pic on Twitter if I wanted by right-clicking Jimmy Fallon's ape.)
My point is just that I think that's a durable desire people have, one that is both effectively already priced into a lot of markets (even for digital goods) and likely to become more widespread in digital art and (ugh) content creation if and when NFTs are either replaced by similar services without the political baggage or created by default on platforms that don't have a bunch of ugly environmental costs.
I don't think that's true—if you look at the most obvious 1:1 digital version of a physical idea, NBA Top Shots, there's a functioning market despite our having this conversation during a crypto collapse and way after the TopShots peak. Somebody just spent $75 15 minutes ago to purchase a 1-of-3000 Fred VanVleet highlight from 2020. The NBA's highlights website is best-in-class; it would be extremely easy to go to that Raptors/Pacers video box score and pull the same highlight into your downloads folder.
Of course people spent up to 10 times that prior to the crash in value, and the marketplace is full of people paying $3 for more common cards, but as someone who collected physical basketball cards as a kid I can confirm that huge (often decade-long) peaks and crashes in value and swarms of common cards are the norm.
Even if they were fully formed you would expect most NFTs to be worthless in the aftermarket just like you'd expect most physical collectibles to be worthless. (Even moreso, probably, since there's fewer barriers to creating one.) I listened to a lot of Christian rock growing up, and my CDs and posters and shirts regrettably have not appreciated in value like some of their secular counterparts.
Isn't it more like getting a reservation slip to go see a piece of gold that everyone else can see except they don't have that precious reservation slip?
There's a subtlety there because it's not necessarily something that everyone in the public has access to. The NFT could be a for a private URL that's just for you. But like I said, that URL could go inactive, because you don't own the server it's pointing to. And the person that made the NFT could make an identical one and sell it to someone else.
The wizards have never drafted a player who in hindsight was the best player they could’ve taken at that position in any draft ever. There’s an argument to be made that they’re actually the worst managed team in the league.
I think Inception would’ve made a better mini-series. The movie isn’t bad, but the premise is so complicated that 90% of the runtime ends up being exposition. I could see a scenario where they spend more time fleshing out Hardy and Page’s characters and don’t even enter Cillian Murphy’s dream until the end of episode 3.
Say what you want about Mitch McConnell, but he has been a pretty effective leader Senate Republicans. The one area he has been less effective at is actually passing legislation (although to be fair to him this might not actually be his goal). This gets to Matt's "lib boondoggle" point. He has not done a good job of racking up even small-time legislative wins for Republicans by making compromises with Democrats. Maybe he thinks letting Democrats destroy themselves trying to pass extreme all-or-nothing legislation is the better track, but it does not actually achieve any Republicans goals. Take the debt ceiling for example. I can imagine a compromise such as permently getting rid of the debt ceiling for a permanent Hyde Amendment. Would this be acceptable to Democrats? I don't know, but it is probably worth trying. Small legislative victories add up over time.
The problem of not knowing how powerful or weak certain weapons/attacks are has been a major problem since the second Avengers movie. There are just too many characters with too many different types of powers. So in one movie, Vision is basically a god that can defeat someone by himself that six Avengers working together cant defeat, and then in another movie he is far less powerful than Iron Man by himself. None of it makes any sense.
This is a deliberate provocation. I simply insist that Matt stop talking about "Anna Karenina".
Yep. Cash Win Money is the best player on the Wizards. And he was robbed of a ship in 2020 at MSU. Trump shoulda forced the NCAA to ball that spring.
"Trump allowing the Sprint/T-Mobile merger was an egregious failure ...."
Why? Sprint was faltering and T-Mobile couldn't scale up to Verizon and AT&T levels of bandwidth. The combined firm is now a true competitor.
Tanking is so overrated. As a Mavs fan I am watching the team lean on a second rounder (Jalen Brunson) and an undrafted player (Dorian Finney-Smith). While the first round pick from two years ago barely plays (Josh Green). Maybe if NBA teams could competently draft it would make sense, but I would rather build a winning culture then hope to win the lottery. I think building a culture like the Spurs or Heat who are expected to be competitive no matter whose on the team is underrated and the idea of magically losing your way into drafting the next Lebron is way overrated.
Matt, given your point about NGDP futures & rich philanthropists it may be worth tweeting at SBF about this given that he follows you on Twitter (and presumably doesn't read SB) and is interested in futures markets (and creating them!) and presumably at least partially futarchy (I presume).
Kalshi does a market forecasting nominal GDP!
https://kalshi.com/events/NGDP-22/markets/NGDP-22-C7.5
Is there enough plot in Moby Dick to justify a series? Wouldn't you have to have entire episodes of Ahab giving chapter-long speeches, or documentary-style disquisitions on (inaccurate) whale anatomy?
A props of Moby-Dick I always liked this Clickhole article: https://clickhole.com/the-time-i-spent-on-a-commercial-whaling-ship-totally-c-1825124286/
For the $60k question, work was good these last two years, we had more income in our household that we had to do something with. The cellular/mobile internet industry did very well during Covid and remains strong.
We did what we always do with income increases or unexpected windfalls - allocate 20% to charity, 30% to various saving goals and the rest depending on a running prioritized list we keep. In our case, we opted to get solar put on our house which should be installed in a month or two. Not a trivial expense by any means, but one that should pay for itself in 7-10 years and maybe sooner thanks to inflation. While that spending is nominally consumption and inflationary, I also consider it an investment that improves our resiliency and takes one drop of water out of the ocean that is the problem of climate change.
About the Russia question I think a lot of people including me really underestimated the pent-up rage Europe had against Putin. Germany and the UK are mad he murdered people on the streets of their capital cities. Poland hates Russia even more than it hates gay people. Half of Eastern Europe’s leaders seem positively delighted at the opportunity to shovel lethal aid into Ukraine if it kills Russian soldiers. Europe seems to collectively have reached a “enough with this guy’s shit” moment and really taken Ukraine as an opportunity to stick it to him.
Regarding the Fed managing checking accounts for all Americans, I read the link to the Morgan Ricks discussion and my conclusion was . . . not convinced.
The Fed has a bit over 2000 staff members, largely professional economists and the like. On what planet do we see a Fed that can be transformed to manage more than 300 million checking accounts with all the churn and turmoil this entails (you know, people being born, people dying, people who are not online, etc etc). There is no way the Federal Reserve could ever do this (and still be something we recognize as "the Fed.")
Maybe some kind of Fed/Social Security Administration partnership? I'm not sure SSA would be up to this either. Handling active checking accounts would still be an order of magnitude (at least) harder than tracking people's Social Security contributions.
It just seems the theoretical benefit of such a thing is far outweighed by the enormous complications of creating and managing such a program.
You might be selling the Fed a bit short. I mean, they are the central bank of the US, they probably have some idea of how to track accounts. Plus I suspect they would have a very narrow focus (basically just risk-free deposit accounts). I think the main concern is that they would displace checking accounts at traditional banks, which would make the business of commercial banking riskier and make it harder for businesses to take out loans.
> NFTs are not in any particularly clear way “more useless” than gold jewelry.
NFTs (and I'm sure I'm getting this subtly wrong, because they are _weird_), are not akin to gold jewelry. They are more akin to a reservation slip to go look at a piece of gold somewhere. You own that slip, sure, but other slips for the exact same thing can be printed, and there's nothing you could do about it. You know where the gold is, because the slip tells you, but it could be moved, and again, nothing you could do about it.
How exactly does that have value?
I don't own NFTs and have no interest in them, but I've never understood how the "I could just right click this" objection is totally different from owning art, or buying a famous photo, or whatever. For the cost of a large-format printer you can have basically any painting or photo you want in your house, provided a hi-res photo exists of it. But people who are fans of the artist value having the original.
This is also true (and closer to the point, I think) in lower-brow collectibles—Pokemon cards, posters, etc. Or ebooks—you could just right click and save as an EPUB, provided somebody else has stripped the DRM for you. (And they certainly have, in most cases.) Digital music back when people bought that a la carte. Subscribing to Nintendo Switch Online instead of buying one of those new Steam handhelds and filling it with ROMs. (This happens, in fact, even in cases where you're no longer directly benefiting the original author—like, why do I buy a used copy of an out-of-print videogame instead of downloading it? People spend hundreds of dollars on Super Nintendo games I've been able to emulate since 1998.)
I think the "right click" objection demonstrates that for people who don't care about whoever is making the NFT (or whatever it represents), the NFT has no value. Which makes perfect sense to me. But if you DO like the artist or weird collective or whatever, having the "real" version of a thing, or a specific version of the thing that's yours and yours only, has an appeal that I think fans and fandoms have demonstrated over and over.
Right now it's way too toxic, and for good reason, but if the huge climate/energy cost gets loudly and publicly solved—big if!—I suspect that a few years down the line more artists and creators will dabble with this kind of thing. They might call it something else because the brand is permanently fried, but "digital merch with a serial number" maps onto a lot of the physical-world stuff people have bought and cherished for irrational reasons for hundreds of years.
> but I've never understood how the "I could just right click this" objection is totally different from owning art, or buying a famous photo, or whatever.
> having the "real" version of a thing, or a specific version of the thing that's yours and yours only, has an appeal that I think fans and fandoms have demonstrated over and over.
I didn't mention this, but I can speak to it. With an NFT you don't "own the original". Or rather the original that you actually own is not the thing the artist made. It's a pointer to the thing. Kind of. My "reservation to see the thing" analogy is closer.
As a really obvious example, when you own that photo or pokemon card, you can resell it. When you own the NFT of a *thing*, you can't sell the *thing*, just the NFT. Just the reservation.
In a very real sense, it's just a number. A unique number, for sure. But you bought a number.
I'm not sure I see why you think that's inherently the case about NFTs—if you *believe* the numbers minted by the original artist or creator are real and represent unique instances of the "thing," which you do if you are in this inherently irrational collector or art-supporter's market, you effectively do own the thing *within* that market or fandom, which is why Ape Club (or whatever it is) people will not buy your JPG but will buy your Official Verified Thing.
Like, with a little trouble I could print a Charizard card that is indistinguishable from the original, but people wouldn't buy it from me for $5000. (Or they'd be really mad if they found out they had.) That's totally irrational—my card looks the same, you can put it in your deck and play with it, you can sell it yourself later on when you get into Magic, and I can make a million of them. But people want "the real one" and within the "people really interested in Pokemon cards" market the definition of "the real one" is very particular. (For people who only casually enjoy it, as with people who only casually enjoy art, a bootleg or a copy to hang on your wall is great and serves exactly the same purpose, just like I could have a goofy profile pic on Twitter if I wanted by right-clicking Jimmy Fallon's ape.)
My point is just that I think that's a durable desire people have, one that is both effectively already priced into a lot of markets (even for digital goods) and likely to become more widespread in digital art and (ugh) content creation if and when NFTs are either replaced by similar services without the political baggage or created by default on platforms that don't have a bunch of ugly environmental costs.
Given that the resale value is basically nil for these things, I don't believe people view them this way.
I don't think that's true—if you look at the most obvious 1:1 digital version of a physical idea, NBA Top Shots, there's a functioning market despite our having this conversation during a crypto collapse and way after the TopShots peak. Somebody just spent $75 15 minutes ago to purchase a 1-of-3000 Fred VanVleet highlight from 2020. The NBA's highlights website is best-in-class; it would be extremely easy to go to that Raptors/Pacers video box score and pull the same highlight into your downloads folder.
Of course people spent up to 10 times that prior to the crash in value, and the marketplace is full of people paying $3 for more common cards, but as someone who collected physical basketball cards as a kid I can confirm that huge (often decade-long) peaks and crashes in value and swarms of common cards are the norm.
Even if they were fully formed you would expect most NFTs to be worthless in the aftermarket just like you'd expect most physical collectibles to be worthless. (Even moreso, probably, since there's fewer barriers to creating one.) I listened to a lot of Christian rock growing up, and my CDs and posters and shirts regrettably have not appreciated in value like some of their secular counterparts.
Isn't it more like getting a reservation slip to go see a piece of gold that everyone else can see except they don't have that precious reservation slip?
There's a subtlety there because it's not necessarily something that everyone in the public has access to. The NFT could be a for a private URL that's just for you. But like I said, that URL could go inactive, because you don't own the server it's pointing to. And the person that made the NFT could make an identical one and sell it to someone else.
The wizards have never drafted a player who in hindsight was the best player they could’ve taken at that position in any draft ever. There’s an argument to be made that they’re actually the worst managed team in the league.
I think Inception would’ve made a better mini-series. The movie isn’t bad, but the premise is so complicated that 90% of the runtime ends up being exposition. I could see a scenario where they spend more time fleshing out Hardy and Page’s characters and don’t even enter Cillian Murphy’s dream until the end of episode 3.
Q: Matt, do you recommend hiring a nanny?
A: hiring an ex-prisoner or recovering addict is a great idea!
I just thought this was unintentionally hilarious.
Say what you want about Mitch McConnell, but he has been a pretty effective leader Senate Republicans. The one area he has been less effective at is actually passing legislation (although to be fair to him this might not actually be his goal). This gets to Matt's "lib boondoggle" point. He has not done a good job of racking up even small-time legislative wins for Republicans by making compromises with Democrats. Maybe he thinks letting Democrats destroy themselves trying to pass extreme all-or-nothing legislation is the better track, but it does not actually achieve any Republicans goals. Take the debt ceiling for example. I can imagine a compromise such as permently getting rid of the debt ceiling for a permanent Hyde Amendment. Would this be acceptable to Democrats? I don't know, but it is probably worth trying. Small legislative victories add up over time.