this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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How wrong? Racist wrong or just "boiled eggs are tastier than fried eggs" wrong?
"Capitalism is good"
"Conservatives aren't completely selfish" (backed with links to leftist sources)
"NFTs aren't worthless"
"Making everyone people pay for rich people's college debt is wrong (and a net transfer of wealth upwards)"
"The central banks cause inflation on purpose"
Some are opinions, some are facts people don't like. All get down voted.
You're being proven right. You will get downvoted for these statements because a majority are just not factual.
The easiest to explain is NFTs are worthless. They have no legal validity for ownership. The largest portion of the NFT market is buying pictures, pictures which are hosted externally and can be taken down without respect to the NFT contract.
So in the majority use-case you neither have the picture stored, nor have exclusive legal ownership. So you're buying access to a very fancy, very energy intensive, url link.
That's not even getting into the politically charged arguments. The whole reason we have child labor laws, minimum wage, and OSHA requirements is because raw, unchecked capitalism was terrible for 99% of people.
I'm just going to address the easy one here (child labor), but capitalism is hardly unique when it comes to treatment of workers. Historically, no one gives a damn about those stupid, ugly, low class hillbillies.
NFTs are wild though, I don't get why or how anyone thought they would be a thing.
Oh, so you don't know what an NFT is. An NFT is a non-fungable token. This is a token that is distinct from other tokens, Some tokens are legally valid, some aren't. You use NFTs every day.
This "NFT = Not legally binding JPEG" thing stuck in your head has got to go. It was just a simple PoC that people took nobody but gamblers care for.
Your credit card is an NFT. Your drivers licence is an NFT. Your car title is an NFT. The car in monopoly is an NFT.
But being able to transfer and store NFTs on a trustless network is an amazing feat, and testing it with silly stuff like jpegs is the way to go before using it for something important.
Now imagine your car title is a legally binding NFT. You can prove you own your car, transfer ownership to the new owner, no trip to the DMV needed.
The supply chain is already using NFTs to prevent forgeries; tokens are created by the manufacturer and sent to the retailers. Retailers verify the tokens and know the real ones didn't fall off a truck.
At some point you'll use an NFT to check if those Air Jordan's on Craigslist are the real thing (or stolen). But like every other NFT you use you probably won't even know it.
It sounds like you don't know what an NFT is. A credit card isn't a NFT because there is no private key, it's only a public token that you hope is securely stored everywhere you put it in. You could put your credit card info on a sketchy website and they could use that exact same information for a purchase with no interaction on your part.
Same exact story with your driver's license. And the car in Monopoly? What the fuck dude, they're mass produced identical pieces of metal.
Maybe that's why you think it's so great, because you have no idea what is and isn't an NFT.
So every credit card is the same as every other credit card? Cool, can I use yours?
Every drivers license is the same as every other license? I dunno about that, mine has my info on it. I don't think yours does. These tokens don't appear to be fungible.
Every token in monopoly is played by any player? No there's one token per player and they're not interchangeable.
They are Tokens. That are not fungible. These are NFTs. You don't have to like it, but try to understand it.
A Token that is unique and different from other tokens is "non-fungible",
My drivers license is non-fungible. So is my car title.
Dollars are fungible. A $10 bill is a $10 bill.
Cars are not fungible. My car is not the same as your car.
Non-Fungible Tokens can be physical things. There were nfts long before the the internet and you use tons of them, online and off. You just don't know.
We can agree on what the words mean individually, but an NFT is not just some physical item which is unique. NFTs are unique and are only possible to transfer if you have the private key. So saying that your credit card number is an NFT because it's a token which is non-fungible is missing the point, and being intentionally obtuse.
I'm kinda done with this, we are not going to get any further in this discussion.
Elon Musk is really stupid socially and say and do a lot of shit but he’s very capable technically and contribute in his role at SpaceX and Tesla?
I’m not in any political or religious communities, but I’m in a lot of technical communities and this seems to be as controversial as you can get. It’s a topic people seem to have 100% set opinions on, are not open for any change, and really dislike people with the other opinion.
It’s not local to the Fediverse though but seems to be the state of Internet in general.
I have yet to see what technical brilliance he has beyond the ability to spend the interest gained on his billions of dollars.
He certainly doesn’t seem very good at spending them, everything around the whole Twitter purchase is just handled so staggering poorly.
For technical abilities, I’m just watching interviews where the way he presents and give answers around SpaceX and Tesla is far beyond what any smooth talking business man could normally manage. He’ll take very technical questions about specific rocket propulsion parts and can reason about them and answer.
Smart people that have worked with him also agree that he has great, technical capacity: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/is-elon-musk-just-a-sales-guy-9d3eb7a1b49c
He’s clearly very often an unlikable person and he says something stupid / childish etc in almost every interview, so I don’t have any problem with people that makes up their mind about him from that alone. On a human level it does usually overshadow any better qualities.