FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
Yeah I can't defend the monkey picture application of NFTs, I'm talking about the underlying technology.
Burberry's sales have been cratering. It's just the lifecycle of the heritage brand. Lately they've been trying to reset to their "heritage" items, but the efforts have been flailing so far. You can tell, because I've read their puff pieces placed in the NYT and WSJ fashion sections, and they don't mention WWI, which is basically the birth of the brand. In WWI the iconic Burberry "Trench" coat existed for the trenches, and it was so good that while it was never issued British officers would buy them with their own money.
What I think could be a useful application of the NFT concept is if we manage to culturally tie the concept of owning an authentic rolex (and the utils that produces for people who own one) into owning the watch + the NFT associated with it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
The book made Romain Gary one the guys I want to dive into this year, he's fascinating. WWII vet, fought under De Gaulle, married Jean Seberg before the FBI drove her to suicide. He actually won the Goncourt prize, the French equivalent to a Pulitzer in fiction, twice, despite the rules saying that you can only win it once, because he released another book under a pseudonym and his fake persona won the prize.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
It appears to be OP's position that the majority of the American public is engaged in some level of treason against itself.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
You literally said these are the consequences of shooting protestors.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
The merits seem to change on a daily basis, and have not been explained publicly in any way. I watched Hegseth's interview on 60 minutes last night, his explanation of the demand for "unconditional surrender" was vague to the point of incoherence. He smirked and played coy about whether there were troops on the ground ("well I sure wouldn't tell you that would I?" "we're not ruling anything out"), until the interviewer pointed out that he had said there were no troops on the ground earlier in the week at which point he claimed that was accurate.
As Daryl Cooper pointed out during the Gaza war, when Unconditional Surrender Grant or Eisenhower or Mcarthur demanded Unconditional Surrender from their foes, there was a basic understanding that once the foe surrendered, the conqueror would take on the government of the surrendered territory. We do not seem to intend to do that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
Israel and the US Military (but perhaps, not Trump) may have a plan that could work - but if the propaganda apparatus is efficacious enough Trump will bail and we'll be stuck with a hankering for revenge outcome.
Does anyone actually have any idea what this plan is? Has it been expressed to anyone publicly?
If it's a plan that won't work, isn't it treasonous to support it by your standard?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
Although it did seem to very much alter the relationship between Venezuela and America's respective "regimes".
Mostly unilaterally, on the part of the United States.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
"Treason is a charge invented by winners as an excuse to hang the losers."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
That would be a very good reason not to start wars that lack democratic approval.
The purpose of requiring a congressional declaration of war is to make sure that you avoid this problem by having democratic backing for your war effort.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
I just finished Romain Gary's The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a genuinely mind-blowingly brilliant literary work that I only heard about because I saw it in the book review section of a vintage 1968 Playboy magazine I was reading. It's a buddy-cop novel set in the 1960s about the ghost of a Jewish comic that haunts the SS officer turned police chief who shot him, who have to solve a series of murders of naked men found around their German town. The best book I've read this year so far.
I also read Mann's Death in Venice, which...what the fuck? It's just that? This is a well known literary book I've run into mentions of many times, and it turns out it's just a book about an old German who spends the whole book mooning after a "beautiful" twelve year old Polish boy. I was less disgusted by Lolita. Just, what the fuck how was this published in 1912 Germany?
I'm starting the Canterbury Tales which is kinda leaving me flat. I think the translation I'm reading, which is the one leftover from the great books course I took in undergrad sixteen years ago, is kinda bad. It uses a lot of minced oaths, which just seem odd. It uses the word "screw" a lot to mean "have sex with" which just takes me out of the piece, it should be either "make love to" or "fuck," any other term is unpoetic to me. Stuff like that. I'm trying to do one tale a night, and the good news is the book is just a few of them, so I can switch translations soon, does anyone have a favorite? I prefer poetic beauty to accuracy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
And really I think most of the AGI people will be happy to go about this probabilistically, you don't need AGI to have a 100% chance of coming about for these investments to become rational, as little as a 5% chance can make these investments start to make sense.
If you're willing to concede that you're talking about most AGI people, then I think we're in complete agreement! I'm not saying that all belief in AGI can be described as religious in nature, or that all people who have any level of belief in it can be described as religious. I'm saying that there exists some percentage of people working in AI who have an absurd, religious level of belief both in the odds of AGI occurring and the things that AGI will be able to do, and the combination is such that these people have effectively zero concern for all the sorts of things that ordinary investors care about. There's some level of irrational belief in the Singularity that is best analogized to religious belief in the apocalypse, and I think there's a percentage of workers in AI who have the belief.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
It's basically a fancy, unbreakable, unforgeable Certificate of Authenticity that comes with your aunt's collectible plates. The thing is, Certificates of Authenticity are a huge part of the economy. A huge percentage of what people pay for in many consumer goods is essentially some form of branding value, the provenance of the good rather than the use value. The NFT is a way to totally detach that from the manufacturing process, while also making it more concrete.
Whine about it if you must, but a huge percentage of the global economy is run on the basis that a Rolex Submariner is worth more than an Armida built to the same specs, a shirt from Ralph Lauren or Lacoste is worth more than one from LAA, an Hermes purse is worth more than one from Quince, etc. The material cost or production cost differences between the fashion brand name items and the knockoff is minimal, or sometimes even reversed: LAA almost certainly pays their workers more than Ralph Lauren does. The use value difference is virtually zero for the consumer, except insasmuch as the consumer draws value out of having an "authentic" xyz.
You can argue that there is no material difference between an "authentic" Rolex and a superfake, or between an Hermes Birkin and any other leather tote bag, but a huge portion of the economy is built on the opposite assumption. Is there any sense in which any visual art is worth more when authentic versus printed at a sufficient resolution and quality? The industry is built on that assumption.
The NFT, if accepted as the financial representation of that branding value, allows that value to be entirely controlled and separated from the good itself. The sense of "participation" that people have when buying something from a stylish brand can be marketed separately from the good itself, leaving behind the current crisis level concerns about superfakes and copies.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
They could be right, but that doesn't change the facts: if you're examining this from an investor's perspective, the insiders don't really think in the same frame of mind we do.
The investor is like a sports gambler trying to bet on a fight, and the companies are like a fighter who thinks he's figured out a brand new unbeatable Steven Seagal kick that will win them the fight. The gambler is betting based on conditioning, style vs style, form in fights going into the match, etc. The fighter thinks that conditioning and form are pointless to worry about it because the only question is will the kick work or won't the kick work.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
How exactly am I sneering? Calling something a religion does not mean that it is (necessarily) wrong or stupid, only that attempting to reason within a normal paradigm with believers in it is probably a waste of time, because their eschatology makes your reasoning irrelevant.
Trying to tell a Jehovah's Witness in 1970 about Stock:Bond ratios in retirement savings would be silly, because in the Jehovah's Witness' mind there was no retirement to worry about: the world was going to end in 1975 and that's all there was to it. If he had been correct, you would be the idiot trying to talk about Stock:Bond ratios; the world didn't end, so all the people who had no savings in 1976 were worse off.
The AGI fanatics don't care about P:E or debt ratios, because they won't matter once the Rapture Singularity occurs. It's the same reasoning. It's an essentially religious framework, immanentizing the eschaton. If you believe in it, sure, great, argue for your religion. It doesn't change the way to look at it from an investing perspective.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Believing that AGI is possible doesn't really require any kind of religion.
Believing that after AGI is cracked nothing else matters is the religion.
Much like fanatical Jehovah's Witnesses my father grew up with didn't save money because they thought the world was going to end in 1975.
In the same way you can't really examine the financial strategies of someone who thinks the world will end in 1975; you can't examine a company making decisions about investment and debt load based on immanentizing the eschaton.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm praying things quiet down, and doubting that they will.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
How many important actors in the AI space need to be religious fanatics for it to start to alter the spending patterns?
There's some subset of people you run into who genuinely believe in the Singularity, that the moment AGI is cracked nothing else matters. The whole concept of worrying about debt load after your company cracks AGI is silly, if another company cracks AGI first then having good profit margins won't save you. If it ushers in the end times, or Gay Luxury Space Communism, worrying about whether you lied to shareholders? Stupid.
The religious fanatics will say whatever they need to in order to push ahead.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Not to be a pessimist, but my prediction has long been that ROC and PRC would reunify in the near future, but that it would be primarily peaceful and political with minimal violence amounting to protests or riots rather than open war.
Accepting ad arguendo that the USA has demonstrated an ability to engage in impressive acts of violence. The Axis of Resistance basically hasn't had shit-all for the Western bloc in Iran and Ukraine.
But there's also been enormous signals of the decline of a unified Western bloc during the past year.
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The least of the things I would brag about regarding Mrs. FiveHour. By far the greatest blessing in my life. Though, also, yeah, I'd brag about it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
If you don't mind, update me on how it goes. I strongly suspect that Mrs FiveHour is going to be on a similar track, long before pregnancy she was on a strict yoga regimen to avoid back pain from her tig ol bitties.
ETA: Asked Mrs. FiveHour, she said to emphasize how natural they look when you do see them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I was approximately 2 years younger the last time I posted here. Work, relationship, life all got in the way of forum posting for multiple hours a day! I didn't stop browsing though.
Mazel Tov!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Material maybe, but I think that dead servicemen would probably bail Trump out of this one public opinion wise, wouldn't it?
If Iran sinks a USN ship with significant casualties, Americans will be baying for blood.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
And now we see famous finger-in-the-wind Haircut Newsom calling Israel an Apartheid State.
Is he still disgraced? The whole thing seemed so silly I kind of assumed it would blow over.
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