I despair. Since I watched that Dan Olson video about crypto, and really learned how stupidly deep the rabbit hole goes, I’ve started regularly checking David Gerard’s blog, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, every morning. This is too much. After a few decades of dealing with the ludicrously inane garbage creationists spew, and living under Donald Trump, and then having to wallow in the idiocy of Jordan Peterson, now I’m going to pay attention to criminal grifting NFT-bros? Brain, stop it.
At this rate, every last bit of my confidence in the fundamental goodness of humanity is going to be eradicated. We apparently have no vestige of any kind of survival instinct left.
After decades of therapy and despair, I’ve reached a state of calm acceptance that human “intelligence” is simply a mutational aberration that doomed us (and millions of other species) the day we dropped out of the trees. I mean, will no-one think of the widespread depression among anaerobic critters back during the Great Oxygenation Event?
In the end, microbes will be the only winners to see the sun begin its transition to a red giant.
All money is fake. We are living in a mass delusion that only works because we think slips of paper are worth something. NFTs and Crypto are just fake money without the paper. Hell most money has existed virtually in computers for decades now. Then you have Wall Street (greed for lack of a better word is good). We have a whole class of people who do nothing but trade virtual things for virtual money to buy other virtual things. Why do these people even exist? What do they do?
I’ve worked in labor my entire adult life. I trade my labor for money that I use to buy things I can’t make. Seeing billionaires who don’t know shit from shinola fly to space just for fun pisses me off so much. Could Elon Musk wire up a Tesla? Could Jeff Bezos work a single shift in a warehouse without shitting his own pants? Does Bill Gates know Python? Capitalism is killing America. A slow death by small cuts but we will die if it continues. This is not a sustainable system.
The madness of crowds. Just goes to show that mental disease can be social as well as organic, and we can’t even do the obvious things to deal with covid.
We’ve been around for what? Barely an eye blink. Not nearly enough time to develop the brains to figure out how to use brains sensibly. At least not at any critical scale.
Tick-tock, humans. Time is the fire in which we burn.
I’ve spent too many years working jobs where I’ve had to help anyone who could trigger a door sensor or use a telephone, so now am just accepting that some people are essentially potted plants without mobility issues. Here in Canada’s capital, an event organized by white supremacists has our city streets blocked and snarled by long haul truckers, upset over the fact that they don’t have the free-dumb to randomly infect others in a pandemic. This is during a time when the city is under a cold weather alert (unfortunately not cold enough*), with not enough public toilets even when it is a planned large public event. As usual for these idiots, swastikas and other symbols of historical loser extremists are proudly displayed. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/live-updates-trucker-convoy-protest-in-ottawa-1.5759806
Temperatures are supposed to go down to -36 C (-33 F) with the wind chill. But every winter there are at least a few days where it hits around -45 C (-49 F) before the wind chill.
@3 stroppy
So am I the only one contemplating how to field dress a human?
Hat tip to slashdot.org for both of these:
Crypto Co-Founder Revealed to Be Infamous Fraudster, Investors Shaken
More Than 80% of NFTs Created for Free on OpenSea Are Fraud or Spam, Company Says
@6 RS
Well anyone who saw Enron saw this coming. I’ll never invest in crypto. Not that I have any money to invest anyway. Doesn’t matter, I’ll never be able to afford to retire. When I’m too old to work I’ll just die. YAY ‘Merica.
@ 5
What??!!
@8 stroppy
I always warn people that even though I’m the best choice for an apocalypse friend, I will go cannibal ASAP. Not even waiting for normal food to run out. I will rebuild civilization on a mountain of skulls. Or just die trying. Same result either way.
well, guess I better post more often then!
you can also subscribe to the blog by email in the usual WordPress manner ;-)
also psst working on a book about the NFT craze with the ideal co-author for the job
(though I haven’t written any words in the past week and they’ve written a pile – gotta catch up!)
I have given up on my ambition to find appropriate news items from Sweden. We have plenty of people who are weird, stupid or both, but they have no chance in competition with some Brits and ‘Florida Man’-type Americans.
Can we import some of yours? Ken Ham would fit in some sideshow. -We have some nazis but they are too boring.
HidariMak @4
Shit, that is as bad as our most northerly town! If a car breaks down on a rarely travelled road, you are done for.
Stroppy @ 3
The madness of crowds claimed overseas colonies and nukes were a good idea, then we got the neoliberal meme infestation.
TechXplore had an article “A model that can create realistic animations of talking faces”.
I realise an AI has no real intelligence, but this would hardly matter for a creationist- or MAGA- bot. We could create bogus podcasts featuring clones of Matt Powell, Ken Ham or Donald Trump.
Hell, the Trump clone would arouse suspicions for being overly logical and free from self-contradictions.
well I think what we are driving at is very little collective survival instinct left. capitalism making money the purpose and motivation for everything is tending to put everyone in competition with everyone else. the idea of a collective is branded as a great evil. it is every man for himself. taken to extreme look at the survivalists for example. OK they survival the calamity in their bunker or in their wilderness outpost them what? there is nothing after that. It is clear if you look at it that humans succeeded and proliferated because of their (our) ability to work together over time and distance.
we seem to be down playing that with this emphasis on competition in markets and nations dividing everything up into competitive arenas so much so that we are threatening each other with whole sale destruction. and collapse.
Oh shit!
Canada has a “freedom convoy” heading to Ottawa this weekend.
The original complaint by truckers- they stay in the truck all day and are not exposed to the virus, so they do not need a vaccine- has been hijacked by seriously far-right nuts.
When the trucks arrive, there will be a shitload of police around to prevent what happened in DC a year ago to happwn there.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are basically Bigger Fool scams – you just don’t want to be the last one holding bag. A lot of the announcements/news are just to attract more suckers to the pool and extend the life of what is essentially a Ponzi scheme.
Cryptocurrencies are too slow and unwieldy to do things that standard money does, making them more like the giant stone ring money of the Yap islanders than anything else. A lot of the thefts and frauds cropping up in crypto happened back in the 1800s when banks issued their own money, so it’s not like there’s much new here – it’s more like the dot-com craze, where computerizing anything made it high-tech and sellable to the ignorant.
Some of the people involved don’t realize they’re scamming – some NFT enthusiasts think they are information/data into private property. A bad idea in and of itself, but typical of the Randoid thinking there.
Just to check: has everybody heard of the latest cryptocurrency scam? Apparently the blockchain software is sufficiently programmable to have “smart contracts” which execute and do things, which can be sent to you by anybody — so of course there is smart contract malware, which show up as spam and activate when you try to delete them, which means in turn there are smart contract ransomeware attacks. It’s like somebody can beam a business card into your wallet and when you take it out all your credit cards are maxed out. So fiscal! Much convenient! Fungibility!
@ 4 HidariMak
I used to live in Hull and work in Ottawa. I sympathize with you having those idiots in town but when better than in an Extreme Weather Warning?
Probably the real truckers, especially from the prairies, can ride it out. Pity the fools in an SUV from Toronto.
Still, nothing like sending a few Proud Boys or equivalents home with frostbite to dampen enthusiasm.
“What did you do at the great Truck Convoy of 2022, Dad?
Lost two toes to frostbite and almost froze my noise off. Only my mask saved me.”
That’s a great video, glad to see it’s up to 3.2million views now.
Trump teases a presidential run and dangles pardons for January 6 rioters at Texas rally
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Vote for me and I’ll set you free!