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News and Headlines...

Strap your load

Water Tires??? :confused::confused::confused::confused:

Winter driving

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This HAS to be intentional

~
 
Silicon Valley Bank has gone under. The bank was known for providing startup capital for new business ventures, and many companies that got their start through them still had a lot of money invested in them. FDIC insurance only covers up to $250,000 per account. All of 2.7% of the accounts in SVB had less than $250,000 in them.

Expect a tech bubble pop next week as numerous tech companies suddenly can't pay their employees.

Between that and another bank, crypto also lost 70 billion in the last 24 hours.

Goood, goooooood. No more startups with no product!
 
Tl;dr: dude leaked a shitton of sensitive, classified, top secret documents on his discord group to gain cred, it's not going well for him.
He fell victim to the biggest addiction in the world today: attention. He wanted a bigger hit, and now he's paying the price.
 
Has World of Tanks ever had a leak? I'm only aware of the half-dozen Warthunder leaks.
 
Not really anything important, but might as well ride on the coattails of that other air national guard dude earlier...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...r-national-guardsman-who-was-excited-to-kill/

Yep, another air national guard dude got arrested... this one for trying to be a hitman.

And here I thought air related stuff usually hire smart people...
Garcia allegedly told an undercover agent that he would be comfortable torturing victims and taking trophies such as fingers or ears, that he owned an AR-15 rifle, and that he accepted an envelope with $2,500 in cash as a down payment for killing the fictional client's abusive husband.

See, I'd sign up to kill a fictional character (or her husband) for $2,500.

That's an excellent fanfic commission advance.


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EDIT: thread topic tax

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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-multidrug-resistant-bacteria-supermarket-meat-samples.html

Multidrug-resistant E. coli were found in 40% of supermarket meat samples tested in a Spanish study. E. coli strains capable of causing severe infections in people were also highly prevalent, this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April) will hear.
 
So, here's the thing I don't get: Why did anyone expect a different outcome? From what I understand, NFTs are, on a fundamental level, a way to digitally establish ownership of unique assets. But, like, we already have that in the real world. It's called property. And most of it isn't worth almost anything. I can go out and pick up a unique stick, one that has never been seen before in billions of years of life on earth and will never be seen again. And if I tried to sell it to someone for a penny, they'd roll their eyes and keep walking.

Why did anyone think NFTs were going to be any different? Why did people throw down the price of houses on mass-produced shitty furry art you'd have to pay me to hold on to?
 
So, here's the thing I don't get: Why did anyone expect a different outcome? From what I understand, NFTs are, on a fundamental level, a way to digitally establish ownership of unique assets. But, like, we already have that in the real world. It's called property. And most of it isn't worth almost anything. I can go out and pick up a unique stick, one that has never been seen before in billions of years of life on earth and will never be seen again. And if I tried to sell it to someone for a penny, they'd roll their eyes and keep walking.

Why did anyone think NFTs were going to be any different?

Because it's blockchain sticks and the people are either stupid or using it to launder money.
 
So, here's the thing I don't get: Why did anyone expect a different outcome? From what I understand, NFTs are, on a fundamental level, a way to digitally establish ownership of unique assets. But, like, we already have that in the real world. It's called property. And most of it isn't worth almost anything. I can go out and pick up a unique stick, one that has never been seen before in billions of years of life on earth and will never be seen again. And if I tried to sell it to someone for a penny, they'd roll their eyes and keep walking.

Why did anyone think NFTs were going to be any different?
Probably by the same brain worm of how product/company/"visionary" X will disrupt the industry despite having no clue what said item is. Much less ignoring the warnings of it being little more than a pump and dump scam. Even the closest thing to an established NFT group, Yuga Labs, has had no success in showing a purpose for NFTs outside of a ponzi scheme between various digital games/metaverse projects fizzling out or being hacked and their celebrity members of BAYC becoming the butt of every joke.
 
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Why did anyone think NFTs were going to be any different? Why did people throw down the price of houses on mass-produced shitty furry art you'd have to pay me to hold on to?
Because some tik tok influencer told them it's the best thing ever and surely they're not lying or talking out of their ass...
 
Because it's blockchain sticks and the people are either stupid or using it to launder money.
Probably by the same brain worm of how product/company/"visionary" X will disrupt the industry despite having no clue what said item is. Much less ignoring the warnings of it being little more than a pump and dump scam. Even the closest thing to an established NFT group, Yuga Labs, has had no success in showing a purpose for NFTs outside of a ponzi scheme between various digital games/metaverse projects fizzling out or being hacked and their celebrity members of BAYC becoming the butt of every joke.
Because some tik tok influencer told them it's the best thing ever and surely they're not lying or talking out of their ass...
The only one of these things that makes sense to me is the money laundering. Like, I can't imagine the level of charisma needed to stand out on the street corner with an industrial-sized printer that was spewing out reams of randomly-colored hideous monkey art and somehow convince someone a given one was worth $5. It's the kind of thing you'd use to establish someone as a supernatural critter. But put it on the internet, and people are willing to put down a mortgage on them?
 
Like, I can't imagine the level of charisma needed to stand out on the street corner with an industrial-sized printer that was spewing out reams of randomly-colored hideous monkey art and somehow convince someone a given one was worth $5. It's the kind of thing you'd use to establish someone as a supernatural critter. But put it on the internet, and people are willing to put down a mortgage on them?
Yep, the internet. Before the internet you have to find the fools. Now the fools will find you and throw their life savings at your harebrain scams.
 
The only one of these things that makes sense to me is the money laundering. Like, I can't imagine the level of charisma needed to stand out on the street corner with an industrial-sized printer that was spewing out reams of randomly-colored hideous monkey art and somehow convince someone a given one was worth $5. It's the kind of thing you'd use to establish someone as a supernatural critter. But put it on the internet, and people are willing to put down a mortgage on them?

Money laundering is probably a chunk of it, but people running pump and dump scams is probably another chunk.

Marketing for NFTs tends to rely on at least implicitly comparing themselves to crptocurrency. When Bitcoin went gangbusters, other cryptocurrency's saw an influx of people thinking that they'd do the same, and people who want to get rich quick and don't think everything through are the perfect target demographic for the people running pump and dumps.
 
Money laundering is probably a chunk of it, but people running pump and dump scams is probably another chunk.

Marketing for NFTs tends to rely on at least implicitly comparing themselves to crptocurrency. When Bitcoin went gangbusters, other cryptocurrency's saw an influx of people thinking that they'd do the same, and people who want to get rich quick and don't think everything through are the perfect target demographic for the people running pump and dumps.

Pump & dump requires a level of market legitimacy which you can't get unless there's another factor putting capital into trades -- either legitimate market activity (for stocks) or a separate scam which leads the way.

For Bitcoin, it was ransomware. The money pumped into Bitcoin by ransomware demands was eventually enough to make it look like a valid investment, and from there speculators started voluntarily putting money into it.

With NTFs there must have been some market-makers who put in trades to stimulate activity (and legitimize the market), then the laundering happened along side whatever idiots thought it was a real thing.

I would expect that by now (or starting soon) there will be laws about transaction transparency which make that market less attractive for laundering, and once that stops happening, then the market will collapse entirely.
 
Like, I can't imagine the level of charisma needed to stand out on the street corner with an industrial-sized printer that was spewing out reams of randomly-colored hideous monkey art and somehow convince someone a given one was worth $5.
Like all sorts of collectibles you mean? Baseball cards, comics, stamps, you name it. A mass produced product that's selling the idea that at some point age & attrition will take out most other owners and your own shitty copy will be worth thousands more than what you put in.

The value is not in the paper or ink, it's on the artificial scarcity and the perception that it's special, even if the publisher could just churn out another ten thousand tomorrow if they felt like it.

NFTs are a more blatant version. The 'good' is a worthless digital signature that means absolutely nothing in on itself. The value is in the hype. People are willing to pay money for it, and with demand, people are willing to pay more money for it.

Things have value because people say they have value, and they stop having value when people stop giving a shit about them. It doesn't matter if it's a bar of gold or a chunk of bits.


That, of course, falls on the same trap as those comics and baseball cards, nobody gives a shit about an unpopular issue, or a baseball card of a nobody, as the market is saturated only a rare few are considered to have any value beyond the initial buy craze. In the same token, nobody gives a shit about an individual NFT after the bubble pops, and as the market saturated, the initial idea of NFTs keeping value for long like other art assets became a pipe dream, but there was always another NFTs, so it became, basically, unregulated & fast-spaced stocks. Buy new, sell to the next sucker before the bubble bursts, take the money to the next asset and repeat. The digital monkey does not matter, the signature saying you have the rights to that particular copy of the monkey doesn't matter, what matters is that an asset with a brief window where people say it has value, and you might be able to use to make money with buying and selling it.

With cryptocurrencies bursting tho, the NFT market that was inherently tied to them went down badly, and the NFT saturation made it worse. The race-the-bubble game stops working when the bubbles keep getting smaller and the money you get out of it deflates to be less than what you put in, so NFTs pretty much died.
 

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