Agreed. From the manufacturer or first sale point of view, it doesn't matter. Sale is a sale. Outside of the prestige of being the original manufacturer of a highly valued card providing some authority to the company there is little value add to the first sale. But... That can be a big feather in the cap for a business. We still (jokingly) talk about Beanie Babies. I've never owned a baseball card in my life but I know of Topps. That brand recognition that reaches across disciplines because of the money changing hands. Saddling that kind of place in pop culture as "good for marketing" feels like it falls short of the magnitude of such a position.

Also agreed that we've mostly moved on. I'm young enough to be a part of the "skins" crowd. Rocket League for me though, not Fortnite. But the implication is the same. I guess the crux of my argument falls along these lines: looking at both sides of the fold, these two things do not look at all similar to me. These kinds of digital goods to me, much like skins in a game, are always expected to be fleeting, ephemeral things. They are not goods I intend to collect for collections sake. They are a way to give money to a product I enjoy for hopefully continued support and development. Just doesn't feel the same.

Baseball cards printed today have about the same value leaving the factory when they are opened. That is to say a negligible amount. They only truly become valuable with scarcity and age. This is something the NFTs will never be able to achieve. There won't be large sums of money for keeping this particular piece of cardboard in pristine condition as any owner of the NFT will have a copy as good as the day it was minted. Passwords, accounts, 2FA, backups, etc all mean the chances of straight up losing the NFT is slim to none. Nobody in 50-100 years will find an NFT token in their grandfather's attic that was no longer thought to exist.

Reprint a copy of an old baseball card and most people don't care. That isn't what made it worth money. I argue that was does make old baseball cards worth something is a set of properties these tokens cannot achieve by design. The exact thing that makes them "better" is why they won't ever command the amount of money some cards have and will.

This is exactly the travelling salesman problem, NP-hard. Fedex and UPS have been paying big money to anyone who can optimize it. I can see some pretty major swings on fuel costs, city/traffic planning issues, etc. depending on how and when you push though several large vehicles that can slow or shut down right-of-way on most traffic.

On my phone but wanted to touch on a couple things cause the convo was good.

Saying it isnâ(TM)t something to brag about was more of me making a point. Not saying thatâ(TM)s how you intended it, but it immediately felt accurate, maybe just not the way you had hoped. LoL. The one self proclaimed audiophile I know would make a vegan blush with their bluster. But even they seemed to shoot down Tidal for their lossless local formats. One anecdote doesnâ(TM)t data make though and I get that.

The niche just feels extremely thin and as I stated earlier, from my perspective and peer group, feels very much like a also ran business. Iâ(TM)d be interested to see their subscriber numbers in comparison. I grant you the crowd I run with doesnâ(TM)t tend to have more money than sense and it seems like what a lot of this stuff is aimed at. But not just DJ stuff. Musicians, audio engineers, AV sound techs for small conference rooms and large halls. Folks who do this for a living. You are correct there are many facets to the audio scene but from where I sit it seems like these folks are unicorns. Or maybe more akin to whales in F2P games. High margin, low numbers. Or maybe Iâ(TM)m just a sheltered pleb with no rich dad friends. =)

Seems like we mostly agree on the premise of Tidal just not so much on its weight in the ecosystem. I concede ignorance for the throw money at the problem crowd, but I feel pretty comfortable stating that it wasnâ(TM)t ever much of a concern or consideration with my group. But weâ(TM)re just picking nits now. Have a good one!

I'm an audio guy. Not a self proclaimed "audiophile" but I own probably more in music equipment than computers and tech currently. Digital and analog DJ stuff, producing, and recording with instruments. I have several friends that are as well. Nothing major but enough so that I have an ear to the ground on these things as they are directly adjacent to several of my hobbies.

This was definitely not the case for my peer group. It never filled a gap for us that was large enough to be usefully put in its own basket. You gave the example of Alienware and that is perfect. No self respecting card carrying member of the PC gaming master race would own an Alienware and brag about it. They don't exist as an also-ran for Dell's majority business, but they certainly do compared to the other offerings for PC hardware considered by enthusiasts. I feel like the folks that would talk up Tidal would also be the sort to buy $100 monster HDMI cables...

They may have enjoyed great marketing along the lines of Beats headphones, but we also made fun of them, too. I appreciate that they brought audio quality to the forefront of discussion but that was about the extent of their contribution.

Decades of bong rips of climate change denial.

So there should be no recourse for over leveraging the company stock beyond 100% of what was available based on a very public personal vendetta from the money manager? At some point, more was being loaned out than existed. If you look at hedge fund shorts as being the coalmine canary for dying companies that would help efficiently redistribute limited resources, then isn't what is happening now also a natural part of the ecosystem where it is showing a weakness in a particular trading scheme, one that could be extremely bad and rife with potential for feedback loops for the entire place? With the hopes that other hedge funds take notice and exercise more caution with what they do with other people's money.

Without this set of events, a group of redditors wouldn't have enough capital to move the needle. I do like your attempt to re-frame this away from those taking the risk on a bad position to those who took advantage of the weakness. Your takeaway is the same apologist BS we heard around the sub-prime bailouts.

It will keep happening. It's a feature, not a bug. Things done under executive order should be known to be temporary even by the most novice diplomat. If this was a serious issue it would have been drafted and passed as law but I assume it was saw more as a bargaining chip by our great negotiator. Any nation looking at this particular issue should know that with even a middle school level understanding of US civic structure.

It SHOULD persist the notion that executive orders are temporary ephemeral things because our president is neither king nor dictator, that there should not be short cuts around our due process of laws, and the fact that anything built under edict can be torn down under edict. As well it should be, checks and balances.

Yeah but this is quite often paired with an exclusivity deal with a national provider for right of way. Almost every muni-network story I've read on /. had this angle to it. So really it's usually just a distinction of who the city council is forcing you to use; a choice generally left to the golden rule (He who has the gold, makes the rules.)

Just a reminder, from the 1890s...

Luminiferous aether is 100% made up, fantasy filler... blah blah blah. No really, it was because a bunch of very smart people who really thought they were right were absolutely wrong based on preconceived notions. This could go either way, not sure where you were going with this.

Funny you should mention Neptune. Did they ever find the planet Vulcan? You know, the one said to exist by the same guy who "discovered" Vulcan because they didn't understand the differences in Newtonian physics and general relativity?

Opinion wise, I agree with OP. From what I've seen and read so far, dark matter seems more like the remainder of a hard equation as opposed to an actual physical thing that exists. Especially when contrasted against past events that you so helpfully bring up.

You're not wrong and I agree with the general sentiment here, but let's be honest. Had he said anything aside from confirming the biases of his knuckle dragging, mouth breathing brethren; they'd have just called it another conspiracy and threw him under the same proverbial bus.

He'll shut up as an official mouthpiece in January. Thankfully nothing stopped him sooner than that because the alternative was\is Pence. Praise whatever deity you worship for that dodged bullet. Trump is morally bankrupt; but at least he was also fairly incompetent at his goals.

Unfortunately with the way targeted advertising works in most cases, by the time whatever relevant targeting occurs most customers already have the product. If I order a pair of shoes online, I'm then subjected to shoe ads for a week or two following.

Then there is the question on the consumer side if that is a good trade. In a lot of cases, the consumer doesn't have a choice so the calculation is moot. But when given the choice, it allows the consumer to decide for themselves if giving up personal details is worth being shown more relevant ads. I think most of my peers who've grown up in the internet era wouldn't care to share details for that bargain because none of us use traditional or targeted advertisement to make informed purchasing decisions.

This is pretty rich considering all that original "invention" done by those brave souls at NASA that the entire industry is standing on the shoulders of was literally the work of German defectors, as the original US Army program couldn't reliably get a rocket off the pad. Since moving away from the von Braun era of rockets, NASA has been a shitshow of congressional pork barrel spending.

If you ran an ice cream shop, it would be stupid, irresponsible, and negligent to ignore the implications of national ice cream day. Social media would be pasting it left and right, folks with pictures eating ice cream tagging each other, special filters, etc, etc. Let's be honest, you probably wouldn't be able to escape it as it tends to be with most of these "days".

If this was your job and you ignore the implications of this, I'd take it as either ignorance or maliciousness. Either you didn't know or you just didn't want the free money that comes with free advertising. And that's just talking about ice cream...

One that had some really nice Jim Crow laws that we had to get rid of 'cause some uppity civil rights folks. This was the best we could do.