Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you're done.
You could do that today without NFTs or anything blockchainish if the game companies wanted it. The hurdle isn't technological, it's monetary. There's no reason that a game company would want to allow you to resell your game.
You don't need an NFT to see that a file is unique. All that requires is a hash function. Many download sites provide signed cryptographic hashes so that you know that the file you've downloaded is the one that they released. None of that requires blockchains or crypto.
While it's often maintained that the word doozy derives from the "Duesenberg" in the name of the famed Duesenberg Motor Company, this is impossible on chronological grounds. Doozy was first recorded (in the form dozy) in eastern Ohio in 1916, four years before the Duesenberg Motor Company began to manufacture passenger cars; the related adjective doozy, meaning "stylish" or "splendid," is attested considerably earlier, in 1903. So where did doozy come from? Etymologists believe that it's an altered form of the word daisy, which was used especially in the late 1800s as a slang term for someone or something considered the best.
I don't think Americans are going to know what they'll miss until it's gone.
I'm assuming you're American. If so, have you ever lived outside the USA? I've lived in multiple countries on a few continents, including some time in the US, so I know what it's like to be in the "hub of the world" vs somewhere else.
Yeah, the US has social problems, there's too much materialism, produce is widely available, but often shipped from very far away, public transit sucks, and so-on. I get you. But, the US is also the place where things happen first. For example, most new gadgets are available first in the US. Most new Internet services are available in the US first. Other parts of the world might have to wait years for things to show up, sometimes they never do. I remember how absolutely shocking it was when Spotify was available outside the US before it was available inside the US, because 99.9% of everything else shows up in the US first.
And yeah, the exercise machine that you never use was $99 at a Black Friday sale. But, the cheapest that machine will ever be in say Spain is the equivalent of $200 or so, because it's "made" in the US (or at least that's where the company that owns the IP is based) and it has to be imported into other countries and there are additional fees, etc.
This isn't just about gadgets though. The US healthcare system is awful, but many medicines are available in the US years before they show up other places. Part of this is that drug companies can make so much more money in the US. But, another important part is that often the best scientists and engineers migrate to the US and they're the ones inventing and patenting these things. If you're someone who needs a certain medicine, it can be frustrating to watch people in the US getting treated years before it's available to you.
Then there's media. Everyone knows how Hollywood is the main source of movies for the entire world, and most other media is similar. But, it's not just that. For example, Americans don't really care about football / futbol / soccer. But, the US market is so important that European clubs mostly travel to the US in the summer for events and tours. Every other continent would love to have these teams visit because almost every other country is nuts about football, but year after year it's a trip to the US because that's where the money is. It's gotten so bad that the Copa America, the South American football championship has twice been hosted in the US in the last decade, despite it being the championship for an entirely different continent.
And, yeah, Hollywood. It's where all the best performers go. Shitt's Creek was a massive hit in multiple countries, and it was a Canadian production using a Canadian cast. But, Eugene Levy was the honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades, he mostly lives in LA. Catherine O'Hara was named honorary mayor of Brentwood, Los Angeles where she mostly lives. It's the same with most of the cast (not that they're all honorary mayors of their adopted home towns, just that they live in the US). Virtually every major Canadian director (Cronenberg, Cameron, Villeneuve) is based out of LA. It's the same with most prominent actors and directors from most other countries. If they don't live full time in the US, they at least maintain a home in LA and live there part time.
Even American sports, despite only being played in the US, tend to pull in the best athletes from other countries. There are NBA players from Germany, NFL players from Cameroon, MLB players from Australia. These are countries where the sport doesn't even exist, and yet they're drawn to the big paydays in the US.
The best analogy I can make is that the US currently has a gravitational field that attracts things there. It's sometimes mild, but often it's strong (especially with singers and actors). Once things end up in that gravitational field, the main audience or main market becomes the US. Americans tend not to notice this because they're at the center of that gravitational field, and it just looks like everything happens to be near them. You have to live outside the US to watch things constantly flowing to the US, and to see how sometimes you have to fight against gravity to get them back.
On the other hand, if your goal is to buy things that are non-American, it gets easier.
I'm happy to buy things from Australia or Denmark. I just don't want to buy American things. If it's assembled in Norway from minerals mined in Canada and then boxed up in Germany, the key thing is that it's not American.
Sure, they're not worried about making mistakes because nobody's holding them to account. But, these people have proven time and time again that they're not competent.
I always forget how Aussie politics is weird. Your liberal party is Labour but without the 'u', and your mainstream conservatives are the Liberals. Canada doesn't have a "Labour" party, so our Liberals are the left wing (our "Labour" party is spelled NDP). And then there's the UK where they don't really have a "Liberal" party so their extremes are Labour and Conservative.
Unfortunately, revolutions are frequently bloody. I think Europe's more gradual change post WWII has meant the future is arriving more smoothly there, with less disruption.
I suspect that if the US survives, people will look at 1950-2025 as a kind of golden age, despite all the societal problems. The US really had things easy. It was virtually the only advanced economy to come out of WWII intact. Every other country had to rebuild. For the first 20ish years, regulations from the Great Depression lingered, so unions were strong and taxes were high. All of that meant that you had families where a plumber could buy a house for a family with 4 kids even if his wife didn't work.
Since the 70s, a lot of worker protections have vanished. High taxes on the ultra-rich have disappeared. But, the US has still had the benefit of having the Reserve Currency of the world. That has allowed the US to easily run big deficits, which has allowed growth that other countries couldn't match.
I get the impression that the time of the US dollar being the world's reserve currency are coming to an end. In addition, US companies and universities have been places that the best and the brightest wanted to go. That also seems to be coming to an end.
So, when the dust settles, if the US does manage to transition to a more socialist country with a better safety net, it's still going to be rough for people. They're used to 75 years of having benefits that most countries don't get. Probably a better social safety net and a greater equality in wealth will make up for that. But, it could be that people who were alive at this time will look back at a time when the US was the hub of the world and miss that.
merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works Posts 10Comments 3,020Joined 2 yr. ago
NFTs were just star registries. Pay a fee, and you can claim to own a certain star.