This sounds like a great premise for a horror comedy. Sam Rami could direct.
Some disruptive innovator should revive the "Sell cryogenics to egotistical rich assholes who want to live forever" business model that briefly flourished in the early 80s. It seems like, culturally, we're in the right place for it to really take off.
Link 1 is a woman, going by the name.
Has anyone figured out yet if someone among the Fyre planners took the money and ran?
Must have, don't you think? The provided accommodations and food weren't comedy-of-errors-how'd-that-go-wrong, they were not even close to what was promised. If the money didn't go to putting on the festival, someone's got it.
Unless the size was all wrong? That they could afford to put on the festival if they sold enough tickets, and they ended up with enough people that they didn't want to just cancel, but not nearly enough for the scale of what they needed to do?
2: whoops. I'm a jerk. Fixed.
Also, what's the gender neutral form of "this guy"?
As Academic Lurker said in the other thread,
Theranos, Juicero, and the Fyre Festival really seem to embody our current cultural moment perfectly.
Ugh why is this shithead still our president?!
7: But she's not an asshole - just a smirky bystander who has some inside knowledge.
1: I don't know about the director but Paul Rudd has been linked to the movie. A comedian whose most recent big role was Ant-Man... sounds if anything too on-the-nose.
There was an sf short story I read - A. Reynolds? - where a rich guy woke up from cryogenesis to find a crapsack world where most of the population was in cryo most of the time, so he wasn't special, and everyone awake was defending against some kind of transdimensional incursion that stemmed from overpopulation (hence everyone else in cryo, for safety).
It's like an Avon scheme: Convince ten people in the year 3000 to get frozen to make room for your thawed self!
I remember a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise lands on an overpopulated world and an alien has sex with Kirk because she knows his VD is strong enough to cull their population back to reasonable levels.
There's a Niven short where the dud is thawed and informed that under current law he's a slave and has to pilot a starship for objective eternity.
13: I don't think Avon is a pyramid scheme. That's Mary Kay.
If you get enough frozen corpses together most would last the summer without thawing.
And in the abyss I abide.
And if one kept adding frozen corpses fast enough they could form a glacier.
Scientists will just dig them up.
As the glacier advances across the landscape it will take more corpses to itself and freeze them also, so fueling its own advance.
Heebie what the fuck have you done.
I was going to joke about how they should consider non-cryogenic preservation methods like Body World-style plastination, but...
Uber Amway but for naked mole rat gene infusions.
And if one kept adding frozen corpses fast enough they could form a glacier.
As the glacier advances across the landscape it will take more corpses to itself and freeze them also, so fueling its own advance.
Please, a pyramid.
Heebie what the fuck have you done.
I only stuck it in a little.
Pyramids have well-known physics-defying properties.
Even if you dig up all the frozen corpses, you will still know where they were. And so will I.
Each cheerleader has to find three more cheerleaders to stand underneath her.
That's sexist. I meant, each cheer-guy.
Once you've completed your corvee labor contributions to the theocracy you start a theocracy of your own.
32: Maybe in support of favors from the pharaoh.
Egypt had pyramid schemes, but not in a way we can understand anymore. They lived and breathed pyramids, yet Betty Devos was not Secretary of Education.
35/36 an object lesson in a the wisdom of a final preview before posting.
The Transmetropolitan view of cryogenics seems a propos these days.
A viable method of it was found, and by the indeterminate future the story is set in, lots of lethal conditions are indeed fixable. The problem was, the people who had themselves frozen didn't think to budget for a comfortable lifestyle in the future. Or they tried to but inflation had been too high, or the story just focused on the people who got thawed specifically when their money ran out whether or not that was all of them, or no amount of money would have helped in the shithole the Transmetropolitan future was. But in any case, there's one full issue about and occasional aside references to the Revivals. That's what they call people who were cryogenically frozen and woke up during the era of the story. After they get thawed, they just get released onto the streets with the clothes on their backs or maybe an orientation pamphlet or something. They wound up not only homeless but also unable to adapt to the culture shock of a black comedy cyberpunk future. Very sad.
39: I remember that issue. Transmetropolitan was pretty good overall, as I recall.
Even if you have a trust fund that could theoretically earn enough during your sleep to be your starting point for a future life, and also even assuming no bouts of inflation, wars, or confiscatory taxation or whatever hard-to-predict future events that tank investments, it seems like the expense of keeping you in stasis could well be enough to eat up all those earnings unless you're extra-super-rich. 0.01% rather than 1%.
Now you understand the Republican objection to higher marginal tax rates on the super rich.
The seat is now a spike pointing upward.
40: Agreed. Never finished reading it myself. Started it on my own. Found that a friend had got partway through the series on her own and one of us borrowed a book or two from the other. Got confused about who was loaning whom a copy of the book, didn't want to go out and buy the next one when I sort of maybe already owned one, and now it's been years. I'd like to finish it someday but need to figure out which ones we actually have.
Cryogenics is very much a pre-cyberpunk idea in general. Very Utopian. The idea not just that it will eventually be possible to medically cure death, but that you and I can live to see that world and it's worth doing so, is more hard to imagine to me than a lot of religious eschatology. I think there was a little about it in Neuromancer, and the people using it were indeed extra-super-rich. It's similar to science fiction ideas about clones raised for organs, in that it's a medical practice that's simple in theory and would be transformative if it became common, but those stories are usually told from the point of view of the clones.
Like I said, it seems a propos. Partly because of the political shittiness in the series (although neither the Beast nor the Smiler resembles Trump as much as other presidents from the past 50 years), but also because we've given up hope of Utopia.
You're talking about cryonics, not cryogenics.
To 2 and 3: I don't think the Frye Festival is a take-the-money-and-run situation. The thing is, festivals aren't the kind of item where, if you have enough money raised, you can go out and purchase a prefab festival kit and have guests show up and you're all set. Even if you have all the money in hand, you have to know how to design an enormously complex system from scratch - logistics, budgets, politics, everything - and make it all line up, or the money will all evaporate into the air in seconds. Running the budget for a multi-million dollar live event is a master skill in itself, let alone executing the event from the budget. The Frye guys sound like they had a flashy idea, and knew how to drum it up and promote it, but had no clue how to take all the capital they raised and turn it into an event. And they weren't smart enough to see they had no clue and couldn't just bluff it through. So they tried to bluff it through and wow, it turns out it really is difficult.
But I bet not a dime of that money is left. I bet these guys never came close to having an accurate production budget. I bet they were off by orders of magnitude on their cost expectations. Just to get to the level of the crappy failed experience they had would easily absorb hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Easily.
And I gotta say, this is partly why I like event production: At the end of the day, you can't bullshit it. We live in a world where a lot of people think that if you can get a flashy idea and a lot of investment, you can shine on the execution and it'll sort itself out, or if it doesn't you can wave around another flashy idea and distract people again. You can't do that with a live event. However clever you think you are, you're gonna butt up against physical reality. The gear has to get moved off the truck and pushed around. The trucks need a wide enough road to get down. There has to be enough power, and enough drinking water. At the end of the day, reality wins. I appreciate that.
49 That's Mr Freeze so he should know.
And they weren't smart enough to see they had no clue and couldn't just bluff it through. So they tried to bluff it through and wow, it turns out it really is difficult.
Nobody could have predicted that!
48- The story says the production team asked for and received approval for a $50M budget.
52: That's spendable if you've have a lot of commitments and aren't being at all careful, I'd guess.
52: The story says they asked for that, and were told they could do it, but then seems to imply that they never actually had access to money at all (at least from the story of the person who quit).
OT: So, my one neighbor (male, early 60s) crashed his SUV into my other neighbor's front steps. Hard enough to destroy the steps and the car, but not so hard that they car couldn't be driven 100 feet to his own driveway. He apologized and went into his house. They went over to talk to him and he didn't answer the door or phone, so they called 911 thinking that he might be unconscious on the floor with some delayed-impact injury. So, the fire department came and tried to get an answer. They failed and called the po-po. It turned out that he just took his other car and went shopping. Nobody considered that a possibility because the wrecked car is parked in his driveway blocking the garage, but I guess he must have parked the other car in the street. I'm feel gratified that I didn't voice my baseless suspicion (that he was dodging a breathalyzer).
Seems even more likely with the extra information, I'd have thought. Or did they test him when he got back?
Back on the OP, the thing that strikes me is that it sounds like a shit version of fatherhood. All the responsibility, but with the hope put off to a distant mythical future. Weirdly, though, the guy in question was actually a father, which restricts our choice of explanations. It wasn't as if he was unaware of responsibility.
That leaves us with a combination of two things - not coping well with death, and massive Dunning Kruger issues. Current political relevance...of course.
56: They talked to him. I don't know what they did.
One of the things about the Bahamas is that its ridiculously expensive there, and that is especially true in the outer islands. Its a good place to burn through a budget.
How much does a pound of Blink 182 cost on the islands compared to on the mainland?
Well, on the mainland, Blink 182 runs you about $1400 per pound*. In a place like Exuma that could easily run you well over $2000 per pound, especially if you have to charter a freighter to bring in their gear.
* $750K per show, ~540 pounds total based on an average weight of 180 lbs per band member
Alternately, you could higher the knock-off band, Blink 183, for $15 a pound and free drinks at the bar.
If you had a drinks on the island. Or a bar.
There is a rider in the contract that says, if you run out of food on the island, the band gets eaten first.
Now that's a poison pill if there ever was one.
And I gotta say, this is partly why I like event production: At the end of the day, you can't bullshit it. We live in a world where a lot of people think that if you can get a flashy idea and a lot of investment, you can shine on the execution and it'll sort itself out, or if it doesn't you can wave around another flashy idea and distract people again. You can't do that with a live event.
SOONER OR LATER A FALSE IDEA BUMPS UP AGAINST REALITY, USUALLY IN A MOSH PIT.
Or maybe the Fyre Festival pitch deck should go here.
Apropos the Juicero: https://medium.com/@freddiedeboer/the-three-hot-trends-in-silicon-valley-horseshit-95cc5a85e8a4
48: I think software is unusual in that nobody knows how to run a software project. The whole "move fast and break things" attitude isn't destructive for Silicon Valley because planning basically doesn't help you. It's an attitude that would kill you for anything that requires logistical planning.
It's an attitude that would kill you for anything that requires logistical planning.
Or stability and consumer protection. Seeing all these fintech companies taking that same approach scares the shit out of me, and makes me glad for once that financial regulators are generally luddites, or at least very small c conservative. Hopefully it will limit the damage some of these firms will do before they realise there's a reason you can't do x, y and z with retail customers unless you're heavily regulated, and even then, sometimes not. That said, I don't think it'll stop there being a major blow-up in the US, where regulatory arbitrage is so much easier and there's very little retail customer protection, relatively speaking.
The sad thing is there's plenty of potential for responsible firms to "disrupt" established banks simply by virtue of being new and not having to deal with legacy systems (not to mention legacy assets). Most of them however seem intent on reinventing the wheel, head-on crashes included. And don't get me started on the blockchain mania.
It could all go horribly wrong, but I'm slightly hopeful that blockchain-type stuff will make banks less central to the economy. Payment systems are pretty inefficient (particularly in the US), and they have the effect of most transactions requiring a bank somewhere along the way. Then banks get to hold the world economy hostage every few years.
And don't get me started on the blockchain mania.
Its dot com bubble 2.0. BTC is the new NASDAQ.
Someone who works for me partly resigned over blockchain stuff. As in he is very interested in working on eye pee eff ess, and we (company) are not.
BTC has a long way to go before it approaches the real-world relevance of NASDAQ. BTC go to zero tomorrow and most of us would barely notice.
One thing I've discovered running software projects, is that however you choose to run it, developers will always complain that you aren't doing it right.
"X isn't proper Scrum, we need Y or we simply can't function or estimate accurately"
Drops X, does Y.
"I can't believe you are doing Y, ffs, man. Management. Morons."
[repeat]
Also, with multiple variations of:
"We're Agile man. Let us make our own decisions based on lightweight descriptions, and we'll pull information when we need it."
Does so.
"FFS, we need super detailed waterfallplans going forward months. We can't work with this lack of information."
[Repeat]
Fuckers -- and I say this with affection -- are never happy.
That's why I just refuse to learn anything that isn't SAS.
I'm slightly hopeful that blockchain-type stuff will make banks less central to the economy. Payment systems are pretty inefficient (particularly in the US)
Man, you think payment systems are inefficient now? You are going to love bitcoin.
I think I do more of my transactions in cash than I did ten years ago.
And I can't even use it for income tax evasion. I just got tired of saving all those receipts.
It could all go horribly wrong, but I'm slightly hopeful that blockchain-type stuff will make banks less central to the economy.
Not going to happen, at least not the way things are going right now. If anything, banks are coopting blockchain (mostly, completely pointlessly). What appears to be happening is that some settlement systems will get new databases (not a bad thing!), but they won't talk to each other much more than they currently do and to the extent they use blockchain tech, it will be permissioned and to all intents and purposes non-distributed. The pipedream of materially all financial transactions being on the same, permissionless blockchain is never, ever going to happen.
On payments, I'm not sure that blockchain is going to be the answer. Partly because most of the problems with the US payments system aren't inherent to traditional banking but an artefact of the US regulatory system and bank/merchant market practice. Other developed (and developing!) countries do it a lot more efficiently, within and without the banking system, though obviously nowhere is perfect. The other reason being because blockchain scales terribly, or at least that's my understanding.
Wow that was a lot of html fail in one post.
I'm not sure what the problems with US payments systems are. Banks are assholes, but I didn't realize they were inefficient in any particularly way (beyond opening 800,000,000 branches).
77: Bitcoin is obviously garbage.
80: I did say "slight". The banks are working hard to prevent any non-bank threat from emerging, so if they succeed it will require government intervention. But even if the government doesn't intervene, blockchain could make winding down a bankrupt bank considerably less dangerous.
Blockchain does have scaling problems, so we would still end up with intermediaries, but they wouldn't all have to be banks, and we could have many more of them.
83: It's much easier to pay for stuff in Europe, and the transaction costs are much lower. Scandinavia is pretty far down the road to being cashless.
I don't necessarily see that cashlessness is a thing to be aspired to.
Cash could use some reforms (dumping pennies and nickles, more use of dollar coins), but if you want something that works without the intermediation of banks, it seems fine.
Let me count the ways.
Expensive and slow domestic wire transfers
Stupid chip and pin implementation/signature verification.
Inconsistent/spotty mobile payments infrastructure
Expensive interchange fees, especially for debit cards
Check out Felix Salmon's archive for further complaints (eg this piece.
But even if the government doesn't intervene, blockchain could make winding down a bankrupt bank considerably less dangerous.
How, exactly?
Banks are assholes, but I didn't realize they were inefficient in any particularly way
Domestically, they are fine, but international money transfers are a giant, inefficient clusterfuck.
Oh, and if we're including cash, the incredibly poor design of US currency.
I've actually got this idea for "Smart Tulip Bulbs" that can be traded on the blockchain. You guys will all buy into my ICO, right?
88: It's already almost impossible to kite checks. That would make it completely impossible.
2nd 89. Payment systems do nothing about debts or risks or speculation.
I don't think I've ever done a wire transfer. And I thought debit cards were for people with bad credit or Dave Ramsey up their ass. If I use debit instead of credit, it doesn't save me a cent but it means the money comes from my account right away instead of being a free loan of thirty days with easier refunds.
I don't think I've ever done a wire transfer
Possibly because they're so inefficient? If you were, say, taking a holiday with some friends and someone booked the hotel rooms themselves, how would you transfer the money to them?
I get the sense that a lot of transactions that would be wire transfers or direct debits in Europe (eg rent payments) are done via cheque in the US. Though even in the US cheque usage has fallen off a cliff in recent years, so I'm not sure how those are being done now (unless all that cheque drop-off is in retail payments).
Yes, I'd just write them a check. I don't know if it counts as a "direct debit" or not but some bills I have are paid on-line, either automatically or not.
The move from using checks to using pictures of checks has been a nice improvement. They still need to clear faster, tho.
I've never tried that. It makes me nervous.
Direct Debit is a UK term, but it's basically a payment authority that allows a utility (for example) to take money periodically via wire transfer from your account, rather than paying by credit card (or cheque or whatever). Your bills may be using the US equivalent (ACH) or may be using your credit card (which would obviously be different).
Anyway, I'm probably part of the problem and all that, but I just walk over to the bank to deposit anything. It takes two minutes and I need to get up and stretch my legs anyway.
So, smart tulip bulbs.
Step 1: Everybody pays me some ether up front to buy some tokens that give you the right to purchase virtual bulbs when they are ready, in six months to a year.
Step 2: Each bulb, when run against the appropriate smart contract on the blockchain, is capable of producing a "flower". The flower is just a fancy digital image derived from the "genetics" inherent to the bulb that grew it. The flower will have a specific shape, color, pattern, etc., and these will be tied to the bulb it comes from. You can spend more ether to "breed" one bulb with another, which will give you a bunch of seeds that have mixed genetics based on their parents, with perhaps a little extra variability based on a mutation factor. These seeds, in turn, can be grown into new bulbs and flowers, which can then be traded around the blockchain.
Step 3: Idiots will pour money into speculating on these because they know that the first person who manages to breed a virtual tulip flower that looks like Pepe the Frog will get stupid rich by selling the bulbs to other idiots.
The most important part of the process, obviously, is the first part of Step 1.
Pictures of checks will be fine, however.
Spike linked this at the furry place the other day. "The default state of bitcoin exchanges is empty. They get hacked."
I have a cousin with this image on his checks. Try doing that with a wire transfer.
6 When Zuckerberg runs for president he'll promise a Juicero in every kitchen.
The link that Roger posted in 68 is excellent and since he has long challenged Roger on the quality of his linkage* I call out ajay specifically to acknowledge it so.
*an assessment with which I largely agree.
If only there were a way to throw gauntlets on the internet.
Huh. I'd suspected that DeBoer was an invention of Scott Lemieux.
109: I hadn't actually read the link in question but now I have, and I'm afraid I don't think it was terribly good - a frothy extrusion of self-righteous hyperbole resting on a warm, sludgy substrate of smug ignorance. A crappucino, if you will.
Spike linked this at the furry place the other day.
Wait, you guys are furries? I, uh, I think I've been commenting on the wrong blog all these years.
114 You are a difficult man to please.
Keep at it Roger, you'll get there.
Tuskies, more than furries. Or at least Spike is.
Oh, that place. You scared me for a minute there.
If only there were a way to throw gauntlets on the internet.
There is: Smart Gauntlets! On the blockchain! Subscribe to my ICO.
I prefer to throw sollerets. Because I'm a disruptor.
I sabots. Because I remember my roots.
This looks like a fine investment. Not at all the kind of thing that will be considered with mocking disdain in five years time.
Domestic wire transfers: zero factor authentication.
Like Spike I've done plenty of international wire transfers, mostly for remittances to my own US bank account from my National Bank of Arrakis account. It's convoluted and never a sure thing and always takes a few days.
It's convoluted and never a sure thing and always takes a few days.
Expensive, also too.
Funny I didn't realize that was DeBoer at the time even though it says so on the tin.
Oh! I have another great idea! Instead of WebKins..... BitKins! Stupid little stuffed animals for kids except these ones are on the blockchain!
We do business bank transfers in work all the time. They do not go through in minutes. They go through when the bank's central clearing does a sweep, as far as I can tell. I don't know how many of these there are a day but there is one which catches transactions done before 12 noon. Transfers done before 12 will definitely hit an account in the same bank network that day (or in another network if you pay a fee of €20; otherwise it might be next day). Transactions in the early afternoon will probably go through likewise. Late transactions might not show up until morning.
Consumer banking transfers do go through in minutes but are usually limited to €5,000 a day.
If someone emails us bank account details, we have to ring them to verify, because there are scams out there where emails are intercepted and fake bank details are substituted.
We do business bank transfers in work all the time. They do not go through in minutes. They go through when the bank's central clearing does a sweep, as far as I can tell. I don't know how many of these there are a day but there is one which catches transactions done before 12 noon. Transfers done before 12 will definitely hit an account in the same bank network that day (or in another network if you pay a fee of €20; otherwise it might be next day). Transactions in the early afternoon will probably go through likewise. Late transactions might not show up until morning.
Consumer banking transfers do go through in minutes but are usually limited to €5,000 a day.
If someone emails us bank account details, we have to ring them to verify, because there are scams out there where emails are intercepted and fake bank details are substituted.
Ah feck it, sorry guys. I swear I only hit post once.
It must be extremely difficult if you are in Nigeria and need to get a wire transfer for non-fraudulent purposes.
It's also difficult for me to say "feck" without it sounding affected.
Further to 55: Apparently, the guy who hit the steps never did talk to the police. So my neighbor whose steps got smashed asked me if the neighbor who crashed into them was a drinker. I said I didn't know.
It's also difficult for me to say "feck" without it sounding affected.
Try "That would be an ecumenical matter".
I don't deal with ecumenism much. I'm in closer contact with agnostics, atheists, or non-Christian monotheists than I am with Protestants.
Explanation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptd_h0dF7NE
At a theoretical level. I've never seen an episode all the way through.
We do business bank transfers in work all the time. They do not go through in minutes.
I think you are ready for Bitcoin. It doesn't go through in minutes either!
Speaking of updating payments infrastructure...
Bloomberg on cheques and America's payments infrastructure.
