Introducing the Icelandverse [video]
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Of course, it would be nice if we got more of humanity on board with this first, what with the vast majority of the population being in poverty, or worse.
It’s gambling. People have done it for millennia. You invent some system and some arbitrary rules about what’s valuable (the right domino, an ace of hearts, a jpeg of a monkey, a beanie baby) and then some people win some money and some people lose.
It’s happened before and it’ll happen again it’s the least surprising thing our culture has ever done. It’s just the superficial details that change every generation or two.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...
1.90 is absurdly low. That totals to $57 for a 30 day month. That hardly covers just your food and water intake in most areas of the world. If you live in the temperate climate zones where fresh water isn't extremely limited and your menu consists solely of rice and potatoes... Maybe, just maybe. I live in a relatively cheap country with plenty of fresh water around and that would get you 500 grams of rice and 2 liters of mineral water. At 70kg I could hypothetically just survive off of that but only just. Anywhere else where food and water requires transport or significant amounts of processing, you are very much screwed.
Also, state pension for many Russians (and Russia usually isn't considered a very poor country) is in the range of $130, which is just about twice higher. Add the fact that private pensions are very rare there, and you can see how thinking that that's "absurdly low" is a pretty privileged position.
Isn't it terrible that despite this situation being as awful as you describe, it still applies to around 10% of all humans?
COVID potentially kills older and more vulnerable people. This might have reduced the burden for some people.
Of course payed by death which is never good but perhaps from a statistics point of view in 10 years.
I thought about this also when thinking about climate change and I think that might have a much more general bad effect.
In a world with a lot of riches (tons of still existing infrastructure) strong weather scenarios can destroy old and critical infrastructure much faster than time.
USA only were able to get more budget for infrastructure with Biden and have a huge deficit.
COVID is very weird as human life feels very cheap. While lots of people don't want to wear a mask (low effort) to save a life and in parallel we pay so much money as a society when someone has cancer and needs very expensive medication.
Let's give that person x access to medical procedures which cost a million and let others die while it would cost us much less to help them.for me personally COVID tanked my general assumption that we would be much more reasonable.
Not sure how to determine the loose on trust.
I am more pointing towards the millions out there who genuinely believe that Bill Gates is behind covid, that covid doesn't exist, that the vaccines contain microchips or are chemicals that destroy your reproductive capabilities. That substantially lowered my survival expectations as species.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-h...
It’s a bit like EVE Online where the existence of PLEX allows for a conversion between USD and the in-game currency ISK and hundreds of thousands of dollars routine gets “destroyed” in big fleet battles.
Didn’t know people spent that much? Companies selling collectibles and companies selling play 2 earn stuff knew
In the same way hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual spaceships aren't destroyed even though the conversion can be made. It's an illusory comparison.
$600K in a NFT is sellable for that much cash, or the nearest bid, no different than Ebay.
Wash trades also occur. People are discouraged from that due to transaction fees. Some people aren't discouraged from that.
would you like a specific trade to debate? does it have to be $600k for this standard? I see some decentraland plots recently traded for $20,000.
thinking further about it, its easier if you owned an NFT other people were interested in, because then the bids - if they arise - would be from other people and you'll be one less person that would hold the likely wash trade idea. many NFTs are free to acquire during their initial creation.
This discussion was about prices are driven significantly by wash trades and that paper doesn’t suggest or imply that.
More urgently, I'm worried "meta" hyperlink on my forum would be ignored by my visitors thinking it's just a link to Facebook; Where as it's an link to meta discussions about the platform.
This should be the meme of 2022.
Lettuce. Think about it.
Most people will still interact with the Metaverse on a flatscreen and not an Occulus. They'll spend money on it like they did/do on mobile games. Some people will spend WAY too much, but most people will spend $20 or so a month for an hour of escapism while they're on the bus. More if they have to be on a plane with WiFi.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Icelandverse&type=story&...
So I've decided to facilitate a proper visit next year. I'm obsessed with country, and as far as islanders go they indeed seem much more welcoming than Japanese :)
Sectors like tech are growing (as is the case everywhere else), but without tourism Iceland's economy is not far from that of the Faroe Islands: fish, fish, and more fish.
(P.S. I live in Iceland)
EDIT: There are movements towards more sustainable tourism, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fi...
That said, I've always seen people try and stir up a strange amount of FUD whenever a Nordic nation is mentioned. FUDing Americans about Scandinavia is practically a sport at this point.
I'm half expecting the mythical Swedish gang war, or rape crisis, to be brought up in reply to this comment. Go do some research on reporting techniques and legal definitions first if you're about to 'well actually' me on that.
It really did feel this way, like a great purgatory full of other travellers on the same airlines, not so dissimilar from a multiplayer game aka metaverse. offline similarity to Elder Scrolls for its Nordic theme or the Witcher. Also real life but yeah
I guess this video can also be seen as a statement against the ultra-fast-paced communication expectancy if you squint your eyes a little bit.
[0]: https://guidetoiceland.is/nature-info/glaciers-in-iceland