As someone who hasn't read the book but watched the movie, here's my best take (spoilers if you haven't watched it):
The main character is from an alien hive race that runs a lot like ants, with workers (main char) and drones (motorcycle man). They are on Earth trying to harvest humans for their skin, but also their meat for research purposes or something, i dunno. Something about being in close proximity to and interacting with humans causes the workers to eventually catch feelings, and need to be replaced. The replacement workers don't care - they're just ants - right up until they catch feelings themselves and the drones have to fetch them for replacement. Hence you watch one worker with her lifecycle on Earth, where she experiences all the good and bad parts of being human.
Interesting. Haven't watched the movie but your description matches the synopsis and clips I have seen.
The novel is different, though it hits some of the same notes. Here's the gist of it, and be warned these are SPOILERS:
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SPOILERS
The main character is indeed an alien. She's a non-humanoid alien, hinted at to be a quadruped somewhat similar to a dog/wolf in her home planet. It turns out that humans are a delicacy to her race, harvested for their flesh. This is a low-scale operation (in order not to alert the humans), and for this they need a lure: she undergoes irreversible surgery to turn her into something that looks like a human girl with big breasts (on close inspection, there are some signs she's a flawed imitation, but most victims don't notice until too late). She finds her human form bizarre and painful, and cannot connect either with other workers at the human meatpacking plant (they remain alien-shaped) or with humans (until very late in the novel she considers humans as barely more than cattle, incapable of real feelings). She is an outcast in her own society, very low-class -- she cannot, for example, "pay" for the human delicacy she helps harvest; it's not for the lower classes -- and this job was an alternative to dying young in some kind of high-risk mining job, reserved for the lower classes of her race. She cannot ever recover her alien form and cannot connect with anyone; she finds the planet Earth beautiful, but not the humans that inhabit it. In the end, her situation is hopeless and she dies, which is a sort of release.
> You create an NFT and sell it to yourself for $200,000.
> Now you have $200,000 and a $200,000 NFT
But you now also have a liability of $200,000. Your total asset is still $200,000 , not $400,000.
> If you can convince someone to buy that arbitrary NFT at 95% discount
so you just sold the NFT for $10,000. If somebody else got tricked into thinking they got a 95% discount - that's on them. A fashion store often marks up their clothing by 100%, and have "sales" of 50%!
>But you now also have a liability of $200,000. Your total asset is still $200,000 , not $400,000.
Assets are not liabilities, so you'll need to explain why you think it is a liability.
Fashion brands and their physical goods are definitely not the same as NFTs, insomuch as they at least have intrinsic value. NFTs only intrinsic value is they good for ripping off greater fools.
That's at least one strong reason - VCs look at the person as much as the business.
Crypto was filled with sleazy car-salesman "investor" types at the time Alameda Research was looking for funding. So when in came someone with a Jane Street background and not a single flashy Ferrari in their driveway, the dam broke on VCs finally being able to pour money into the crypto space on a decent looking founder.
If that's how unsophisticated these VC operations are then I think we'll see a lot of them lose their shirts in the coming macroeconomic environment. Which will consequently make future funding rounds all the more difficult.
Sure, I'm just curious how we'll deal with interest payments on our debt, especially since our economy has evolved to thrive on low rates. The hikes are necessary, but I think they're going to kill a bunch of BS jobs, meanwhile we'll have to raise taxes to service the debt. Gonna be real interesting.
Sure, but we made the economy grow by keeping debt cheap. Now debt will be expensive and all signs point to the economy not growing in such an environment.
I am slightly baffled by this comment since my first impression of him was exactly "sleazy vibes". Not in the flashy Ferrari sense but because the look seemed to try so hard to be the opposite of flash - the nasty stretched out t-shirts, shorts and forever bed-head hair. It struck me as a contrived and something of a put on. Google "John Blutarsky Animal House." SBF appears to have patterned his look after Jon Belushi's character in that movie. I think you have to make an effort to look like that so consistently, especially when there are cameras around.
Well if it's so common as to be a kind of uniform isn't that the very definition of contrived? How else would you explain the phenomenon then, that slobs just naturally gravitate towards prop trading?
Plus both his parents are professors at Stanford Law school. I can see VCs having a natural bias towards "it would be unlikely for someone with this pedigree to operate so completely outside the law".
SBF had huge sleaze vibes, so I don't know if your logic applies.
> and not a single flashy Ferrari
the article mentions his $30 million dollar penthouse ... It seems the only place the flashy assets didn't exist was in the press coverage put out by organizations SBF gave money to...
SBF branding himself as an effective altruist and even purposely dressed in the silicon valley "genius" attire. His condo in the bahamas was after he hit it big and needed to be close to Washington to work on crypto regulation.
There's a huge gap between that and the majority of crypto founders at the time.
>the article mentions his $30 million dollar penthouse
the $30M penthouse in the Bahamas that was purchased using investor money and customer funds... he didn't own it at the time he received funding from these big name VCs, did he?
It's investing in the confidence of the future of a network that can only handle 7 transactions a second, at the expense of a small country's use of electricity.
Just because you don't have a bearer bond doesn't mean you haven't invested in bonds. Modern finance isn't about holding an invested asset in your hands.
This splitting hairs over "true" ownership ignores the fact that the original investor analysis done by GP here premised on chain transactions is still semantically wrong.
