What do you like on your April Fool's Day thread?

[JoePCool14]

It's been a while, but it's time to bring this trend back.

I'm a big fan of clickbait, fat lies, pie-in-the-sky, and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.

[hotdogPi]

For supposed events, I prefer things that are believable – and throw a few real ones in there too, to make it less obvious that the fake ones are fake.

Things that aren't events (such as my NFT thread) need to have some thought put into them.

[webny99]

The irony is that an April Fools Day thread would never actually be called an April Fools Day thread.

[kphoger]

the secret war with Nimbya

[Scott5114]

Didn't want to make an entire thread for it (since I do get a percentage if anyone actually buys this), but here's Jake Bear's April Fool's:

https://signsbyjake.com/product/craig-county-oklahoma-county-line-sign/

[epzik8]

Memes aside, "Never Gonna Give You Up" is everything a pop song should be.

[Max Rockatansky]

Anger from friends and family like the year where I somehow convinced a great many of them that I was transferred to Maine via provisions of a mobility statement.

[jeffandnicole]

There aren't going to be very many states where's the Governor's official Twitter page will feature a April Fool's Joke involving the middle finger. NJ is, well, different... https://www.nj.com/politics/2022/04/what-the-njs-state-bird-is-now-the-middle-finger-murphy-just-declared-or-did-he.html

[hotdogPi]

I'm wondering why Alps deleted (not even just locked) my NFT thread. I know that he has a personal grudge against me, but that's definitely not a reason to delete a thread I created.

[webny99]

I'm wondering why Alps deleted (not even just locked) my NFT thread. I know that he has a personal grudge against me, but that's definitely not a reason to delete a thread I created.

It says "MOVED" - probably moved for the mods to review it, which I believe has happened in the past. (Although for my two cents, I didn't see anything wrong with it.)

[Scott5114]

Having talked to Steve, it was done out of an abundance of caution, just in case someone were to fall for the joke and get tricked by someone else (not necessarily anyone here) into spending real money on a road-related NFT.

I should hope that nobody on this forum is dumb enough to buy an NFT no matter what it's an image of, but, well, you never know.

[vdeane]

You haven't experienced Rick Astley until you've heard him in the original Klingon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA_v0YMPN9c

[CNGL-Leudimin]

I try to do an elaborate, credible road-related news item, or research. Ideally I wouldn't post it on April 1, as Spain doesn't have the April Fools' Day tradition, but on December 28, the day that tradition is actually held in Spain.

[JoePCool14]

I try to do an elaborate, credible road-related news item, or research. Ideally I wouldn't post it on April 1, as Spain doesn't have the April Fools' Day tradition, but on December 28, the day that tradition is actually held in Spain.

Does Spain have a name for that day? December Deceit's Day?

[Big John]

^^ Día de los Santos Inocentes (Holy Innocents' Day)

[hbelkins]

Having talked to Steve, it was done out of an abundance of caution, just in case someone were to fall for the joke and get tricked by someone else (not necessarily anyone here) into spending real money on a road-related NFT.

I should hope that nobody on this forum is dumb enough to buy an NFT no matter what it's an image of, but, well, you never know.

I don't understand them at all -- same with Bitcoin, to be honest -- but apparently they're a real thing. Twitter is even promoting them via the use of NFTs as profile pictures.

[Scott5114]

Having talked to Steve, it was done out of an abundance of caution, just in case someone were to fall for the joke and get tricked by someone else (not necessarily anyone here) into spending real money on a road-related NFT.

I should hope that nobody on this forum is dumb enough to buy an NFT no matter what it's an image of, but, well, you never know.

I don't understand them at all -- same with Bitcoin, to be honest -- but apparently they're a real thing. Twitter is even promoting them via the use of NFTs as profile pictures.

They both operate on the same principle. Say I take a thing, whether it's a unit of currency (bitcoin) or an image (NFT), and start a ledger that shows it belongs to me. Then I sell you the thing, but instead of physically giving you something, I write down in my ledger "Scott Nazelrod transferred ownership of this to H.B. Elkins on 2022-04-02." Then a week later you sell it to Steve, so I mark down in my ledger "H.B. Elkins transferred ownership of this to Steve Alpert on 2022-04-08," and so on. You can see who owns it just by looking up who the last person who owns it in the ledger is, so there's no need to actually hand over any sort of tangible object to complete the exchange.

"Hey wait a minute," someone might say. "Scott has control of the ledger, so he could make it say he owns everything anytime he wants, that's not fair." So a couple of other people also start writing down whenever a transaction occurs, so if there's any funny business with my ledger they can call me out on it. As an incentive to get people to do all this accounting, though, they get to make up their own thing to add to the ledger every once in a while. To make sure this doesn't happen too often, though, as part of the ledgering process they also have to do a super-hard math problem that takes a bunch of electricity to compute.

The problem here is that a random image file...doesn't really have any intrinsic value, since it can be copied and distributed en masse. What is really being traded is a "token", i.e. a serial number in a database somewhere, of which the image is just a visual representation. But a serial number doesn't really have any intrinsic value either (see if you can talk a clerk into letting you read off the serial number of a $20 bill out loud instead of giving them the bill). Any variation in price comes from pure supply and demand of these tokens, no value is actually added to them at any point in the process. It's all speculation and stupid accounting tricks. No useful work is being done upon them to transform them into anything else; no value is being added.

Add on top of that that the bitcoin mining industry–those are the companies that are running the ledgers and solving the math problems. But to do that they need warehouses full of computers sucking down a ton of electricity. They can draw so much electricity it starts to have serious impacts on the rest of the grid. And it takes a lot of machinery to keep all those computers cool, so it creates a lot of noise, which is a problem since these are often located in rural areas to take advantage of cheap land. And because so many computer chips are being used in these server farms, there isn't much production capacity left to fulfill orders for people who want to use computers for things like graphics work. That means the price of computer hardware is going up, up, up. And none of this does anything to benefit anyone who isn't in the bitcoin market.

[webny99]

Wow, thanks for the overview. I didn't know much about how bitcoin worked either, but after attempting to take all that in, I've gone from simply disinterested to feeling a little spooked by the whole concept.

[US 89]

Yeah, NFTs as far as I'm concerned are simply a thing for rich people who have no idea what to do with all their money.

When you buy an NFT, basically what you're buying is a bunch of letters and numbers that give you the right to say that you "own" it ... but do you really? Any random person can right-click and save the actual file to their own computer. And generally the original creator still owns the actual legal copyright. I cannot wrap my head around why anybody would spend money to obtain "ownership" of something that they won't have any sort of copyright on, nor any mechanism or right to control its distribution.

[formulanone]

Yeah, NFTs as far as I'm concerned are simply a thing for rich people who have no idea what to do with all their money.

When you buy an NFT, basically what you're buying is a bunch of letters and numbers that give you the right to say that you "own" it ... but do you really? Any random person can right-click and save the actual file to their own computer. And generally the original creator still owns the actual legal copyright. I cannot wrap my head around why anybody would spend money to obtain "ownership" of something that they won't have any sort of copyright on, nor any mechanism or right to control its distribution.

The more I understand it, NFTs are like buying the goods in a store, and getting the receipt, and having competed the transaction, the buyers strolls out with their cart with both goods and receipt. But then...

A buyer says, "I'd like an NFT of those goods".

Seller says, "Sure, here's the receipt."

Buyer has paid {whatever amount} for the receipt...usually in cryptocurrency.

Buyer now owns a receipt, and not the goods. But they can take a photo of the receipt! Or post that receipt to social media! Or dress up their online character with an image of that receipt. But no food or supplies come with that.

Seller now has 0.0000156 of a "Crypto-Currency-Thing-Coin". The system works! Except to convert it into something somebody will actually accept, you pay between 8-20% to convert it to a currency that matters, without so much of the overhead. (And if you're a coin collector, there's really no specie to go with it. Phooey.)

So it's a great thing if you like spending money to create an artificial banking infrastructure use money. To be fair, we do that today in the form of taxes or interest rates.

tl;dr We only think something is valuable if enough other people also think the same way, and aren't lying.

[kkt]

Mayo and just a little dijon mustard.

[hbelkins]

It seems the bitcoin mining "industry" is getting a toehold in eastern Kentucky. We have gobs of underused electricity infrastructure now that coal mining has declined, so some state legislators from this area are pushing bitcoin mining.

Wasn't there a problem with "hostile takeovers" (for lack of a better term) of individuals' personal computers by hackers to use them to process the equations needed to produce cryptocurrency a few years ago?

Scott's explanation just fuels my skepticism about this whole deal.

[Scott5114]

It seems the bitcoin mining "industry" is getting a toehold in eastern Kentucky. We have gobs of underused electricity infrastructure now that coal mining has declined, so some state legislators from this area are pushing bitcoin mining.

This is happening in a lot of rural areas. I remember reading a story about something similar going on in rural Tennessee. But the noise from the server farm was so loud that the locals were hopping mad about it. They chose to live far away from a city in a quiet rural area that suddenly wasn't quiet at all anymore.

One article that I read said that the average crypto mining farm uses the same electricity as 60,000 homes, and contributes to a monthly increase of about $8 on the average home electric bill. In Texas, there are arrangements to pay off the bitcoin companies whenever power is scarce to get them to shut down. Whoever it is that does the paying (it's either ERCOT or the state, the articles I read have been cagey about it) 
has to pay them more money than they'd make normally to be able to reclaim that electricity usage.

Wasn't there a problem with "hostile takeovers" (for lack of a better term) of individuals' personal computers by hackers to use them to process the equations needed to produce cryptocurrency a few years ago?

Yup. That's illegal, of course, but who needs to follow the law when you could make a few bucks instead?

Scott's explanation just fuels my skepticism about this whole deal.

You're right to be skeptical. My explanation was pretty one-sided, though, so I will mention a couple of good things about bitcoin.

The main upside to bitcoin, in my opinion, is that it makes online transactions way cheaper and easier for everyone involved. The US dollar was never intended to be exchanged in any form other than cash. For any other type of transfer, you have to have a bank involved in facilitating that transaction. This is true of a check, obviously, but also debit/credit cards. With debit/credit cards, Visa/MasterCard/the other two nobody cares about take a cut out of the merchant's payout as a fee to facilitate this transaction. With bitcoin, it's all digital, so transferring the money doesn't require a facilitator other than the ledger keepers, and they get paid off for the act of keeping the ledger, not out of transaction fees. So the cost to the merchant is a flat rate of pennies rather than the percentage Visa/MasterCard keeps.

There are some other potential upsides. There's no central bank that can manipulate the number of bitcoins in circulation to enact a monetary policy encouraging or discouraging inflation/investment. This could be seen as a good or bad thing depending on your political views. It can also lead to more privacy–while the ledger is public record, everyone on there is just an account number, so tracking down what you spent money on is more difficult that with a traditional bank account, which is required to have certain personal information attached to it because of the Bank Secrecy Act. (This also means crypto is a free pass for laundering money.)

The main thing that undercuts these advantages, though, is Bitcoin is so hilariously unstable due to speculation that it's more or less unusable as a currency unit. You sure as hell can't set the price of a widget in Bitcoin, the value could swing anywhere from you making a windfall profit on each sale to a 100% loss just by the time you go to lunch. (There's a pretty famous story about how a guy in 2010 was able to talk Papa Johns into accepting 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. In 2021, at the same price, those two pizzas would have cost $630,000,000.) So if you have to set the price in USD and convert from USD to BTC at either end of the transaction, is that really worth getting to save a few bucks in credit card fees?