Andy Kessler

WSJ: Mark Cuban Knows Crypto

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-cuban-knows-crypto-11621785848

After my recent column on buying devices like iPhones but not really owning them, Mark Cuban, as he sometimes does, responded via email: “Nice argument for NFTs,” referring to nonfungible tokens. I’ve known Mr. Cuban since the last tech bubble, when he famously sold Broadcast.com in 1999 to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion, more than Apollo Global Management paid Verizon for the remnants of Yahoo, AOL and even Netscape earlier this month. He smartly hedged his position and bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000.

I’m not sure Mr. Cuban ever talks on the phone, but he’s sure quick with email responses.

“It depends what you ‘own,’ ” I shot back. By now, you’re probably familiar with the eye-opening $69 million dropped on NFT “artwork” by Beeple. Or the $2.9 million for the NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which you can easily see online: “just setting up my twttr.” I guess you own something, I’m just not sure what.

“The NFT is the authentication of what you own that is made public for anyone to see,” Mr. Cuban explains. Today, “all provenance is siloed and not public. NFTs can change that.”

Little did Mr. Cuban know that I had been poking around NBA Topshot for a highlight NFT of Mavericks star Luka Dončić. One cool NFT goes for $120. But what’s this? A 5% transaction fee? Even more surprising, the fine print says there are potentially 9,999 other “owners” of the same highlight with asking prices into the thousands for the same NFT.

Mr. Cuban adds, “All the prices paid for entertainment collectibles is fun and works well and it’s more efficient than physical collectibles as long as you are good with valuing digital items. We value our pics and music on our phones. Collectors value what they value and if there are more buyers than sellers pricing will go up.” Then again, maybe it’s a hustle, as Elon Musk said of dogecoin on “Saturday Night Live.”

WSJ: Automated Luxury Communism?

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/automated-luxury-communism-11621185487

At first I thought it was a joke. I still do. A couple of years ago, there was a stir around Aaron Bastani’s book “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.” It’s a manifesto for the “postwork” movement. Technology will “liberate us from work” and automation is “the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone,” the book advertises. Cue rainbow-belching unicorns. The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.

The idea isn’t even original. It’s the plot of the 2008 Pixar- Disney animation “WALL-E”: Tubby humans in personal mobility vehicles leaving planet Earth on a luxury spaceship as robots like WALL-E clean up the industrial wasteland. Kid-friendly propaganda.

Collectivist visions (Cuba, “infrastructure” bills) fail in real life for one reason: They ignore productivity. Karl Marx was ignorant that capital and technology could increase living standards for everyone, including workers. His shallow “immiseration thesis” missed that productivity drives society to make obsolete certain low-end work as more jobs move to a higher intellectual plane. Even night-school economists know that productivity is the only path out of poverty.

Plus, as economies shift toward services, workers themselves, via human capital, become owners of the means of their own production. Even Lord Keynes fell for the ruse 90 years ago, envisioning a 15-hour workweek. But there is always, always something else to invent—like mRNA vaccines—to improve society’s living standards.

Fully automated luxury communism is a joke, but maybe over the past year we’ve experienced a version of partly automated luxury communism. Think about it. Many Americans stayed home in their comfy chairs. We worked, schooled, exercised and entertained via a telescreen that, as George Orwell imagined, “could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Amazon primed our doorsteps. Instacart delivered groceries. Cities became ghost towns. Governments justified spending willy-nilly with crackpot ideas like Modern Monetary Theory.

Coyotes came back to San Francisco, and U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions dropped 12% in 2020. For climate-change control freaks, this is a dream world—a Green New Deal delight—and they’ll do anything to re-create these conditions. Wait for the headline: “Bad CO2 Day, Lockdowns Enforced.”

WSJ: The President's Speech

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-presidents-speech-11619974402

At his first press conference and at last week’s address to Congress, I noticed (most didn’t) that President Biden experienced a few blockages, or disfluencies in his speech. In other words, he stuttered. I’m writing this not out of malice, but with enormous respect. I know because I have sons who stutter. I found out my wife had stuttered during a call telling her mother she was pregnant. Yes, it’s genetic—and life-changing.

Mr. Biden has said, “You know, stuttering, when you think about it, is the only handicap that people still laugh about. That still humiliate people about. And they don’t even mean to.” My G-g-generation. Th-th-that’s all folks.

As a listener, you learn to be patient. We hired speech therapists. None were effective. Then we heard about an in-ear device that delays incoming sounds and shifts their frequency, providing voice feedback to trick your brain not to stutter. We eagerly met a representative who fitted a prototype in my then-fifth-grade son’s ear, fiddled with some settings and asked my son to speak. No stuttering! Amazing. Excited, we ordered a custom-fit version immediately. We hassled our son to wear it at home and at school, but sadly it never worked. He would complain that it sounded like his younger brother whining in his ear all day. Fair enough; his brother is annoying. Eventually someone “accidentally” stepped on it.

A few years later, on a trip to Moscow, we heard about scientists who had PC-based software that trains stutterers to speak without blocking. We visited them in a blocky Soviet-era housing complex. They had my son put on headphones and speak into a microphone. We left the room as the training started. After maybe 20 minutes, they had us come back in. My son took off the headphones and spoke without a single blockage. Amazing. We scrambled to several ATMs to get cash to pay for the software. Back home, we’d have my son train with it for an hour a day. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work.

As a parent, you’ll try anything. We attended seminars and conferences. One conference brought a group of inner-city teenagers with stutters of varying severity to put on a play. My son took to them immediately and hung around with them all weekend. It was very emotional to watch the group perform. Afterward, I spoke to a group of these teenagers and complimented them on their performances. One turned to me and, with many blockages, explained how they had practiced, and then said, without stuttering, “Actually, it feels like I’m on a stage every day of my life.”

I was surprised to learn of many famous actors whose style may have come from their disfluencies. Marilyn Monroe stuttered, hence her breathy voice.