Good morning. Hello. How are you? #579
Tulipomania as a proxy for web3 but not in the way you think cuz tulips are still around, that Florida billionaire guy, bananas.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? What’s shakin? What day is it? What’s happening? All right. THURSDAY. Hell yeah who doesn’t love a Thursday.
This Galbraith book got me thinking about Tulips. You know, Tulips are awesome. They are very pretty, they smell lovely, they come in all sorts of colors. I can’t quite imagine why an entire country, and continent, would lose its mind about them and mortage everything to the hilt to buy more and more increasingly expensive tulips. That does seem a little weird. But underneath tulipomania was… the tulip. And tulips, if you think of them in any other context besides tulipomania, are really pretty cool.
Plus, here it is, four hundred years after tulipomania, and tulips are still really cool, they are still very pretty, they are still with us. Tulips rule.
Except, of course, Tulips only rule in the Bevisean, Buttheadean sense. They do not, in any way, shape or form, rule the world. They do not have a negligible impact on anyone or anywhere. Looks like the Netherlands are still the largest producing country, with a tulip industry of $250 million annually (forgive me for relying on Statista here, I am lazy, this is not an academic paper). The GDP of the Netherlands is just shy of $1 trillion. So it looks like tulips make up two and a half percent, ish, back-of-napkin of the Netherland’s GDP.
I think, when we think about crypto, and other bubbles, we forget about the ultimate outcome of tulips. We tend to think in extremes, in either direction. The whole thing will crash and is a giant scam and will die off in a spectacular catastrophe, possibly taking the global economy with it, or it will be a revolutionary change, ushering the world into a new age of prosperity of wealth redistribution and service to the global banked.
But it feels like history is telling us something different: that we still have tulips. The Beanie Baby market on eBay is still very active. There is still a giant amount of “wash trading,” sketchy $20k+ sales of beanie babies with one bid that is obviously fake. But there are still thousands of Beanie Babies being sold with 30, 40, 50 bids in the $100-200 range. I’m no Schumpeter die-hard, not the biggest fan of creative destruction. I have a bit more time for Carlotta Perez, and her economic cycles. But I am not really talking about that. Perez and Schumpter make the implicit claim that the new tech, after the hype cycle, has something new and innovative implicit in the tech, and that after the hype cycle, the tech can hunker down and get on with the business of innovating. I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that there’s sort of a bored, banal version of Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, where there is no revolution, no huge financial disruption (after the bubble pops), and just… Beanie Babies. Comic Books in those plastic shells still managing to fetch a hundred bucks if you’re lucky. Tulips at the grocery store. Boring shit, not especially positive or negative on society. Just a thing that keeps going, middlingly, through cheer capitalistic inertia.
NFTs joining Magic Cards and Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies joining sugar, the weather, pork bellies and tungsten as just another thing boring-ass bankers like to gamble on. Aspects of Blockchain tech becoming occasionally useful to solve certain problems in the average engineer’s toolbox. The most likely path of Web3 seems, to me, to simply become more flotsom and jetsam of capitalism. Somewhere between VW Beetles (for their mix of actual innovative economic and design impact and cultural woo-hoo) and Pink Flamingos (for the irrational obsession sweeping the country and their abundant use of a new, toxic material).
As an aside, I often think about the words of Dan Featherstone, the inventor of the Pink Flamingo: “let’s keep the archaeologists guessing.”
Read that profile in the Washington Post about that Floridian hedge fund billionaire. It was pretty interesting. I was hoping that it was going to be an inspiration in some way, and clearly the guy wants to be an inspiration, some poster-child of the good of capitalism. I am a man who made it myself and here I am giving back to my community. And I suppose props must be due to the guy for signing the Giving Pledge. But in a lot of ways, this guy is exactly what’s wrong with the Giving Pledge, with most billionaires, even the ones who think they’re good people. First off, this guy moved to Florida for 183 days a year to minimize his tax bill. Right off the bat this is a huge red flag for any billionaire purporting to be interested in doing good. What does this say about them? It signals a contempt for the very society they purport to love. This guy’s all like “America is great it made me who I am,” and he doubles down and says “it might be harder now but it is still possible for someone in the 99% to join the 1%.” Except he doesn’t think it’s worth it to, like, you know, pay that society back. Direct beneficiary of multiple government programs and initiatives in his life, and he disses what he calls “socialism,” without ever bothering to learn what it is, what Democratic Socialism is. Tries to starve the very governments that helped him on his journey, all while bemoaning he can’t give his money away faster than he makes it. Which is bullshit, of course. The dude could write a check, today, for one billion dollars to the Buffet or Ford Foundation, and he could pay his taxes, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t because he has spent 15 hours a day every day of his life in front of a desk and he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He’s all proud of the hospital with his name on it. The fifty million dollars he gave to fund that hospital is less than 4% of his net worth. It’s like the average American bragging about $2,000 in donations in their lifetime. Come on.
McKenzie Bezos has given six times this dude’s net worth away in a single year, without a large foundation, without pomp and circumstance. If he is serious about giving his fortune away, he is incompetent.
All right, speaking of which, probably time to start thinking giving money away in the next election cycle. What do we got? James Carville (I know, I know) went on a good rant a few weeks ago about the gap in donations in state-level races. He cited secretary of state races: “You know who is paying attention to these races? The Republican party. Last I checked, Republicans raised $33m for secretary of state races around the country. The Democrats had until recently raised $1m. I think it’s now up to $4m. That’s the story, right there. That’s the difference, right there.” Is there a good batch donation ActBlue thingy for a bunch of most-important state-level races? I would like that. Suggestions are welcome.
In much more important news, I would like to report that right now the Webb household is in a golden age of bananas. Seriously. The banana situation is the best it’s been in the entire two years of the pandemic. I have exactly three perfectly ripe bananas, they are so, so good, and they are going to last exactly long enough for the next very green batch of bananas, that are currently ripening in a plastic bag. I cannot tell you a single other time in the entire pandemic where our Strategic Banana Stockpile was in such good shape. The state of the banana union is strong.
Let’s do an oldies mix. I realize for some of you that I am stretching the definition of “oldies” here to include hit songs from your childhood, but I think you underestimate how young and hip the audience of GMHHAY actually is. The 80’s are oldies now, I am sorry to be the one to tell you this. Okay. Not all 80’s. Not, like, pioneering synthpop 80’s like Kraftwerk or Depeche Mode or Blue Monday. But the smooth stuff, the big-hit-in-America stuff. The blue-eyed soul stuff. The stuff with a connection to an even older era. Oldies. BUt i did put a few actual oldies too, never you fret. It’s a good mix. Especially the end.
All right. We got, like, four meetings today. Mental fortitude. We can do this. Talk tomorrow!
yeah, fuck most billionaires! i like this thing that richard says, that being a billionaire is essentially a mental disorder: instead of hoarding garbage, they hoard money—more money than they could ever use—to the detriment of society. i think he's got something there.