It's nice to find lesser seen stories with your curation but the Magic news was a blast from the past trip for me. My son was heavily into Magic from the beginning & there were tournaments in NYC area we would drive to with a crew of his friends making trades & selling cards and building competition decks.. no doubt I've seen a small fortune go through my hands in new packs alone. Fun trivia my avatar that was whittled down over the years by site resizing began its life as a Magic card and if you look really closely you can see the caryatid still there! :~)
Oh wow!! That is so nice to hear - I feel nostalgic just hearing that. And what a wonderful easter egg in your avatar! Now I need to build a deck around it, using my fancy new proxies. I will make you the Caryatid :)
More deja vu karma.. my IRC handle was acaryatid.. quite a few old friends know that and was an inside joke that pseudo was right in my avatar.. covert actors love signature clues! <3
Thank you for doing these Liam, that MTG section was an important highlight worth the length. This move by Hasbro (like many others) seems to be a microcosm of the real problem.
The valuation of assets (of all types) is going a bit cray-cray right now, but I feel like this is an opportunity for the people to dictate our own future. Assets with intrinsic value can/should be what we focus on for determining material wealth, while everything else is completely arbitrary and subjective to the will of the people (rather than a unilateral centralized agency dictating how it is). Essentially, it would be cool to have a free market, but a real one, and not the illusion we currently live under. If we can go in this direction, it could become a legitimate era of enlightenment for the history books.
I like the idea of BitCoin replacing the gold standard, as mathematics is ultimately the controlling force there, though the institutional-level investments going in make me think it's just gonna transfer the wealth gap into a new cryptographically-secured system. But for people like me who are currently on the lower end of the wealth spectrum/poverty line, it doesn't make sense to try to buy in at this point in time. Rather, I find myself wondering, what are the other assets of legitimate value that should be pursued in order to make the most of the crumbling fiat dollar? Infrastructure for growing food/livestock? Tuition towards developing trade/skillsets? Property for providing safety and sanctuary? Arsenal of medicines? Fidget-spinners?
Great thoughts. I’m happy you and others agree there’s something to the collectibles market being relevant. In fact, I wonder if this discussion would naturally lead us into asking further questions about people like Hunter Biden and his Uber-expensive paintings.
If hunter's paintings could somehow be revalued by some sort of popular vote consensus, that would be a small yet meaningful win for humanity as a whole.
It's nice to find lesser seen stories with your curation but the Magic news was a blast from the past trip for me. My son was heavily into Magic from the beginning & there were tournaments in NYC area we would drive to with a crew of his friends making trades & selling cards and building competition decks.. no doubt I've seen a small fortune go through my hands in new packs alone. Fun trivia my avatar that was whittled down over the years by site resizing began its life as a Magic card and if you look really closely you can see the caryatid still there! :~)
https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=438722
Oh wow!! That is so nice to hear - I feel nostalgic just hearing that. And what a wonderful easter egg in your avatar! Now I need to build a deck around it, using my fancy new proxies. I will make you the Caryatid :)
More deja vu karma.. my IRC handle was acaryatid.. quite a few old friends know that and was an inside joke that pseudo was right in my avatar.. covert actors love signature clues! <3
Thank you for doing these Liam, that MTG section was an important highlight worth the length. This move by Hasbro (like many others) seems to be a microcosm of the real problem.
The valuation of assets (of all types) is going a bit cray-cray right now, but I feel like this is an opportunity for the people to dictate our own future. Assets with intrinsic value can/should be what we focus on for determining material wealth, while everything else is completely arbitrary and subjective to the will of the people (rather than a unilateral centralized agency dictating how it is). Essentially, it would be cool to have a free market, but a real one, and not the illusion we currently live under. If we can go in this direction, it could become a legitimate era of enlightenment for the history books.
I like the idea of BitCoin replacing the gold standard, as mathematics is ultimately the controlling force there, though the institutional-level investments going in make me think it's just gonna transfer the wealth gap into a new cryptographically-secured system. But for people like me who are currently on the lower end of the wealth spectrum/poverty line, it doesn't make sense to try to buy in at this point in time. Rather, I find myself wondering, what are the other assets of legitimate value that should be pursued in order to make the most of the crumbling fiat dollar? Infrastructure for growing food/livestock? Tuition towards developing trade/skillsets? Property for providing safety and sanctuary? Arsenal of medicines? Fidget-spinners?
Great thoughts. I’m happy you and others agree there’s something to the collectibles market being relevant. In fact, I wonder if this discussion would naturally lead us into asking further questions about people like Hunter Biden and his Uber-expensive paintings.
If hunter's paintings could somehow be revalued by some sort of popular vote consensus, that would be a small yet meaningful win for humanity as a whole.
Okay, now do Pokémon next. 😂 Like Pamela, I’ve seen a small fortune go through my hands to satiate my son’s addiction.