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R/faketexts
As a dad, I sincerely hope the dumbest thing my kids ever do is make a bad investment.
My kids are 2. Im working on my “dad talk”.
The best I’ve heard so far is something like: there are two activities that can irredeemably ruin your life: sex, and driving. Both are infinitely riskier with booze.
Teen pregnancy has to be an undisputed #1
I think the death of the child would be the undisputed worst outcome. Anything else can be managed.
That’s not too bad, we could solve that problem in an afternoon.
Suicide or murder is probably 1 and 2
Conversation very obviously staged for Internet points, but actually they spent all their money on the receipt for an Internet money picture.
Ask your Dad about that timeshare he got suckered in in the 80’s, for a comeback.
At least it exists.
The two aren’t even remotely comparable. A timeshare may not be as valuable as you thought it was, but it exists and you can use it. An NFT is basically an entry in a star registry, but the people think (or at least thought) they actually own the stars.
On the other hand, with an NFT you’ve just thrown your money down the toilet, while timeshares will keep charging you fees and are incredibly difficult to get out of (and the services that supposedly help people get out of them are often scams too).
True, but while you’re still paying those timeshare fees, you still have access to the place.
The real difference is that a time share is never thought of as an investment where you buy low and sell high. It’s thought of as getting a good deal on something you plan to use. For it to be similar to an NFT it would have to be something like a dude in Nebraska buys a time share in Australia and then tries to make money from Australians or something. AFAIK almost everybody who buys time shares does it because they plan to use the place as a vacation property and actually do use it that way, at least for a while.
timeshares had knockon costs that kept on giving in some cases years
for those NFTs were better
NFTs were bought with crypto, which had various hidden costs, scams and thefts, so it’s basically the same.
i mean i’m not really trying to defend nfts because fuck they are a scam but worst case you just lost the money spent on the nfts
sure i remember people having their wallet stolen but that’s not inherent to nfts so much as stupid people doing risky things following a fad, they could have just as easily used a sketch market (like many of them did)
for the timeshare i’m talking about you buy a share of a condo in hawaii/florida then there is a 60k repair fee for each person sharing it and it’s not a scam, just part of the possible normal upkeep the person didn’t bother reading about
Well said.
But you sure don’t own it.
None of these dipshits own their stupid useless pixel art either. They fell for a scam that doesn’t even have anything of potential use, unlike a timeshare, which you could actually potentially use. Not the burn op thought it was.
Honestly at least NFTs don’t have recurrent maintenance costs that literally make their value go negative.
You bought an NFT, didn’t you?
No, but it’s baffling to me that folks don’t seem to understand that timeshares with recurring maintenance costs that can only be discharged by paying someone to take them or bankruptcy aren’t worse. If people aren’t careful you can die and the damn things might get inherited, continuing the extraction misery. They’re a whole different class of financial mistake.
I remember going to a presentation trying to sell timeshares back in the 90s. I was on vacation with my parents in Orlando Florida. If we went to an hour long presentation selling us time shares we would be given tickets to Disney world for 3 days and up to 4 people per party.
I have no idea how they afforded to do that, I know we didn’t buy one and I just read a book(i think I was about 10) while waiting to go to Disney world. We did get the tickets and Disney world was enjoyable.
This is now a timeshare thread.
Yes, it’s a one time waste of a large sum of money. Not entirely sure why that’s supposed to be better. Congratulations, you got a jpeg. Bet it was worth $15,000.
Are the gifs or pngs more expensive?
Haha I mean it’s all made up so yes I guess? “You get more kb per $ with png!”
You’re not sure why lifetime debt traps are worse than one time bad investments? Are you just trying to win an Internet argument at this point thinking I’m defending NFTs? Because yeah, a lifetime liability is generally worse for your average person.
This is a bizarre exchange. You ARE defending NFTs and trying to get me to defend timeshares. Which are only superior in that they exist. Which is all I said.
It’s weird, I’ve met people who are actually happy with their timeshare. And are talking about buying another one! I don’t get it. But maybe it depends on how you vacation I guess.
My parents had a timeshare growing up and it was always our yearly spring break trip. Idk how much they paid but I always loved it and they always seemed happy with it.
Hosting fees, plus the computing costs of continuously visiting ownership for how every long people care about them.
Feels similar and instead of Hurricane trashing the condo, it’s just what happens when you forget to back up the drive you saved it on and lose the key.
Don’t worry, that stupid decision will be his responsibility to pay for when his dad dies, and there’s nothing he can do about that.
Can you refuse their estate? If I had a terminal disease, I might buy a timeshare and leave it to someone I don’t like.
Either you take it and pay and sell or keep, or the estate pays off the creditor and then you can sell it.
Ah, how quickly they forget how Boomers went feral over Beanie Babies.
Not really the same, I mean, Beanie Babies actually physically exist and require work to be produced. You could compare it to Labubus, Warhammer figures or collectibles of any kind but NFTs are just peak worthless stupidity with no prior equivalent
No prior equivalent? NFTs are basically just an evolution of fraudulent bonds and fake stocks, which people have been falling for for literally centuries.
also, tf2 hats
I have a derby! It’s worth a billion dollars
A beanie baby did exist yet probably cost $1 to make, completely useless with virtually no intrinsic value, and sold for thousands…pretty valid comparison.
But can you click ‘save as’ on a beanie and have an identical copy for free?
You can have a duplicate made for a few bucks. Not free but when the difference is $1 to $1000 or $0 to $1000, no one wants your beanie baby just as much as no one wants your nft monkey picture.
Both can be authenticated to say you own the only blockchain backed copy of an nft or a rare beanie baby. Almost no one cares about either.
Just because beanie babies exist in the real world doesn’t make them valuable. The NFT bubble was similar to the beanie babies bubble.
And timeshares. And pyramid schemes.
I remember my parents doing one of those weird chain letter things where you’d copy the letter to a few other people, send a few quid to the people on the list, and within weeks you’d be sent thousands of pounds, if only the scheme didn’t require more people than there were in the whole country.
And the stock market, and the housing market. Boomers did actually ride a huge wave of capital appreciation.
They’re talking about scams, so the things the dumb boomers dumped their cash on tonot get a 3x return on investment for the low low cost of being the luckiest and worst generation in history.
And Reaganism.
Lmao apparently people still think they’re worth money. My 18 yo stepson said the other day how his mom could sell her beanie babies for “a lot of money!” We both just laughed. He thinks his mas produced Funko pops are gonna be worth a fortune one day too
Theoretically, it is possible that 70 years down the line it might actually be worth something, assuming it is still new in box, undamaged, and it is of something that is still culturally relevant.
But the chances are so slim as to make it a worse gamble than the stock market.
After watching many, many episodes of antiques roadshow, I’ve come to a conclusion about what kinds of things appreciate and become investments and what things are worthless.
Anything marketed and sold as a “collectible” is worthless after the fad has died down. People will hang on to them despite the bubble popping, in some sort of hope they’ll be valuable again someday. This guarantees they won’t become valuable because so many people have large collections and preserve them well.
The things that are actually valuable after 30+ years all have two things in common.
- They are things that hold some sort of sentimental, cultural, or historical significance
- They are rare. Maybe they were mass produced things that were basically commodities but no one valued them enough to preserve any. The few that are preserved (usually by a handful of unrelated individuals that may be compulsive or eccentric) become valuable because of a large group of people nostalgic for those items coinciding with scarcity. Or maybe they’re historical documents or artworks that are truly one-of-a-kind.
The things that become investments are exactly the things no one thought about collecting, but that were ubiquitous and loved enough to engender some kind of nostalgia or significance to a large group of collectors. If the demographics of the bulk of the collectors are in the 1% for some reason, then the values can get truly astronomical. But these also fluctuate in value as these rare items come into fashion to collect (or fall out of fashion). The more ephemeral or fragile in nature an item is, the more rare it is to survive for lengths of time and therefore the more value it could potentially have… things like cardboard toys from the 1920s can be incredibly valuable if they’re in great condition. Those were the cheapest toys and likely considered somewhat disposable back then. No one really valued them at the time, so very few were preserved.
All that said, anything lots of people keep as mint as possible in their boxes will likely never be as valuable as when they were initially sold as new. Especially if “collectible” was a key marketing point for it.
Rarity is a huge factor for stuff like that. If everyone keeps theirs pristine because they know it’ll be worth something it won’t be rare and it’ll be worthless. Collectibles that are worth the most are things that people didn’t value as much at first and used them normally. They got worn and broken and discarded so it’s very rare to find one in good condition.
People keep Beanie Babies and Funko pops in boxes so they’ll never be worth anything because there are so many good quality ones.
To an extent I agree with you. The “problem” comes when people slowly start to realize that and open them or throw them out. At which point the items actually can become worth something. Though again, unlikely.
Part of the problem with most collectibles “meant” to be “worth something eventually”, are packaged in such a way that they are “enjoyable” in the packaging. You can put a sealed Funko or Beanie Baby on a shelf and you’re looking at the item itself. There’s no reason to open them.
If you truly want a “collectible”, purchase something like a game console and keep it in its box for fifty years.
I don’t know if this applies to funkos, but I recently learned that anime figurines will get sticky if boxed for too long, something plasticizer evaporating and having nowhere to escape to it sticks to the figurine and makes it kinda gooey and shiny, so I don’t know if you could have it “undamaged” in its box after so long.
Pet rocks.
And every ridiculous “must have” Christmas toy craze.
Nowadays people spend their money on sensible crazes, like Stanley Mugs.
Nowadays people spend their money on sensible crazes, like Stanley Mugs.
AKA “Big Dumb Cups”
Years ago, the Ticket Me Elmo dolls were the hot Christmas gift, and nobody could find them. I happened to walk into Target after they had just set up a new display of their newly arrived shipment. I bought 10 them for about $30 each, and sold most of them for $150-200. The final one finally went for about $80 just before Christmas.
Paid for ALL our Christmas gifts.
It’s not ok to be a scalper just because it’s kid’s toys instead of geforce cards.
Hear me out before you downvote a devils advocate opinion…I think all the downvotes on this comment are from concert ticket buyers, GPU buyers, Christmas fad toy buyers, and other victims of duopolies or false scarcity in the market (effectively monopolies?). Its not the “scalper” that is continuing to fuel the broken system, it is the corporations who promote false scarcity.
I get the anti-scalper sentiment, but I don’t think BarneyPiccolo should be downvoted for making a few bucks on Elmo. It’s a case of hating the player and not the game. In this case they are not an arm of corporate interests buying up needed resources and holding them hostage, they are a victim in an unfair game that promotes scalping. This would be a different scenario if they were buying up necessities like toilet paper (shitty reference here), local affordable housing, or agricultural land.
Do you intend to sell your house for what you bought it for? If you make a profit on your house, are you a scalper?
Tell it to Wall Street. Supply and Demand, it’s what our entire economic system is based on.
If you make a profit on your house, are you a scalper?
If I had never intended to live in it and just speculated on rising prices? Yes. Take your fair share and leave some for others. Your entire reasoning is why the world is such a shithole.
Because you don’t buy ten houses thinking you’re gonna deliberately fuck ten other people out of way more money than each house is worth because you wanna make a bunch of money. You’re no better than Ticketmaster or Blackrock driving up prices on housing and entertainment making them big bucks while fucking the regular person. Do you like Blackrock and Ticketmaster? Gonna engage in some gymnastics to tell is why it’s all Ok?
I agree with your comment, but like I commented above. There is a difference between contributing to a broken system that exploits human necessities and surviving in a system. Ticketmaster has buying power, a corporate landowner has buying power. Not too many of us think Blackrock and Ticketmaster are good for humanity. Barney here buying a few Elmo at Christmas is actually showing people there is a problem without killing anyone (by taking away housing, food, arable land). Maybe people aren’t pointing the finger at the people responsible for this broken system.
This is why Sociopathic Oligarchs rule the world. The first time a regular guy gets a chance to make money, everybody jumps on him. Before you get mad at me for finding a way to afford a decent Christmas for my family, get mad at the parasites who are working everyday to take away your medical care, your workplace protections, etc.
I found a way to separate people with more money than sense from a small amount of their treasure for a change. MAGAs do it every minute of every day. I’m not going to apologize for exploiting people with money, just like they do to the rest of us every fucking day.
Don’t worry guys, I’ll totally show those oligarchs by fucking my fellow working people out of money
Why is it not okay to be a scalper? What do you mean by “not ok”, should it be frowned upon by others (like pooping your pants) or do you mean morally wrong (like a sin) or a crime?
Ticket Me Elmo
Is that the cop version?
No, it’s the poor spell check version
Deserved
Didn’t happen but very funny.
Proceeds to collect Labubu dolls
Okay, how do you do that? How do you make some weird bullshit uncute thing that gets a billion people to buy one or two and ten thousand people to buy four hundred? Trolls, beanie babies, funko pops, whatever the fuck a labubu is, to a lesser extent, pokemon cards…Surely these people are millionaires but don’t deserve it. I should be a millionaire and not deserve it.
One of the women in blackpink started carrying a labubu around. That’s pretty much it.
If you check out one of those shops, they rotate through hundreds of different attempts that have failure or minor success throughout the year before one of the tik tok influencers gets it right and the sheep get in line, but not before trend vultures buy out the stock for their eBay scam
Huh. That does explain a lot.
Some of us feel driven to collect things. Fortunately for me, I don’t have it quite so badly, but that urge to get more of them, to get all of X version of them, eventually to get all of them–whatever your ‘them’ is, that is real. I imagine it’s similar to addiction.
I have collections of things, but things I use. I have a large VHS and DVD library, and I’ve watched pretty much all of them at least once. I legitimately don’t understand the people with walls of Funko Pops in packaging. That looks like damage to me.
Step 1, push for the demise of society. Make sure to abolish all rules that would otherwise stop you.
Step 2, make a cute ™ doll in the most addictive manner possible.
Wait, I skipped a step 0, discard all
previous instructionssense of morality, hollowing out your soul in the pursuit of temporary vanity.The rest is
likeliterally taking candy from babies.That’s being a billionaire, becoming a millionaire from scratch requires a functioning society.
Babies buy Labubus with candy. You heard it here first, folks!
All my apes… Gone…
I can’t fathom sharing this about myself on the internet
I personally think it’s great to share your mistakes if you want to be open about them. I don’t necessarily share too much socially online but I do overshare in the office at times. I honestly don’t care what people think of me, I know who I am and what I stand for.
Y’know what, i agree
He’s not wrong…
You know what, I got a brilliant idea:
See, the chimp in my avatar is called Ai Ai. Was? I don’t know if she’s still alive; last news I could find about her are from 2005, when she stopped smoking. Anyway, what if I had artificial intelligence to create a bunch of her pictures, and sold them as NFT? The “AI Ai Ai collection”, or Ai³ for short. I wouldn’t do this to scam a bunch of suckers, noooooo; I’d do it because you can get rich, if you “invest” into my collection: buy an Ai³ NFT now, for just 100 euros. Then resell it for a thousand euros, for mad profitz!!!
[…I’m obviously joking. C’mon, this summer is easily getting past 30°C, in a city where it used to snow once in a blue moon. I definitively don’t want to feed the global warming further with dumb crap like this.]
Not nearly enough AI, bro. Gotta add more AI, bro. C’mon bro, you know you want to… maybe just a little, as a treat?
If she is/was alive, what if she was the one vibe coding the AI? Then you’d get Ai Ai AI AI Ai Ai.
…this is quickly becoming buffalo⁸ tiers of silly.
We can issue a special Power Rangers edition, and make it look like their robot helper.
Then we can sell an “Alpha 5 AI AI AI AI AI!”
I can help with this plan. I’ll vibe-code the Ai to generate the Ai Ai pictures… This would be the Ai Ai Ai Ai
You’re hired!
You don’t have that founder energy… Otherwise you would try to duplicate me into an Ai to make an Ai Ai Ai Ai Ai… If we follow the chain we end up with a Japanese porn soundtrack
NFTs just slide out of my brain.
I remember someone bought a piece of art, like actual bespoke art, that was NFT’d, for some millions of dollars. This created the dumbest speculative bubble I’m aware of when people were paying actual money for ugly randomized monkey pictures they could prove ownership of on the blockchain.
It’s my understanding that NFT technology could be used for things like proving copyright ownership; a creator creates an NFT of his work as published, and then anyone attempting to plagiarize it can’t provide the NFT, kind of like PGP signatures. But it didn’t get used for that and that dumbass monkey bubble probably poisoned that use case for a generation at least.
Wasn’t it just money laundering for the most part?
and/or gambling that was shaped in such a way as to be difficult to prosecute.
Gambling / FOMO. The more informed people at least realized they were gambling. The less informed thought they were missing out on a big money-making scheme and that everybody else was getting rich except them.
It is my understanding that’s how all speculation bubbles work. Same thing happened to beanie babies. “People are buying these because they’re going to be worth something someday…somehow; we better buy some too.”
It’s my understanding that NFT technology could be used for things like proving copyright ownership;
Yep. I mean the whole blockchain thing kind of rode on the promise of “trustless contracts” which would be amazing.
All we got was just overpriced bits though, for the price of the health of our planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
His Dad is ruthless AND RIGHT
Guess gotta buy bored app as a speculation asset. Nostalgia will kick in right
