Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

About Last Night

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The punchline: Elon’s hosting gig on Saturday Night live wiped $50 billion off of Dogecoin’s market cap in a single session.

The setup: That’s going to take longer to explain.

For those of you visiting us from outer space, Saturday Night Live is a nearly 50 year old show which, at times, has been the hysterically funny touchstone of American culture, and at other times, has been a wretched bore. I’ve watched the show countless times, and know everything there is to know about its history, but I stopped watching it a very long time ago. Having seen last night’s episode, I feel no sting of regret.

Elon Musk, the zillionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, was the inexplicable host last night, and given his endless pumping of the Dogecoin currency, the general feeling among the bubble-headed millennials was that the smart move was to buy up as much Dogecoin as they could afford and – in their own endlessly-repeated words – ride the profits “to the moon” as DOGE exploded to God-knows-how-high a price.

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NFT Fifty

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Honestly, I get it. I understand that new technologies come along, and people unacquainted with them will eschew them. I’ve been mixed up in high tech for almost my entire life, and I understand this. Plus, I’ve never seen myself as a luddite. It may take me a while to fully grasp the consequence of something new, but I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to reject everything that comes along with is novel.

But here’s the thing – – – when I saw new things come out in my lifetime – – be it graphical user interfaces, or the LaserWriter, or LANs, or WiFi, or the commercial Internet, or electric cars, or the iPhone, or anything else – – no one could plausibly make the argument that one of those given things was useless and idiotic. Any reasonable person could be convinced that, yes, this new “thing” might just turn out to be important, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious as to why.

Try as I might, this still hasn’t clicked for me with crypto, which is pretty odd, since this is literally a multi-trillion dollar market now with hundreds of well-funded companies in that ecosystem. But my refusal to embrace the idea that crypto is going to change the entire universe is dwarfed by my eye-rolling about the latest extension of crypto, which is NFT. I just stumbled upon a site whose sole purpose in life is to sell digital artwork by way of NFT, and it’s quite a sight.

Here’s one auction of note – – you will kindly note that the winning bid was well over a million dollars.

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For Your Consideration

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A very long time ago, one of the highlights of my year was when a family friend of ours would host his annual Oscars party. He would dress in a tuxedo, and we’d all gather at his house for drinks and hors d’oeuvres as we watched the red carpet arrivals and speculated on who would win what. It was great fun, particularly since we had seen most of the movies that had been nominated.

How times have changed. Who gives a crap about the Oscars anymore? And these movies and actors — Minari? Mank? Steve Yeun? LaKeith Stanfield? — Never seen ’em, never heard of ’em. It’s no surprise then, to see the trend:

Infographic: Oscars' TV Audience Plummets To All-Time Low | Statista

I think the Oscars are a lot like business travel. Covid changed society permanently, and it’ll never, ever really be back.