The $55M saga of a Netflix series nobody will ever see

> Are you suggesting that they're intentionally hamming it up?

Oh, absolutely. They're making fun of the inherent silliness of the Flash Gordon serials.

Another gem is the priest at the wedding:

    "Do you promise not to blast her into space?"
    [Ming gives him a warning look]
    "Until such time as you may grow weary of her?"

> I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.

What, specifically, do you find dumb as shit? I don't want to come across as confrontational here, but it's difficult to gauge how much a person knows about blockchain, its uses, current pitfalls, and the technology's mission. And these conversations usually end up in one of two ways for me depending upon how much the person on the other end actually knows. Either they know next to nothing besides how to buy and sell it, in which case, the conversation almost always tends to lean into pointless vitriol; or they actually know a lot about the current crypto industry, see it for all its weaknesses and none of the potential, and are willing to have a civil conversation.

Frankly, like the other user, I'm in the boat of thinking that our current financial system is in desperate need of some kind of overhaul. Blockchain/crypto could be a part of that overhaul, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But it's clear to me that something needs to change.

Anyway, I'm just always curious about other people's thoughts. I'd say the majority of people I talk to on this topic though just jump straight to abusing the person that's pro-blockchain-as-a-concept without having substantial reason for disliking it besides:

1) it's a huge waste of the world's non-renewable energy resources, which is not necessarily true, it's mostly only true for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW, there are blockchains that require substantially fewer resources to be a player on the chain.

2) That crypto prices fluctuate too much when cashing back out to fiat. This argument seems short-sighted, because in a possibly ideal situation you would never need to liquidate to a fiat. In an possible future (for blockchain) you would be able to pay for your morning coffee at a PoS terminal using your crypto wallet directly and there's possibly a government system that lays out the purchasing power of a coin. I use the word "possibly" a lot here to point out that there are probably competing theories on ideal implementations of crypto as a general and worldwide currency.

3) That the transactions per second (TPS) that a blockchain can handle aren't comparable to systems like VISA. That seems true, for now. Blockchain is still very much in the early stages of development, culturally and technologically. Keep in mind, fiat currencies have been around for nearly a millennia. A technical solution to replace an ancient system needs engineering time and public adoption.

If you have other reasons for thinking blockchain/cryptocurrency is dumb as shit, I'm very interested. And genuinely, I'm not being sardonic or anything else when I say that.

It has been a long time since I last debated this stuff, so it is funny to see the same talking points from 10 years ago.

1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.

2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.

3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.

"Live TV" includes streamed live TV and "broadcast TV" is always considered to be licensable.

You can avoid the license fee only if you watch exclusively internet streamers like Netflix which aren't TV channels. Which means: no TV news or sport. Pretty major components of why people watch TV to begin with.

But this is well into straw men territory. This thread started with me saying that the tax-based structure of the BBC lets it ignore sci-fi. Now you're arguing that you don't have to pay the tax if you are willing to forego the benefits of live TV, which is a point I readily concede because it's irrelevant to the one I made.

> ITV and Sky manage to find plenty of poor actors, so clearly having good actors is not just some inherent unearned feature of British TV

Sure, and good British actors do well in the US. The BBC just is more prestigious than ITV/Sky, and might pay better. BBC also has its share of bad actors, of course. I'm just saying that the quality of top British content is more coming from the acting (down to acting schools) than the production house.

> this is a misconception. if you don’t want to pay for the BBC, you don’t have to. it’s just a crime to use it without paying

I think this is a little tricksy - the BBC has had pretty dystopian ads[0][1] out for a long time that mean people pay the licence fee just out of worry about being caught.

[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/5bmE7wpBG23peFVe6

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/bd1caeqH9NCrSP427