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Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

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Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#101

Post by qingcharles »

yieldcrv wrote: post #82
renegade-otter wrote: post #50

Perhaps beanie babies is an example that we actually know about.

until you find out that beanie babies weren't irrational either there was a supply crunch with the manufacturer in China, it was rational to think it wouldn't be solved, creating a limited supply item that had more demand than the supply. the founder solved the issue and flooded the market with beanie babies, prices crashed at that point

As (probably) the world's largest reseller of Beanies at the time, this was 100% nothing to do with a Chinese supply crunch, as far as I was ever aware.

It was 100% to do with Ty corp's very clever handling of distribution, limiting where, who and how many Beanies could be sold.

There was a huge over-supply of the less rare Beanies and a huge under-production of the rarer ones. All done on purpose.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#102

Post by NuclearPM »

Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #41
silotis wrote: post #14

The brief mention that the fallout wasn't as disastrous as myth would have it greatly understates just how exaggerated the popular account of tulip mania is. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

So many of these articles get it completely wrong. Economically. People weren't going crazy for tulips just because, the government had incentivized investment in tulips. The government at the time basically told people that they could not lose money on investing tulips. It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania wh…

> It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it,

No. It’s a story that has been repeated with beanie babies, baseball cards, and crypto crap

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#103

Post by mothballed »

soperj wrote: post #99
mothballed wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure you need any of that. My entire 'city' is private property including the streets. There is absolutely no one to manage them, no HOA, absolutely nothing. If you can't drive on them you literally have to bust out a tractor and fix it. There is no public water or sewer, no public utilities, so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administe…

I really want to know where this is.

~Most of rural AZ and probably rural AK is like this. There are some 'cities' that never incorporated and have street grids without any sort of government administering them nor any organized system of maintenance.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#104

Post by tardedmeme »

mothballed wrote: post #87
Lerc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are governments at many levels. I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management. Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters. If a place had a sewer it probably had a government. Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doin…

Not sure you need any of that. My entire 'city' is private property including the streets. There is absolutely no one to manage them, no HOA, absolutely nothing. If you can't drive on them you literally have to bust out a tractor and fix it. There is no public water or sewer, no public utilities, so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administe…

I'm glad you have the option to live somewhere like that. I'm also glad you can't forcibly impose it on everyone else. I'll take a moderate level of corruption over a completely unregulated hellhole.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#105

Post by Lerc »

mothballed wrote: post #96
Lerc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can build a house in the middle of a street? If someone tries to stop you, by what authority? If they can stop you, there's your government. More than 100,000 people? Even Kowloon had a degree of management by criminal groups.

I'm not claiming there is literally no government, I'm claiming they are not acting in planning or maintenance ('civil management') capacity. If you have an easement contract to travel on a 'street' and someone violates it by building a house on it you can still sue them but the government has nothing to do with planning that. The population is not quite 100k but also not an order of magnitude lower either.

But you don't have to pay them even if you lose the suit. No police. If they try to take by force you can defend your property and your life.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#107

Post by Esophagus4 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #73
brap wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....

> dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars

That actually seems like a very big difference.

(If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#108

Post by throwaway902984 »

jMyles wrote: post #83
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print…

> The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. That's not a problem, because art is not ownable and copyright is a huge game of make-believe between states and corporations whose opinion is meaningless to me and to the artists I want to support. > if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the origin…

When you say NFTs in your wallet, what do you mean? Links that click through to images are real but their endpoint is mutable and philosophically has the same artistic value as temporary graffiti, not as a store of value like oil paintings.

How did you think about the links themselves vs the destination? That is the rub I feel like. Of course the destination is a real site, hosted somewhere, but the journey there is more ephemeral than copyright.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#109

Post by bilater »

iambateman wrote: post #33

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#110

Post by arealaccount »

JohnMakin wrote: post #88
iambateman wrote: post #33

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me: https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club

I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy
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