sarcasm warning – grouchyfarmer

How Stupid Are We: Just What The Hell Is A NFT Anyway? (Warning, there may be sarcasm ahead)

Welcome to a new feature of grouchyfarmer.com which, I hope, will never be repeated but probably will because every time I look at the news it seems the human race is well on its way to stupiding itself into extinction. It’s called How Stupid Are We. And I’ll warn you right now this article got way, way longer than I intended. But let’s look at NFTs.

The acronym NFT has been popping up all over the place recently. I read a lot of articles in which they are mentioned, usually by people who seem to have absolutely no idea what the hell they are or how the whole system works. All they know is that they think they can make money off them. Somehow. Maybe.

As the headline up there asks, just what the hell is an NFT anyway?

Sidenote: Well, as a former writer and editor my first question was really “Is it ‘a’ NFT, or ‘an’ NFT’?”. Personally I think “an” should be used because the rule of thumb is that ‘an’ is used when the following word starts with a vowel sound, in this case ‘en’. But if you want to use ‘a’ yourself, hey, I’m not going to complain. Go for it. Just to mess with any grammar police out there, I’m going to use both.

A NFT is a non-fungible token. There you go. That clears that up, right? So let’s talk about wood or cows or photography or something really interesting…

Hm? No? It doesn’t clear that up? Yeah, I suppose it doesn’t. Let’s see if we can dig into this.

The dictionary meaning of non-fungible is that it is a thing that is unique. There is only one of them and there is no other thing that can replace it. The dining room chair I’m sitting on right now is fungible. It is not unique. There are five others just like it sitting around the table and I’m sure there are hundreds of others floating around out there.

However my van Gogh painting depicting a tiny mouse wearing antlers romping in the woods with drunken unicorns while a certain politician who shall not be named stoically suffers from severe constipation off in a corner behind a bush is, however, unique. It is non-fungible because, well, van Gogh is dead and can never make another one (thank God).

Side note: No, no, no! Not that van Gogh. I mean my old neighbor Coriolanus van Gogh. No relation to that van Gogh at all. Give Coriolanus a box of crayons and a case of beer and it would keep him busy for hours, but the less said about that, the better.

So when you buy an NFT you are buying a unique object that no one else can ever have?

No. A lot of people seem to have that impression, but you aren’t. You’re forgetting the “token” part of the term. A token is a thing that serves as a representation of another, entirely different thing. Let’s say we go out to the local bar and I buy you a drink but you’ve already had two (Well, this is Wisconsin so most likely you’ll have had six or eight) and don’t want another. The bartender at some places will give you a plastic or wooden coin that you can use later to exchange for a drink when you do want one. That’s a token.

When someone buys an NFT of a GIF, JPEG or video or something like that, they aren’t buying an actual thing, they’re buying a token that represents that thing and which, hopefully, maybe, ‘points’ to the actual digital representation of that thing so you can go and look at it or something. I guess. In this case the token is an entry in a kind of special database called a blockchain.

So wait, Gf, you say. You mean not only are these people are paying literally millions of dollars for a stupid GIF file of a cat horking up a hairball that’s been floating around the internet for the last 20 years, they don’t actually get, well, anything at all for their money, just an entry in a database somewhere that says they own a thing?

Well, sort of, yeah.

If it will make you feel better, please feel free to join me in banging your head against a wall to get rid of the headache this has possibly given you. It won’t make you feel any better, but it does help pass the time…

But before you start banging your head on the wall and begin to suspect that the human race is going to be the first species ever to stupid itself into extinction (it probably will but that’s fodder for a different article), remember these are special gifs and jpg and mp3 files. And these are special databases. We know they’re special because they call them blockchains and not databases.

Let me see if I can make this more clear. I probably can’t because all of this makes my head hurt, but let’s try anyway.

I wanted to call it “Harvesting Pickles in October While Being Attacked by Wild Chickens” but I was overruled for some reason

Now look at that image over there on the right. That is a digital representation of a painting I did many years ago called “The Dancer”. And I want to sell you the NFT of that painting for, oh, let’s say a hundred bucks

Come on, just play along here.

So, you say, GF if I buy that NFT you send me the painting…

No.

Well, what, you ask, do I actually get for my hundred bucks then?

You get a token entered into a database that says I sold you an NFT of that painting. Period. I still have the actual painting, I still have the copyrights. What you own is an entry in a database somewhere that says I sold you the NFT of that JPG image up there, which I have stored on a flash drive laying on my desk. Unless the cat ate it, in which case it’s, well, in the cat but that’s the cat’s problem, not mine.

You’re free to sell the NFT, the token I just sold you, but the image itself? It’s still on that flash drive, in the cat. (Well, unless the cat pooped but I’m not about to go look. Ick. I’m not going to fish it out of the litter box.) I still hold all rights to that so you can’t do things like, oh, reproduce it in a book or something without paying royalty fees. To me. And the royalty fees are going to be steep because I want to buy a Cat D10 bulldozer and those puppies aren’t cheap.

But wait, you say, it’s a picture in this blog. Anyone can just do a screen shot of it and have a copy.

Ah, but only you own the NFT which says you own, well, the NFT which is, well, something, I suppose? Maybe? Kinda?

These NFTs we’re talking about here are all, oh, digital assets, let’s call them. They are GIFs of dogs trying to take a dump behind a bush, or alleged artwork in JPEG form or sound files or video files. Someone even bought a NFT of the very first Tweet for something like three million bucks, for God’s sake. Or what they were told is the very first Tweet. And ultimately what they own is, to be completely honest, nothing. Nothing except an entry in a blockchain that says they somehow “own” that particular asset.

I have no problem with buying and selling digital artwork or other digital assets. I personally do it all the time. I’m in Second Life where I spend time building environments. At the moment I’m building a sort of cyber/diesel/steam punk city with surreal elements like bits of kawaii culture, exploding penguins (seriously, exploding penguins. they’re great fun.) and other goodies. I do create my own stuff in SL but there’s no way I can build enough props, buildings, and exploding penguins in my lifetime in order to finish an entire city, so I buy stuff from other in-world builders. I sell stuff in SL as well, and some of my paintings and photos, (well, digital representations of them), are hanging on virtual walls or are on display in a few places in SL.

But when I buy something in SL, it is something I can at least use in that environment. It’s a bit of art. or a prop for a scene I’m creating, or a building that fits into the environment I’m making. When I buy something there I am buying the right to use the creator’s intellectual property in my own environment. With an NFT I’m not even getting that. All I get with an NFT is an entry in a database somewhere that claims I own that NFT. Period.

Now if you’re starting to think this all sounds like some kind of scam designed to separate people from their money, you aren’t the only one. Personally I agree, and there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way.

Supposedly you are buying the original “thing”, whatever it is. But if you stop and think about it for a moment, there literally is no such thing as an “original” object when it comes to a digital asset. It isn’t like a painting where there is only that one, single physical object. In the digital world everything is a copy. Everything. That’s how computers work. Look at this letter “T”. Within milliseconds of my typing that letter it ceased to exist and became a copy as the pattern of bits that represent that letter were copied from the keyboard’s buffer memory into the computer’s cache memory to be stored in main memory and and the “original” pattern of bits in the keyboard’s buffer was destroyed. Then a video system looked at that copy and saw that pattern meant it needed to put a “T” in that location on the screen and made another copy of it, and then the system realized I’m writing an article so it made a backup copy just in case, and some of that data was then stored on the SSD drive in this computer, which was then backed up, and then it realized the section of the SSD where it was storing that “T” was getting full so it made a new copy of that “T” in a new location and erased the old one to recover the space… You get the idea.

The person who bought the “original Tweet” bought no such thing because there is no original. By the time the sender of that original Tweet hit the send button, it was already a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a… You get the idea.

Here in the real, tangible, physical world, there are “original” objects, there are non-fungible objects. They have a physical reality. In the digital world, in the “metaverse” (dear lord I hate that term), in the “virtual world”, there is no such thing as an original copy of anything. The very nature of how computers work make the concept of an ‘original’ impossible because in the act of creating something even the artist or creator of that thing is always working with a copy and the ‘original’ is destroyed in the process of creation as patterns of bits are moved around in computer memory and data storage spaces.

The whole concept behind these NFTs is fundamentally flawed from the beginning.

And then we come to blockchains. What makes the whole NFT thing possible is, of course, the blockchain, a mysterious and astonishingly complex bit of code that creates a supposedly immutable, permanent transaction record of every movement of an asset in the system. If you start to look into the technical details behind a blockchain you will find yourself quickly wandering off to watch cute cat videos on YouTube out of sheer boredom. Now I know, sort of, how blockchains work, but if I started to try to explain it completely it would take me about, oh, five days just to write down the basics before I even got to things like decentralization, the different types of forks, genesis blocks, orphaned blocks, nodes, wallets, signatures, encryption, hashing… Sorry, I just can’t be bothered. Far better writers than I have tried explaining it to non-tech people, so I’ll leave it up to you to do your own digging.

But to get back to NFTs, what can I say? Let’s just say George C. Parker would have been proud if he’d come up with this scam.

I’ve heard NFTs being called a reimagining of the old “pump and dump” stock scam. Some NFT owners are selling their own NFTs to themselves in the hopes that the transactions being generated will make people think they are valuable so they can dump them on someone else. I’ve heard others claim that when following the “chain” to try to find the actual digital object the NFT is linked to, most of them don’t actually exist at all. Someone else said that nfts are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion and fraud. Scammers are outright stealing artwork from legitimate artists and selling them as NFTs. From one end to another, the whole NFT system is little more than a great, steaming pile of sh*t.

So, hopefully this has taken a confusing subject and helped to make it even more confusing.

Misc. Stuff

How stupid are we? Pretty damned stupid, if some of the stuff I saw recently is any indication. Let me explain. I wanted to get one of my sons a stereo system as a combination Christmas and housewarming gift because he was moving into a new apartment over the holiday. I haven’t bought any audio equipment in decades so I did some research and finally decided on a fairly nice and relatively inexpensive receiver, turntable and speakers. But along the way I stumbled across something that can only be described as a world where rationality doesn’t exist. In the world of audiophiles, things like logic, physics and rationality quickly get tossed out the window, it seems.

The lowly power cord is one example. It’s a simple thing, a power cord. You take some copper wire, wrap it in insulation so it doesn’t electrocute you, put a plug on one end to plug into your wall outlet, put another plug on the other end that goes into your equipment, and there you go. The only things you need to be concerned about are the insulation being good enough to protect you, the gauge of the wire being heavy enough to carry the current, and the plugs being well made and attached well so they aren’t a safety hazard.

Unicorn pubic hair harvesting. Artist’s (Artist? Ha!) rendering. No unicorns were harmed in the production of this blog.

But apparently all these years I’ve been wrong. Apparently every single thing I’ve ever learned about physics, electricity, electronics, atoms, electrons, everything, is just wrong. Apparently if I want the best “listening experience” the worst thing I can do is use an inexpensive power cord. I need to spend hundreds of dollars (or more, some of the cables I saw were selling for up to $5,000 for a six foot long electrical cord) for “special” power cords, with “special” connectors, made with, oh, hell, I don’t know – Made with hand harvested, free range, organic, artisanal copper atoms, lovingly caressed with special quantum crystals, and then sheathed in insulation woven from the pubic hair of virgin unicorns. (Hmm, unicorn pubic hair harvesting – there’s a phrase I never thought I’d see in a blog. Or anywhere else for that matter.)

I learned other things as well. Did you know that wire is directional? Apparently electrons only want to flow in one direction along a wire. Wow. I had no idea. I also learned that I need to “burn in” cables. All of your cables need to be burned in, or broken in, a process similar to breaking in the engine of a new car. You need to use those cables for hundreds of hours before you’ll get the best listening experience. And if you don’t want to take the time to do that yourself, you can send them off to companies who will burn them in for you. For a fee. Or you can drop $1,000 – $2,500 to buy a fancy box with many connectors on it that will do it in just a few hours.

I learned that you can’t just run your $1000 per foot speaker cables along the floor. Oh, no. That would be too – too common or something. You need to buy $350 each cable clamps to hold your oh so special cables up off your oh so common and dirty floor.

I need to buy “quantum stickers” at $100 a pop. A lot of them. And stick them on every component in my amplifier and on my cables because they will – well, I’m not sure what they really do, to be honest, but they do something, as confirmed by several dozen glowing reviews from Bob and Stacy and George and others. And, well, come on, Stacy wouldn’t lie to me, now would she? Of course not.

One company sells, for about $150, what for all the world looks like a small block of wood with a logo laser etched on it, and claims that if I glue that sucker inside of my amplifier, many special “nanocrystals” embedded in the wood will do something that will align some kind of quantum field and do mysterious quantum things to the components in my stereo and make it sound better. And all just from being glued to the case! I know it’s hard to believe, but Peter down in the comments section says it made an astonishing difference to the sound.

Wow. Amazing. I need to get me one of them right away.

I could go on and on about things like $1,500 power strips, $250 outlet covers to put over the outlets in your wall that somehow “align the magnetic fields” or some nonsense. “Power conditioning” gadgets selling for thousands of dollars that are supposed to somehow filter out – something that will degrade your “listening experience”. Several places will sell you gadgets for several hundred dollars that will “demagnetize” your CDs.

And all of it is surrounded in sciencey sounding technobabble about quantum this and nano that and aligning quantum fields and… Oh dear lord I can’t stand it any more. Let’s talk about…

Picard

The internet immediately exploded into a tsunami of hype the moment CBS announced it was making a sequel to Star Trek Next Generation starring Patrick Stewart. But when, after all of the Star Trek fanboys came back from changing their trousers, it was learned that CBS would only be showing it on their new streaming service, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but never mind about that, I want to talk about the whole Star Trek thing and Picard because CBS recently made the first episode in Picard freely available on YouTube.

Now the first question that came to mind when CBS did that was, well, why release the premiere episode for free on YouTube? The series has been streaming for a while now and the whole Picard thing was, if we are to be honest, a blatant ploy by CBS to try to force people to subscribe to its streaming service. They apparently believed that there were so many ST fans out there that they would subscribe to the service in great hordes. So the only thing that I could think of is that they were doing it because Picard hasn’t been doing anywhere near as well as they thought it would and they’re trying to pump up the viewership numbers.

Despite the fact I used to be a Star Trek fan, I wasn’t all that interested in Picard. I expected it would be a cheap ST ripoff being produced solely to draw subscribers to a streaming service. I was a fan of STNG when it first came out, and since it’s available on Netflix and Amazon video, I decided to take another look at it a few months ago, hopefully with a more impartial frame of mind than I had when it originally came out and, frankly, it was – unpleasant.

Now I knew there were going to be awkward moments in STNG when I watched it again. The show is now 33 years old, for heaven’s sake. The first episode aired back in 1987. I expected it to look dated, and it did. Often badly so. But what I hadn’t expected was that it would be actually painful. Plots were full of holes big enough to fly a galaxy class starship through. The show was self contradictory, often ridiculously so. It was preachy and holier than thou, especially during the first season. The aliens were, frankly, ridiculous for the most part. And every time Wesley Crusher appeared I kept hoping Picard would strangle the little weasel with his own intestines. And how many times did someone pull a deux ex machina out of their asses to save the day by ‘rerouting the plasma stream into the auxiliary conduit’ or some similar sciencey sounding gobbledygook? I found myself hoping the Borg would win and bring it to an early end.

I started to feel that STNG was the onset of dementia for the ST universe, Voyageur took it into the nursing home, the movies shifted it into hospice care, and finally the abomination that is J.J. Abrams drove a stake through it and turned it into just another SF shoot-em-up.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like SF shoot-em-ups. The new ST movies are fun. As long as you forget about the whole Star Trek universe that existed before Abrams came along and take them at face value.

Wait, I was supposed to be talking about Picard, wasn’t I? Sorry, I get easily distracted. Let’s get on with this.

There Will Be Spoilers. You Have Been Warned

Do I really need to say that? I suppose I do lest some poor lost soul who hasn’t seen Picard or hasn’t seen the hype and nonsense on the internet comes along.

First, this is a Big Budget production. Capital “B”. The cinematography, set design, CGI, everything about it is pretty much top of the line. It is beautifully filmed and edited by some of the best craftspeople, editors and videographers out there.

Unfortunately, the sound absolutely sucks. At least on the YouTube video. Seriously sucks. Volume levels go from hardly audible when normal conversations take place, to ear splittingly loud when something important happens. I had to keep one hand on the volume control through the whole thing.

But on with the story…

Picard is an elderly, angry, depressed, disenchanted man, living on the family vineyard, suffering from dreams/hallucinations and, after the first scene at least, I started to wonder if he was suffering from dementia. He lives on the vineyard with a dog and two Romulans who seem to be his employees/friends.

Switch now to Boston for no apparent reason, where we find a young woman with her boyfriend, who apparently hasn’t heard of The Hair Club for Men and has hair made of bad plastic and the usual “he’s an alien so he has to have a weird face” syndrome. And that hair… I’m sorry, but I just can’t get that hair out of my mind because, I swear to God it looks like they glued coffee beans to the poor guy’s head.

See what I mean about the hair? Look closely. Those are coffee beans. Seriously. They glued coffee beans to the poor man’s head.

They’re sharing a romantic moment when three masked assassins teleport into her apartment, immediately kill the boyfriend, start beating her up, put a bag over her head and…

And then she turns into super-ninja, taking out three trained assassins in less than a minute.

And as she cradles the head of her murdered boyfriend, coffee beans and all, she is thinking of – of Picard?

Roll credits…

And it’s just so contrived, so overly dramatic… Stewart’s performance seems forced, uncomfortable, awkward. Now I know the fellow is like a gazillion years old, but come on, the man is still a good actor, but this performance certainly doesn’t demonstrate that ability. The only time he shows anything that looks like real emotion during the entire 47 minutes is during the brief interview with a reporter that they had to shoehorn in in an attempt to try to explain WTF happened that screwed things up so badly during the last 20 years.

And then we go through a lot of maudlin stuff where Picard visits some kind of museum where all his stuff is being kept for no apparent reason except, of course, to be all poignant and try to remind people that this is the real Star Trek, not the abomination created by Abrams I suppose.

Meanwhile the girl is sitting huddled on a street somewhere, calls her mother, who tells her to “find Picard”, and she does in a sort of computer hacking scene to make sure we know that she is “special”. And she meets him again and he tells her she’s Data’s daughter and then in a dramatic action scene straight out of a bad kung fu movie, her and Picard get attacked by more masked assassins, she kicks ass, and then one of the assassins kills her by- by spitting on her????

But she’s Data’s daughter. And Data’s offspring can only be twins because, well, because of “reasons”, so there’s another one of her, somewhere… And before we roll credits and shut the episode down, we find her twin is living quite happily with the Romulans, who apparently have moved into an old Borg cube…

What? Seriously??? Where did I put that face palm graphic…

Zenn and the art of electric cars

No, I didn’t misspell “zenn” up there. This has nothing to do with buddhism, but instead the Zenn is actually an electric car. This thing, to be specific…

Screen Shot 2017-07-01 at 6.40.43 AM.png

“Zenn” stands for “zero emissions no noise” and it was an attempt by a French company to produce an all electric car. And Eldest Son (ES) has one of these — these things.

It’s not really a car, it seems. Technically it’s an LSV, “Low Speed Vehicle”, a classification of vehicle that was created by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration because they were bored or had too much to drink at lunch or something, because while LSV’s are allowed on the street, they are exempt from most of the safety standards real automobiles and trucks have to follow and these things are about as safe on the street as, oh, a tin foil and tar paper shack is in a tornado.

LSVs are restricted to a top speed of 25 mph, and can only legally travel on streets where the speed limit is 30 mph or slower. (I’m told there is a way to hack the computer on this thing to boost it’s speed up to a mind numbing 32 mph! Ooo!)

Now electric cars are getting a lot of press these days, things like the hybrids, all electrics like the sporty, high tech Tesla, the Leaf, etc. And they are fine vehicles, some of them are even outstanding vehicles.

The Zenn is not an outstanding vehicle. The body and chassis was made in France, shipped to Canada where, with the help of trained beavers, they shoveled a 30 hp electric motor into the thing. Well, okay, so they probably didn’t use trained beavers. But I do suspect moose were involved because Canadians enjoy messing with us down here.

The Zenn had a whopping 30 hp engine, it’s top speed was limited to 25 mph. You could squeeze 2 adults into it with some groceries. It ran on sealed lead acid batteries that gave a range of about 30 miles or so, less if you had a passenger or did something silly like, oh, turning on the lights or radio. Much much less if you did something even more silly like turn on the heater or air conditioning. (Note: the owner’s manual states that the car’s heater is not intended to actually, well, heat anything. It’s there only to defrost the windows.)

Still, for it’s intended purpose, which was basically driving five or eight miles to your job or running to the local grocery store to get your organic free range humanely harvested almond milk for your morning bowl of kelp flakes, it would work.

But there were a lot of problems with the Zenn. The biggest of which is that it was, well, pretty much crap.

I drove this thing yesterday, and after I stopped laughing because I couldn’t believe they actually allowed this thing on the road, I realized that it is a bloody horrible car, and the only thing that surprised me about it was that it took nine years for the company to go out of business.

The ride is — well, awful. Every expansion joint, every dip, every stone, every defect in the pavement, every pile of squirrel poo, is transmitted directly from the rock hard tires and even harder suspension directly to the base of your spine. It handles just like a golf cart, with uncertain steering, odd twitches and peculiar vibrations adding to the excitement of the experience.

And that whole “no noise” thing they talk about? Uh, well, no. Okay, standing on the sidewalk watching it go by you don’t hear anything. That’s because they’ve funneled all of the noise into the interior of the car. My Corvette with the racing exhaust and headers and the stereo cranked up is quieter inside than this thing.

Then there’s the brakes. As in what brakes… It has a regenerative braking system, they claim. When you step on the brake, it goes into regenerative mode, supposedly taking the energy of your forward momentum and magically turning it back into electricity that gets dumped into the battery and slowing you down. So you put your foot on the brake and — nothing happens. At all. Rapidly going into panic mode, you push harder, and harder and harder, and still nothing happens. Until finally you put your foot all the way to the floor and the real brakes kick in and the car comes to an abrupt halt and you find out why they put seat belts in it, to keep you from going through the windshield when you stop.

You laugh a lot when you drive this thing. You have to because it keeps you from screaming in terror.

Let’s look at some of the other high points of this car.

It’s plastic. All of it. Plastic body, plastic, well, everything. Even the glass isn’t really glass, it’s plastic. The windshield is glass, but the side windows and rear windows are plastic, and not very good plastic, either.

As noted above, the heater doesn’t actually heat. It’s just there to defrost the windows. And the air conditioner, well, it sort of works? Kinda? Maybe? If you’re willing to put up with your range dropping by at least half.

Charge time isn’t utterly horrible. They claim it will recharge the batteries to 80% in about 4 hours, with a full charge taking 8 hours.

Oh, they would have sold you a fast charger that would give you a full charge in an hour.

For $9,000.

Yeah, $9,000 for a battery charger…

So, you ask, what did they sell this thing for? Five, six grand, maybe?

Uh, no. Try (cough cough) $18,000.

With the optional quick charger, this sucker would set you back $27,000. For a car with a top speed of 25 mph and a range of 30 miles, which is ridiculously uncomfortable to ride in, terrifying to drive, and which would crumple like a piece of paper if it were even bumped by a real road vehicle because it meets virtually zero highway safety standards.

Gee, I wonder why the company shut down…

ES picked this thing up for next to nothing. It needed new batteries, work on the electronics and other things. I figure he’s got about $2,000 invested in this vehicle so it isn’t like he’s stuck a fortune into it, and he’s using it every day. He commutes to work with it every day. And I have to admit that it’s cheap. He’s crunched some numbers and figures that as far as energy usage is concerned, he’d have to have a car that got at least 140 mpg to match the cost of the energy he uses with the Zenn.

And there’s another benefit as well. The sheer terror of driving this thing in traffic is better for waking you up than an espresso I.V.

The CEO of Soylent Is Enraging LA by Throwing Parties in a Shipping Container | MUNCHIES

The CEO of Soylent has run into trouble with the city of LA over his sustainable living experiment.

Source: The CEO of Soylent Is Enraging LA by Throwing Parties in a Shipping Container | MUNCHIES

If you aren’t familiar with Soylent and it’s more than a little irritating CEO, Rhinehart, let me give you the background.

Soylent Green was a 1973 movie starring Charlton Heston about a dystopian future where the world suffers from out of control over population, horrific environmental pollution, dying oceans and a seriously degraded climate due to climate change. Abject poverty is the norm. Housing is so bad a dozen or more people can be crammed into a single room. You know, sort of what like the “small house” movement wants to do to us, only they’re trying to make us think we want to do it.

Oh, dear, I just realized something. Horrific environmental pollution, dying oceans, seriously degraded climate, housing so bad a dozen people are crammed into a single room… Sort of like, well, what’s going on right now, isn’t it?

Never mind…

The movie was named after a food product, Soylent Green, which is the primary food source, often the only food source, for the vast majority of the population. Heston is basically a drone, an unthinking cop, an enforcer for the government/big corporations, mindlessly following orders and committing what are just flat out atrocities, all in the name of keeping the ‘peace’, including one horrific scene where they deal with a riot by bringing in huge armored garbage trucks and simply scooping up the protestors, dumping them into the back of the trucks, and presumably, well, squeezing them like garbage.

A key element in this new culture is death, and the promotion of death. Basically trying to talk people into committing suicide voluntarily in the hopes of attaining some kind of peaceful, more pleasant afterlife (I think — it’s been decades since I saw the thing).

The kicker to the whole story is that Heston’s character discovers that Soylent is made from people. Presumably the people the friendly government has been scooping up in garbage trucks and talking into offing themselves in pleasant, luxurious government operated death palaces.

Anyway, the new Soylent is all about food, as in not having to actually eat any. Seriously.

Rhinehart, well, apparently he doesn’t like to eat. (I say ‘apparently’ because I don’t really know. Never met the guy. While he’s probably a nice person, doesn’t kick stray dogs, doesn’t yell at the hired help too much and all that good stuff.) He seems to think eating, cooking and all that fun stuff that normal people like you and I enjoy, even relish, is evil. Total waste of time. He thinks everyone should just gulp down this green goo he calls Soylent a couple of times a day, and you’re good to go. This way you don’t have to cook, don’t have to go through all the hassle of, well, what he thinks are stupid things like enjoying time with your friends over dinner, and eating really tasty food.

The green goo (i.e. Soylent) is, he claims, supposed to supply everything you need to survive, all crammed into a drink a bit smaller than a Big Gulp.

Now as silly as this may sound, he apparently isn’t the only one who thinks this way. There are people, allegedly real live actual people, who actually pay allegedly real live money for this stuff, and allegedly even (down stomach, down boy…) drink it.

(Easy there, stomach. Hang in there, we don’t have much farther to go.)

And not just a few people. Him and his company are now supposedly worth about $100 million, for heaven’s sake.

Oh, and ignore the fact that there is at least one lawsuit going on at the moment over the alleged safety of this goo.

Rhinehart, not content with attempting to utterly destroy the joy of food, seems to be trying to expand his realm into also destroying our enjoyment of living in general. His solution to the world housing crisis is — shipping containers. As in shoving in a chemical toilet, cutting a few holes in the side to let in light, and living in them. And like all good ideas, he basically stole it from someone else. Using shipping containers as housing has been going on for a long time with mixed results.

And judging from the example he’s set up out in California, well, let’s just say that living in the original Soylent Green’s conditions is pleasant when compared to what he’s got set up.

The thing is, well, it’s just flat out horrific. It’s an old shipping container, a few holes cut crudely into the walls, a chemical toilet, and, well, that’s about it. Looks like there’s no insulation at all, so under the hot California sun interior temperature will… Well, let’s face it, you’re inside an uninsulated metal box. In California. You could roast a turkey in that sucker for heaven’s sake.

The photos, well, dear lord, it looks just bloody horrible, there’s no other way to put it. If this is Rhinehart’s “vision” of how he wants people to live… Well, considering what he wants us to gulp down instead of real food, trying to shovel people into what is little more than an oversized coffin with windows shouldn’t be surprising.

Rhinehart has, of course, never actually lived in the thing. No thank you. He claims that he has, true, but according to at least one source cited in the article, he’s never actually lived it in. He has a perfectly nice, luxurious real home to go to at the end of the day.

He has, however, used it for parties. Although how he got anyone to actually go there is beyond me. Now I admit that some of the frat houses from my college days were pretty much real, live, waking nightmares and you’d want to dip your entire body in sanitizer just looking at them. But this — this thing? Oh, my…

Well it seems the local government feels pretty much the same way, and is going after this pusher of green goo and his rather curious idea of what constitutes “housing”.

To get to the point, though…

Rhinehart reminds me of something my father once said about a particular Christian church with a reputation for being — irritating, shall we say. I was still a child and was curious about this bunch and asked him what in the world was going on with them

“They’re the kind of people,” he told me, “who live in constant fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun, and believe it’s their job to put a stop to it.”

Those weren’t his exact words, I’m sure, but it’s close enough.

But that’s not why I’m posting this. Oh, no.

This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, this station will be conducting…

Oh, all right, I know, really, really bad joke, but I tend to do that. Sometimes a lot, I fear. I blame my father. I think I inherited his snarky sense of humor. Which is curious because I’m not actually related to my father. Or to my mother for that matter. Or to my sister.

But that’s a different story entirely. I also tend to go off track, I fear.

Ah, now I remember!

This was a test. And a kind of shot across your bow, you poor people out there reading this. I just found the “Press This” tool! One click and bang! Up pops my editor, I drop in a few pithy comments, and instant post!

Well, okay, so I had the ‘press this’ thing for a while now, but I didn’t actually use it because the one from Tumblr is so wonky it hardly works at all and I figured this one was probably going to be wonky too.

But it works!

Oh brother, you’re in trouble now…