I was once involved with a young woman in a homeless program which was entirely defeated by this exact "wrong person" attitude.
Get a homeless person an apartment? Great.
But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making money and took most of your earnings away to pay for the housing. The program constantly threatened to take away your funding if the paperwork wasn't perfect. The program constantly made mistakes, paid rent late, and generally threatened a vulnerable homeless person with further homelessness.
It was infuriating to experience this through another person. In attempts to help a person, these programs were taking vulnerable people, dangling housing in front of them, and constantly threatening them with taking it away. That is of course exactly the opposite of what you need to do to someone having trouble taking care of themselves, and sadly mirrors the abusive kinds of situation which so often leads people to homelessness.
These stories usually spur more enthusiasm for buying cryptocurrency, but ironically those buyers aren’t interested in spending cryptocurrency using their MasterCard.
They’re hoping other people will buy cryptocurrency from these announcements, driving the price up. Or, more likely, they’re just hoping other people will buy cryptocurrency and not use it in these spending systems.
Spending cryptocurrency would result in selling that cryptocurrency, which would drive the price down. That’s not what cryptocurrency investors actually want.
Should also note that MasterCard crypto transactions almost certainly won’t be settled on the blockchain. Not with $8 Bitcoin transaction fees. They’ll just be denominated in cryptocurrency and people can deposit/withdraw in certain cryptocurrencies. MasterCard only needs to buy and sell on the blockchain as needed to provide an FX window. The actual transactions would be stored in traditional database systems (aside from customer deposits/withdrawals, just like Coinbase)
Why? Because MasterCard would get to act as an exchange and collect exchange fees. Exchange fees are a great way to charge consumers for spending their own money in 2021, when normal credit cards actually pay people 1-2% to use them. Cryptocurrency’s inefficiency is their financial upside.
> I don't understand why people are so quick to dismiss SpaceX's ambitions as unrealistic.
I expect that part may be an attempt to not get their hopes up. One of the things I learned as a child was that if someone told you something that you really wanted to be true, and you believed it, then when it turned out to not be true you felt really really horrible. So instead you disbelieve it, and when it turns out to not be true you feel satisfied that you knew it wasn't true. If it turns out to be true after all, then you are surprised (in a good way) and excited because its a great thing. Of the choices, disbelieving gives a better future emotional outcome.
That said, the older version of me has come to appreciate people who are sincere even if they aren't able to deliver on their promises. Elon is pushing the edge of space travel at a rate that is much more exciting than NASA and other governments were. As a result I can cheer him on in the hopes he will be successful without becoming so invested in that success that it would crush me if it didn't come to pass. As a kid I really believed NASA when they said we'd have a lunar colony in 2001 after the lunar landing in 1969, and their inability to come close to delivering was really painful[1].
The launch of Falcon Heavy is going to be a significant milestone for SpaceX. If they can pull it off, they will have proven they can tame the complexity of adding rockets in parallel to tune their mass fraction to space. No one has done that yet. And if they can recover a second stage, and do so in a way that they can re-use its engines at least, it will demonstrate that the economics of such an effort can be managed as well.
High hopes, realistic expectations.
[1] Yes, I know that if they had kept their funding they would have made better strides, and yes I know that isn't there fault. But neither reality mitigated the impact of NASA essentially "giving up" on the moon.
Get a homeless person an apartment? Great.
But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making money and took most of your earnings away to pay for the housing. The program constantly threatened to take away your funding if the paperwork wasn't perfect. The program constantly made mistakes, paid rent late, and generally threatened a vulnerable homeless person with further homelessness.
It was infuriating to experience this through another person. In attempts to help a person, these programs were taking vulnerable people, dangling housing in front of them, and constantly threatening them with taking it away. That is of course exactly the opposite of what you need to do to someone having trouble taking care of themselves, and sadly mirrors the abusive kinds of situation which so often leads people to homelessness.