There were no good episodes of Seinfeld.
I can already see Kramer running NFT scams… or crypto rug pull xD
“So what’s the deal with inflation? Whenever I just make more dollars, I get in trouble.”
In “The Checks” they get a bunch of tiny payments from Japan.
Something something Seinfeld something something Epstein island lemonade
America’s screen writers adopted the Seinfeld paradigm years ago:
No hugging, no learning.
I could see george having FOMO and doing most of this shit. Kramer would fall for the AI chatbot.
*The AI chatbot would fall for Kramer.
Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don’t remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2Jf29hlXA
From the finale episode
That sounds vaguely familiar… did she have bad reception or something and her condolences came across as insulting as words got cut
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn’t cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven’t seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn’t going to be exactly right.
Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.
STOP REPOSTING NAZI BOT SHIT.
- Google being evil aside, I still think about how great google maps is and how it seemed to come out of nowhere.
- Paypal is straight up evil, no redeeming value for the past decade. Use something else. They also own Venmo.
- Battery packs and cell phones are great in that general sense.
Out of nowhere? MapQuest and printed out directions were a thing for many years.
Mapquest was no google maps. Google had you in real time recommending restaurants and giving you directions with voice. You could see a streetview. It felt like a huge leap at the time to me. You may have a different viewpoint.
Not to mention mapping GPS receivers. Google maps was probably the most obvious use case for a smart phone after making phone calls and listening to music.
Was PayPal always evil, though? The concept of it wasn’t. People wanted an easier way to conduct transactions electronically. Something faster and more convenient than, say, a Western Union money transfer order.
Almost every country around the world has a free way of moving money between people without using an app or third party website. It’s just a standard part of banking. I haven’t looked into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Paypal has bribed and lobbied to keep that kind of functionality out of the US. So, the US has a shittier, more expensive, less convenient, more privacy-invasive version of what everybody else takes for granted. Just like with medical care, taxes, etc.
To be fair, moving money between countries was not trivial before PayPal.
To use Europe as an example, SEPA became operative in 2008, about six years after PayPal first became available in Europe. Before that, all international money transfers had to go through SWIFT and the easiest way was probably to use a credit card (and good luck trying to send money to a someone who isn’t a company with that).
Even with SEPA (or for domestic transfers), PayPal offered superior comfort over entering the recipient’s IBAN into a homebanking software. Processing was faster, too.
Of course these days banks in Europe have to offer instant transfers, there’s a QR code standard to read invoice data into banking apps, and they’re working on a full-blown PayPal replacement to get the last comfort bits down as well. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.
I would expect the American credit card companies and banks lobby just as hard if not harder to prevent that from being a free service in the US. Electronic Funds Transfers are an option at every bank in the US, but they’re not very easy for individuals and seem to always charge a fee to either the sender or receiver.
Yes, just like how tax preparation companies lobby to keep the IRS from just telling people what they owe in taxes. It keeps the tax prep companies in business.
We have Zelle in the US, but it’s not the same as PayPal. At its simplest PayPal is just a way to send money from one entity to another, but it does a lot more than that. It has escrow and fraud protection (debatable if they do a good job at it). With Zelle it’s much more like handing someone cash. There have been some instances of fraud resulting in reversed transactions but those are big deals not your everyday scams or unreliable sellers.
Because PayPal and Venmo has been shitty a lot, Zelle is gaining a lot of use. I pay my rent with Zelle. Buying or selling stuff on craigslist or marketplace I’ll use Zelle if it’s more than like 40 bucks. It’s nice as a seller because there is no way to reverse the transaction after the fact.
I think they had a couple of years where they weren’t evil, but pretty close to always. They own Ebay too, and they’re also evil.
I think other countries have payment systems where they’re not evil. It’s ran by the government I think? There are no fees and it just comes out of your account. I guess payment systems in the general sense would be a better mention.
To go a little more in-depth, if a product would simplify certain aspects of life, make them more straightforward and less prone to a chain of comedic errors, then it’s a good product.
If a product makes things more complex, has more things to go wrong, and more corners and edge cases for some weirdo like Kramer or George to think they’ve spotted a killer side hustle, then it’s a bad product.
Now, I’m not saying that smartphones and computers and the Internet aren’t complicated, but they are far simpler to how things were done before. Read old hobbyist magazines to get a sense of the complex system of self-addressed stamped envelopes and hand-compiled mailing lists it used to take to get info on your hobby. Meeting a friend in a nearby town to go see a movie at a theater you haven’t been to before required a shocking number of cross-referenced paper resources.
Hmm. Do we want good tech, or do we want to inspire new Seinfeld episodes? This is a tough one.
Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.
MADOFF!
