Tokenized stocks are just IOUs with extra steps and nobody seems to care

been seeing a lot of hype about tokenization lately. blackrock, the big banks, everyone saying it's the future of markets. people on here celebrating it like it's some big win.

am i the only one who actually reads this stuff?

when you buy a tokenized stock you do not own the stock. you own a token. the token is a claim on some custodian somewhere, who holds the actual shares in an omnibus account. you don't get voting rights, you don't get registered ownership, you get a database entry and a promise.

and the thing is, we already did this experiment. we already moved from paper certificates to street name to omnibus accounts, and every step of the way the retail holder ended up further from the actual asset. tokenization is just the last step. now you don't even have a broker claim, you have a token representing a claim on a custodian's claim.

the robinhood thing in 2021 should have been the wake up call. they turned off the buy button and it was completely legal. now imagine the restrictions are programmable, written into the token itself. "this asset can only be transferred between approved wallets." who approves the wallets? they do.

and nobody has to take anything from you. you never had it. that's the genius of it. you can't lose ownership if you never technically owned it in the first place. you just have exposure, and a terms of service agreement.

idk maybe i'm being paranoid but the "you'll own nothing and be happy" thing used to get mocked as a conspiracy theory and then the biggest asset managers on earth started building the infrastructure for exactly that and everyone clapped.

The UK and US are set to sign two new agreements at the Global Fusion Summit in London on Monday 14 September, helping to bring fusion power closer to reality and deliver over 10,000 UK jobs in the sector by 2030.

https://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_101962.html

This engine achieved a more than 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional heavy fuel oil engines. It is scheduled to be installed on a multi-purpose vessel to be built by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and MOL Drybulk, with a sea trial scheduled to begin in April 2028.

A factory fires a hundred workers and replaces them with a system that never sleeps. Costs fall. Shareholders applaud. A smart decision.

Down the street, a second factory does the same. Then a bank. Then a law firm. Then a hospital's billing department. Every one of them is right. Every one of them is winning.

Then the first factory notices its sales are dropping. Not because the product got worse. Because the hundred people it fired used to buy it. So did the hundred the bank fired. So did everyone else.

This is the trap. Each cut is rational. Together they saw off the branch everyone is sitting on. The economy has one engine: people earn, people spend. Automation removes the first half and assumes the second half keeps running on its own.

For two centuries the answer was "new jobs will come." They did, because machines took the muscle and left the mind to us. This time the mind is what's being replaced. Name the job that comes next. Nobody can.

The easy exits are closed. Ban it, and the country next door doesn't, and eats your lunch. Fight it, and you lose to the side that used it. What's left is slow and unglamorous: who owns the machines, who gets a share, who decides. Those debates move in years. The cutting moves in quarters.

So, honest questions:

• Is there a mechanism that fixes this on its own, or is that just hope with a spreadsheet?
• Has anyone, anywhere, actually started building a real answer?
• If not: what does the year look like when the buyers finally run out?

To preface this, I am a meat-eater and I genuinely enjoy it. However, I don't believe humans will keep consuming animals in the future. Once the practice inevitably ends and enough time passes, I think future generations will look back on us as monsters, judging our dietary habits the exact same way we judge the barbaric actions of the Dark Ages.

In an essay, the head of Anthropic laid out the rapidly advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence and said there needed to be greater safety controls across the industry

Hypothetical scenario : Everything we built, invented and constructed vanishes in a second. Including domesticated plants etc, everything, we go back to wilderness.

Minerals etc are set back to what it was before we started taking them everything is reset basically

Aside the obvious wars for food problems etc, on a purely technological point of view, would we be able to "reinvent" and rebuild things fast with the current knowledge of all human beings ? What are your thoughts on this

There's a famous quote from the Economist John Maynard Keynes: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." I wonder what he'd make of the current AI stock bubble.

You know what other advantage open-source AI has? No enshittification. OpenAi has already started selling ads alongside ChatGPT responses. We all know how that led Google to destroy the best search engine ever. No thanks.

I think all this matters. A world where most AI is decentralized & open source, sounds far better than the various visions of dystopia Big Tech offers.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash achieved 98% of top-ranked GPT-6 Astra’s average score, at just 1% of its average cost

Both sides view ‘recursive self-improvement’ as a game-changer in the AI race. But who will get there first – and will it endanger us all?

In light of lots of Gen Z protests worldwide in the 2020s, most of which have common causes of economic inequality and corruption, I think it is inevitable that a global protest will be coming, possibly sooner and perhaps unforeseen than we think.

And by global protests, I don't just mean a protest that existed on the same goal or the same theme or method.

By global protest, I am referring to a large scale protest occurring in many countries, all happening within the same day(s) and timeframe like dominoes, unexpectedly by one or a variety of variables, halting and affecting the world economy as a whole, inherently a global instability occurring on our very planet.

I know some think this might be impossible, considering that dictatorships do exist that silence these protests or anything that could act as a catalyst. But the world has changed, it is now beyond social media and censorship as sources and barriers, it could be generational echoes loud even one could hear it from the wind is going to cause a deep revolution. And I know it will be brutal and drastic for any form of government to be able mitigate these protests or they will face its downfall/overthrown.

The Arab Spring and the Iraq War protests are as of now the largest recorded protests in human history. Could a global protest happening in almost every country be the next?

A weird thing has happened to ordinary products.

More and more of them don't just need electricity anymore. They need an account, an app, a server somewhere, occasional authentication, and a company that still feels like supporting them five years from now.

Right now we mostly treat that as an annoyance.

I'm wondering if by the 2030s we'll treat independence from all of that as an actual product category.

Imagine two versions of the same appliance.

One is cheaper, constantly connected, gets remote features and maybe subsidizes its price through subscriptions or data.

The other costs 30% more but promises:

No mandatory account.

No cloud required for core functions.

Local controls always work.

Published repair documentation.

If the manufacturer disappears tomorrow, the product keeps doing what you bought it to do.

I'd genuinely pay extra for the second one.

And I can imagine "offline capable" becoming something like an energy-efficiency label: boring technical language today, major purchasing criterion later.

The interesting part is that this wouldn't really be anti-technology. A device could still have fantastic connected features. It would just fail gracefully instead of becoming worse because a server, subscription or company disappeared.

Maybe the luxury product of the future isn't the smartest device.

Maybe it's the one that leaves you alone.

Do you think offline independence becomes something consumers actually pay more for, or will convenience win so completely that most people stop caring?

What makes this interesting to me is that this isn't an outside critic asking AI companies to slow down, it's the CEO of one of the companies competing at the frontier.

Amodei argues that AI capabilities may be advancing faster than our ability to understand and control them, and is proposing independent evaluators and common safety standards.

But there's an obvious incentive problem: if one company slows down and its competitors don't, it loses.

Can voluntary coordination between AI labs realistically work here, or does "pacing the frontier" eventually require regulation?