Wouldn't it be easier to make an app that verified your net worth and not your watch?
This is hilariously "startup that invents something that has existed for decades", because Stone Island/CP Company (and I think some other Italian brands) has been putting QR codes on their labels that you can verify with their website since 2014:
https://www.stoneisland.co.uk/pages/authenticity
Certilogo itself, the company that provides the technology, has been going since 2006 but I guess it's enlightened, topless Europe so it doesn't count.
That's hard to do to check someone else's watch.
has been putting QR codes on their labels that you can verify with their website since 2014
But this has blockchain in it! You are comparing apples to oranges.
2: My breakfast cereal has a QR code on it so that you can verify it with their website.
For me? or for someone who has mastered forging Uggs already?
I can't get my phone to recognize a QR code.
4: Depends if one thinks the blockchain is adding any value, presumably. How many entities need to add to the register? Not very many, presumably, and you require a level of trust for each one, so blockchain tech seems to be missing the point.
If they are making their own private blockchain for this, it would be a pretty stupid implementation.
What they should do, which is still stupid, is just have some this that adds a record to a existing blockchain. Spend 10 cents on a bitcoin transaction with a note attached regarding the provenience of some Uggs, and then becomes a piece of blockchain history forever.
It depends what the blockchain is made of. Is this prole pixels or high end pixels? Will the pixels rub off over time or can you treasure them with your grandchildren in your formal library, by the hearth?
I love this stuff.
https://www.richardmille.com/collections/rm-69-tourbillon
https://www.dezeen.com/2010/09/17/hakes-shoes-ss11-by-julian-hakes/
https://www.dhgate.com/product/3-5-mylar-smell-proof-bag-cookies-420-packaging/606931144.html
In Norway when you go to a restaurant now you check in with a QR code for contact tracing purposes.
That's one of two reasons I haven't eaten in a Norwegian restaurant since Covid started.
Are Uggs luxury goods?
I do know that for a wedding gift, we recently had to give a Le Creuset* Dutch Oven from the official store rather than from an outlet, so ~$350 instead of half that. Admittedly the $350 one was the exact color the couple wanted versus a slightly different shade for the outlet one, so I told myself that we were gifting a household decoration as opposed to a cooking utensil.
* Though I have to admit that Le Creuset are terrific and that my wife and I have about 8 different ones, all bought at outlets.
They probably want to be able to return it for cash.
Whenever I go to a Norwegian restaurant I slip the maître d' a halibut, so they don't bother me with things like QR codes.
At the risk of being didactic, I was completely baffled by this until I read James Twitchell's Adcult USA, which pointed out that manufacturing surplus coincident with cheap offset color printing was where advertising in the US began. That is, soap and thread brands rather than brands attached to well-made stuff.
He also writes a lot, more loosely, about the dynamics behind self-expression through consumption. To my taste, he could have cited societe de spectacle for that, or maybe Baudrillard.
You can check in to almost everywhere here using a QR code, but very few people seem to be doing so.
In other testing news, Ume was picked for a random test by some polling company. She had to self-administer it, put the sample in the fridge, and wait for a courier to collect it. The courier, from a private firm, knocked on the door and shoved the "Sorry you were out" note through the letterbox in one motion, so that by the time I got up from the kitchen (maybe 30 second later) he was already in the car and driving away; fortunately up a dead-end street. I was able to yell as he was turning loudly enough that a pedestrian noticed and gestured him into the kerb. I passed over the package - "sorry I'm in a hurry" he said, while running back to the car.
According to the notification, he had 71 tests to collect today. They are worthless if not collected the same day as they're done and I'd give long odds that half at most of them actually get to the test centres.
What a fucking shambles this country is nowadays.
I get that is suboptimal, but we have federal health officials asking for an "uprising" against state-level health regulations in a state where there has already been an armed group arrested before they could kidnap the governor.
Wait, polling companies are doing COVID tests now? Or some other kind of medical tests?
16.1: not really. I'm just amused by the person in the story.
13 is great! I got all my Xmas shopping done at once!
13: Spambots playing the long game now, is it?
On the weird luxury items front, there's apparently a whole subculture of people who collect vintage sneakers the way some people collect vintage comics. I learned this when a store catering to these people opened in my neighborhood a few years ago.
I don't think they use blockchain, though.
25. I hope this internet magazine comment finds you well. While the link is indeed a set of references to commercial objects, this thread is a discussion of commercial excess. I've tried in my own way to share my enthusiasm for the forms this very excess takes in what I understand our shared culture to be.
It's possible that my understanding of cultural norms is so deficient that nobody else will find any of them entertaining. I'm pretty interested in the line between self-conscious quotation (with a high price tag for the curated object) and objectionable plagiarism-- a lot of it seems to me to be recapitulation of Lichtenstein's ripping off Russ Heath, but that can't be right, fashion brands openly imitate each other constantly and quickly. Someone first came up with the idea for high-end goods nearly identical to low-rent schlock of a decade ago (here thinking I'm of Off-white's simpson hoodies and the many designer shoes that are purposely careful copies of cheap-looking sneakers), and then others copied that.
And the proliferation of junk food names for weed strains is just funny, with the strains' owners having trademark rights I guess only in California.
27: Yes, sorry if that was insulting. I was commenting on form rather than content.
There's a venue for following the arguments, always euphemistically.
28. I don't mind, mockery in lukewarm-to-good faith is fine with me, and I may be pretty badly out of tune on this. I can't tell.
junk food names for weed strains is just funny
I was thinking the Girl Scouts might object to the use of the term "Girl Scout Cookies" for a weed strain, or at least collect a licensing fee.
They want the right to sell cookies in front of the dispensary.
31: It looks like they did send a dispensary a cease-and-desist in 2014, and now most sellers use just "GSC".
Here they just hybridized it out of the name, so now they are selling "Chem Scout Glue"
I imagine the people who sell Gorilla Glue might have had similar objections.
Sniffing glue seems like a bad idea.
Sniffing glue seems like a bad idea.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop telling people to not sniff glue.
Female explorer biscuits. Made with real female explorers!
(Actually explorer is a variant of scouting so is probably also trademarked.)
In researching this I learned that an edible company was sued for trademark infringement by a health food company that took the same name even though the edible company had probably been using the name earlier. Of course, none of the cannabis firms can register trademarks. They tried to countersue which was dismissed because they're not legal.
I was at a conference just over a year ago at which there was a panel with representatives from the major auction houses pitching blockchain as a tool in securing the provenance of high value works. I didn't bother with the session, as it seemed foolish in all the ways these things are. I was struck, though, that the conference otherwise mostly tried to appeal to ideas of diversity, equity, justice, etc., with sessions on opening paths into the field, working with indigenous art, sustainable practices in the arts, and here we had the money people bragging about their new toy.
I can tell they aren't serious because none of this is useful as a non-forgery guarantee. Something like embedding a chip with a PUFs might do the trick.
If there's an app that can tell perfectly whether is something is authentic, it would immediately be gauche to old money at social occasions. It'd only be used by new money and at transactions.
Blockchain is useless, as usual. Well, I suppose a well-distributed blockchain is less likely to disappear than some fashion houses, but that's such a marginal benefit.
Recently--I blame pandemic madness--I've been interested in bullion coins (awful investment, I just like the shiny), and they have slightly different verificationist properties from regular luxury goods or even regular valuable coins since almost all value is in the metal, with only a small amount of value numismatic or due to being legal tender. So the entire design of the piece is identical in function to the QR code, a convenient signal that the underlying materials are good. No need to break out the scale and calipers. Unlike in the Uggs case, if someone made counterfeit bullion coins of the right metal, they'd probably be valued similarly to real ones, and in fact some mints make rounds that look suspiciously like US coinage.
Everything in 13 is hilarious. Especially the 7-Eleven shoes--I could easily see, say, Vans selling a limited edition on that theme for $50. But charge two hundred times that and it's art.
Blockchain does have potential applications in securing digital assets, though we really haven't found any great use cases for it. So people go looking for use cases in securing physical assets, which is dumb. You can't take a digital hash of a diamond. You can take a hash of a picture of a diamond, but that's not the same thing.
A watch might be easier, I guess. But if you've got a phone to run the app, you already know what time it is.
Obviously, if they ever made it so that anybody could appraise a watch with an app, the higher quality retailers would go out of business. If they guy on the sidewalk is selling you a Rolex, there's no overhead, so it's going to be cheaper than anywhere else.
Always go to the sidewalk guy for the best deals on a Rolek watch.
43 is right. Everything in 13 is delightful and amazing.
I'm afraid to click on commercial links because one time nosflow linked to a floral jacket and it followed me around the internet for weeks.
49: it was the shoes that I couldn;t get rid of.
I'm in a late Bush era state of mind.
The polling company was doing it because the government has outsourced sampling the population, just like everything else.
And the polling company then outsourced the pick up to a courier company that has inadequate staffing and probably has "contractors" instead of employees.
oh yes. That guy with 71 pickups to make had "contractor" written all over him.
Stone Island/CP Company (and I think some other Italian brands) has been putting QR codes on their labels that you can verify with their website since 2014
As has Icebreaker (NZ) which AIMHMHB invites purchasers to track their garment back to the individual merino sheep from whose fleece it was made by scanning, I am sorry to say, the garment's unique baa-code.
56 has completely derailed my mind. Thanks a whole bunch.