Monday, May 10, 2021

The Literal and the Figurative

Thanks to my Vienna feed reader, I just encountered an Al Jazeera article that could not have been better timed after the latest Saturday Night Live. Elon Musk used his opening monologue to talk about his use of Twitter. He admitted that he tended to write a mixture of powerful insights with utter balderdash, leaving it up to viewers to decided whether he knew which was which. That seems the best context for the following sentence I just read from Al Jazeera:

Musk said on Twitter in April that SpaceX was going to put a “literal Dogecoin on the literal moon”.

This was his way of saying that Dogecoin would pay for a SpaceX moon shot scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

Needless to say, there is nothing “literal” about any cryptocurrency. It is just another artifact whose value is determined strictly by trading practices. (Those practices were exercised in “real time” during that Saturday Night Live broadcast, when the trading value of Dogecoin took a serious drop after one of Musk’s throw-away jokes.) Mind you, whatever efforts there may be to impose standards, the value of anything traded is inevitably figurative, which is why retirement plans tend to go for conservative investment strategies. Nevertheless, even the most cautious investors cannot be fully protected against the bad judgement of other investors!

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