Yeah but Tokyo has some of the best transit in the world and incredibly well planned districts. If we had that and no glass I'd feel better.
Anybody who cloaks themselves in the garb of "New Yorker" as their entire personality is a boring ass person. NYC is the best place to live in the United States since it's the only city where you can actually walk everywhere and that's why I love it but compared to any other city of similar or larger size it's embarrassing. We don't even have fucking glass on our metro platforms. Half of the island of Manhattan is a Disneyworld. A decent chunk of the iconic parts of NYC life have closed and are never coming back because landlords refuse to rent to businesses that aren't Starbucks or Planet Fitness. The roads are decaying, the parks are grassless wastelands, but fuck I don't know where else I could get a Tibetan momo, bomb ass al pastor tacos, xiao long bao, and fluffy bagels all on the same block.
Oh for sure, only the 0.01% or higher who can afford this do this. You're right that most investors are doing this because they hope to sell for more than they buy, and will have to pay capital gains tax.
It's the long con—if you buy an NFT, get it appraised at some crazy high value, then donate it to a museum or something that counts as a donation and it's a tax writeoff. I buy an NFT for $20, I get it appraised at $20 million and then I donate it, and now I'm paying $20 million less in taxes on my other income. This is how art works, I'm positive it'll be how NFTs work as well, except this is even easier since there's nothing physical at all.
Imagine thinking tea is English instead of Chinese. Couldn't be me. Tea is the drink of the Chinese peasant who killed all the landlords in their village.
Hot take: I'm actually not really a fan of socialist realism because it's boring and quasi-reactionary. Socialist realism was only codified as "the" art style of the USSR after the Soviet bureaucracy began to reel in the craziness of the post-Revolutionary period in terms of new cultural forms. Constructivism (heavily supported by the Bolsheviks) is far more interesting and boundary pushing than socialist realism, while still upholding and working well with socialist values. If all art was just socialist realism I would be so sad.
Yeah it's a shame that NYC is pretty much the only place I can live in the United States without owning a car, and I can feel it dying. The outer boroughs still have life, but it's only a matter of time before my local places are replaced with Dig Inns and Trader Joe's.