Hell, I’ll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It’s just that that’s nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.

Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

It’s a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you’re not allowed to be honest or forthright.

You’re allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
You’d “hate to intrude”, or “be a bother”. If it’s pushed, you’ll “consider it and let them know”.

Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can’t be conveyed.

Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.

Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.

That might just be a growing up near water thing. I think that on average, Canadians live closer to larger bodies of water than Americans do, since more than half are within day trip distance of the great lakes waterway, and then there’s Halifax and Vancouver.

Growing up in a place with water, basically everyone I know also has at least a passing knowledge of recreational small watercraft.

Where I live basically every location is some combination of “French, native American, English, Scandinavian”, “pronounced natively or not”, and “spelled like it’s pronounced or not”.

The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy#products

The results were fine, but the work to get there was quite bad quite often.

UX polish is one of those things that just isn’t as fun to do, and isn’t as rewarding either. So pumping a bunch of money into it is going to go a long way towards making all the other hard work come out better.

With the spiderman games, I almost always swing around instead of using fast travel. I’ll do the little tricks and stuff too.

They did such a good job making the basic traversal mechanism satisfying that it’s almost weird they included fast travel.

Yes, that’s sorta why I picked that example. It’s a symbol that’s been used in other contexts and is almost entirely associated with a specific negative use case.

If you see a guy walking around with a swastika arm band, do you really think "oh, look at that man showing pride in his Hindu beliefs”?

Actually, I think that the opposite of a bad example. If I see you flying that flag, I’m not going to assume your an enthusiast of finish WW1 aviation.

I chose the swastika specifically because some other people used the symbol at some point and had it ruined for them. That’s a thing that happens to symbols, they get associated with shitty stuff and you stop showing the symbol, convince people to drop the objectionable meaning, or accept that people will think you endorse the shitty one.

They can have whatever they want, but you’ll have to forgive people for thinking that you align with people who display the same symbols as you.

I assume anyone flying a swastika is antisemitic, when to be fair, they might just be a fan of the Nazi stance on affordable housing and infrastructure.

If you have a problem with symbols you identify with being co-opted by people you don’t, take it up with the people you disagree with who took your symbol, not the people who also disagree with them.

Again, it’s not a record keeping problem, it’s a problem with people being able to dispute the records, and transactions being able to be nullified.
The records are public today, and you can go check them. It’s usually even accessible via the Internet.
Part of buying a house is the mortgage company checking all those records, and other ways things can go sideways.

Issues usually aren’t because someone misread the records, but because a record was created that was invalid, or things you can’t record on the block chain, like “back taxes” or “grandma had two wills”.

The block chain doesn’t add anything that a public website doesn’t provide more simply, and it’s just as susceptible to the courts coming in and saying that a transaction was invalid because the estate executed the wrong will, or something like that.

I’m not sure I agree with your mortgage insurance example.

The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?

Block chain might make title searches easier, but it wont have any impact whatsoever on the existence of a legal system that can independently audit and invalidate contracts after the fact.

The asset isn’t digital, so ownership can’t be enforced digitally.
The current system is a pile of digital databases and paper records that need to be checked before sales can happen. Actual questions or disputes are handled by the courts. Block chain can’t change that, only change the underlying way we store the data.