crypto: scratch-off lotto tickets but as currency https://t.co/brQJl6c1ho
— kilgore trout, junky horse (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 19, 2021
… Which I can regard as an early-morning soft target, because I Do Not Understand Finance, and also the only acquaintances I suspect might have any coin in this game are, to be honest, would-be sharpies who mostly get shorn…
The value of more than 7,000 crypto tokens tracked by CoinGecko sinks more than $600 billion in the past week to $1.9 trillion https://t.co/rNrZqXtZVe
— Bloomberg (@business) May 19, 2021
Value of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other cryptocurrency plummetshttps://t.co/Nj8LPvssh5
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) May 19, 2021
Bitcoin shed about $70 billion in market value in 24 hours. Here's a look at what's behind the wild swings in the price of the digital currency.https://t.co/UdD4VwmTGG
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 19, 2021
Also, if past performance is any guide — once Wells Fargo jumps on the train, the hijackers are already ensconced in the engine car and busily looting the first-class passengers.
I don't write much about Bitcoin because there aren't any fundamentals to discuss. 1/ https://t.co/G7WtGDYv3Q
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 19, 2021
This is an important point: a lot of very smart people, from VCs to bank execs, have invested a lot of time and money into trying to find a use for bitcoin. They haven’t found one yet…
…Well, other than as a pyramid scheme, which it excels at. https://t.co/Pc4NZ0eW9l
— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) May 19, 2021
But I've given up predicting imminent demise. There always seem to be a new crop of believers. Maybe just think of it as a cult that can survive indefinitely 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 19, 2021
I wonder if this has to do with approaches to the Internet.
Boomers remember a world before the Internet, allowing for a sort of skepticism. Zoomers have only ever known the Internet, making them harder to impress.
To Gen X and Millennials, the Internet was always *The* Future.
— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) May 20, 2021
(Plus, when Boomers hear people talking about it, we’re reminded of Superboy’s pet dog, and that is not conductive to serious discussion.)
debbie
Well, I have received a few emails demanding bitcoin in exchange for not sharing my password. So there’s that.
Ken
That’s unfair to scratch-off tickets, each of which does have a definite value (usually zero).
NotMax
Foto frolics. Nearly impossible not to click through all of ’em.
:)
NotMax
Cryptocurrency not worth the paper it isn’t printed on.
//
Ken
So where is everybody? Did the Four Corners thread run until 3 AM, and everyone’s still in bed?
(I was reading the thread, but didn’t feel I could contribute meaningfully, and almost everyone seemed on their best behavior so I couldn’t contribute in my usual way.)
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
rikyrah
@Ken:
I was running late today ?
Baud
Someone got rich, which makes it all worth it.
Booger
I have a NFT of a tulip bulb, which I will happily provide to you for an appropriate amount of Dogecoin. So Bubble! Much Speculate! Very Collapse!
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@Ken:
Those people were too nice and optimistic. It’s like they didn’t even know they were on the internet.
Ken
A new slogan for the Baud!20XX campaign!
Baud
How low does crypto have to go before we stop destroying to environment to mine them?
Jeffro
LOL
I can’t do any better than that – see y’all in the next thread! ;)
rikyrah
GeorgiaPeach ??????? (@ChrisFromGA68) tweeted at 7:22 PM on Wed, May 19, 2021:
Another badass photo of our Commander in Chief ? https://t.co/q9K1tYil7l
(https://twitter.com/ChrisFromGA68/status/1395173046265290755?s=03)
Jeffro
@NotMax: also can’t beat this one. People bringing their A-game early today! ;)
Baud
@Ken:
The original idea was “Someone got laid….”, but it didn’t poll well with imcels.
MattF
Cicada news. And… a reason to not eat them, if you needed one.
satby
What I wish people would grasp about financial markets is that the traders are almost all high stakes gamblers. IRL too, half of the ones I supported at the Merc and the CBOT had online gambling sites on one of their six monitors while they were working. It’s all based on speculation and (not very) educated guesses on future events. And they fuck up a lot which they can cover by out trading and not get dinged personally. Bitcoin appeals to them.
Geminid
I would like to see governments crack down on Bicoin by making electricity used in “mining” bitcoins more expensive. I think a pricing system that discriminates against this wasteful practice would not be too hard to devise. It’s in the interests of governments in general to suppress alternate currencies anyway. They undermine regular currencies, and make anti-money laundering and corruption laws hard to enforce
rikyrah
Billy Porter reveals he’s HIV-positive: ‘I’m so much more than that diagnosis’ https://ew.com/celebrity/billy-porter-hiv-positive/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social-share-article
debbie
@Geminid:
Can they create a usage tax on the profits that would reduce the cost of electricity used for bitcoin?
satby
OT: just scored a roundtrip fare from Chicago to London, returning from Paris for under $500 (full travel insurance boosted it to $502!). Dates are mid to late October, 17-24 London, and 24-31 Paris or maybe Brussels for a few days. Woo-hoo!
RSA
I sometimes wonder how low the response rate would have to be for robocalls to become unprofitable.
Wapiti
My wild stab about the fall-off in crypto: people were finishing their taxes this month, and got asked a new question this year: “Do you have any cryptocurrency?” Because having such, and not checking that box on one’s tax forms, means one is now exposed to tax fraud charges. There’s also a requirement to report transactions that occurred in the year, because they will be taxed as an investment.
Baud
@satby: Sweet!
Baud
@Wapiti:
I didn’t know that. Very interesting.
satby
@rikyrah: That’s too bad, but if he’s compliant with medications he’s got a good prognosis. I have friends who were diagnosed in the late 1990s who are doing great managing it.
Steeplejack (phone)
Brent Terhune explains crypto. “It’s like an NFT but for money.”
Baud
@RSA:
Judging by election results, we’re no where close to that number.
Mat
Yes, crypto is a typical financial fraud. This is my latest reading on financial fraud. Davies is always knowledgeable, entertaining, and informative, though sometimes not an easy read.
ETA: Messed up my nym.
Ken
@satby: Out of curiosity — and not intending to harsh your mellow, so apologies in advance — does travel insurance nowadays cover “one or more of the governments involved shut down air traffic due to a surge in pandemic cases”?
(You young people still use “harsh your mellow”, don’t you? I’m trying to keep up with the lingo so I look hip and happening on this internet thingy.)
Joe Falco
I just buy lottery tickets. It’s easier to understand and my odds of striking it rich are about as good.
Ken
@Wapiti: Now that you mention it, I remember giggling when I got to that question on the tax forms. It hadn’t occurred to me that many people might instead say “oh shit…”
Cameron
Not directly on topic, but I thought this Michael Hudson piece shows a bigger problem of which Bitcoin is a part.
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/01/the-rentier-resurgence-and-takeover-finance-capitalism-vs-industrial-capitalism/
narya
@rikyrah: Read that yesterday; loved it.
Gonna start pulling stuff together today to get out of town . . . we’ll see if I get there before dad shuffles off this mortal coil. Rather than dashing around to fly out, I’m focusing on being able to bring more stuff w/ me so I can stay a bit longer. I also hate to fly, and feel like that would potentially expose me to more opportunities for running into infected folks.
Keeping OzarkHillbilly’s thoughts in my head–to try to keep my balance. (Thanks for that formulation yesterday; it’s a very nice way to think about it.)
rikyrah
3ChicsPolitico (@3ChicsPolitico) tweeted at 10:27 PM on Wed, May 19, 2021:
Michelle Obama’s former Secret Service agent says she ‘could do nothing’ when witnessing racist slurs directed at the former First Lady
https://t.co/armxjlgQcY
(https://twitter.com/3ChicsPolitico/status/1395219511620550658?s=03)
Soprano2
Yep, this is exactly right! When I was in college I did a paper for my finance class about the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates on 1982 (dating myself there!). My conclusion, after spending many hours in the library reading Wall Street Journal articles, was that there were a few important “market makers” whose pronouncements about what was going to happen made things happen! Everyone followed these people, and mostly did what they said. I think that’s the basic model. Periodically I ask my husband “What are those people in the market mad/glad/obsessed about today?” Honestly, the value of a particular company or its products doesn’t always seem to have that much to do with the value of the company’s stock, or with how it goes up and down. Look at the value of Tesla stock; that seems insane to me!
Bitcoin seems like a scam that criminals use to separate people from their real money and commit crimes. If I remember correctly, it started out as a tax avoidance scheme, with the theory that if government didn’t create the “currency” they couldn’t tax it.
MattF
[deleted]
Baud
I’ve never heard a compelling case for crypto other than speculation. I’ve heard that the underlying blockchain tech can be useful to reduce the costs of payments and money transfers, but the regulatory framework is not in place yet to permit that on a wide scale.
satby
@Baud: Right? If you’ve a member of House Pfizer, House Moderna, Or House J&J, the EU is opening soon with no quarantine. I figured by October things should be a bit smoothed out, the weather will be good, and the prices are crazy low now.
I also booked my unsold.com 7 nights in London for under $300 (under $45/night, 4 stars on Trip Advisor), and I have a Paris 7 night stay that I’ll book as soon for about the same. I doubt I’ll get a chance like this again, so I’m going!
Baud
@satby:
What’s going on with J&J? Have not heard any more reports about side effects since the pause. (Generic question.)
I’m a little surprised about the prices. I thought there’d be pent up demand for travel.
Splitting Image
The surest sign that cryptocurrency is on its way out will be when Donald Trump gets into it. His supporters will be the last group of suckers to get fleeced in all of this.
Soprano2
@satby: Wow, I’m seriously jealous! I got the yearly magazine from a travel agency my mother & I used for a trip to New Mexico a few years ago (the theme was Christmas in New Mexico). They have a week-long trip to Italy the first week of November. I’m tempted, but concerned about how Covid will be there by then. Before Covid hit, we were planning to try to go to Italy last year or this year. *sigh
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
There are too other uses! Money laundering, tax fraud, narcotics distribution, bribes, currency control evasion….
Everything from the frantic quivering over Snowjob’s “revelations” to greasy “Han Shot First” tshirts to Russian subversion of American society to election interference to Q to crypto currencies to GameStop is easily explained by the simple phrase “it’s all really just about ethics in gaming journalism”. Those goobers are the most credulous, easily deluded, stupid motherfuckers on the planet.
satby
I’m not a young people (66, Tuesday), but the insurance did specify covid restrictions being reimposed. As vaccination increases in the EU especially, I’m hoping the pandemic is less severe by then. I normally do volunteer vacations (have one booked for 2022, in fact), but all those countries are short of vaccines and struggling with high covid rates. I’d rather be part of a vaccination team honestly, but I don’t have a current license (we don’t do EMT stuff at the eye doctor’s).
Ken
@Baud: IIUC, the blockchain tech is chiefly useful if you need a public ledger that anyone can read and (consensus) write. Such applications are few and far between. To take one example, Visa doesn’t want anyone else writing their ledgers, and there is absolutely no demand from their customers to make their transactions public.
WereBear
Exactly. And without restraint, there were regular Panics in the American economy which ruined everyone BUT the rich…
Geminid
@debbie: I was thinking along the lines of surcharges on rates for bitcoin miners. If a business uses a lot of electricity to produce say, aluminum, they might pay a fifth of the rate charged if it were mining bitcoins. Households might pay the higher rate above a certain level. A potter who has an electric kiln in their backyard studio could get an exemption.
Bitcoin mining really sucks up electricity. Gaetz wingman Joel Greenberg used $90,000 in tax payer money to buy a bitcoin mining rig. When he turned it on, it blew all the breakers. So he moved the rig to a different part of the building, and it started a fire. Greenberg explained that he was just getting his county revenue office ready to accept bitcoin payments.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2:
We have two weeks in Crete booked in September. While there, we’ll be exploring the potential for our ultimate retirement one day – property there is cheap enough where you can get nice oceanfront homes for about 100K Euros. It would take some time to rebuild our money, but it could maybe be eventually possible.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Greenberg damn well better have the goods on Gaetz (and hopefully others) in exchange for that plea deal. The man is a stone-cold psycho and should be locked up for a very long time.
satby
@Baud: J&J is released and being administered again. I think they’re prioritizing it for people who want only 1 shot and also for homeless/transient populations, who may not be able to be compliant with a 2 shot protocol.
Soprano2
My husband had a print shop in the 1970’s. He said he got to know some con men pretty well – you could tell them, he said, because they always wanted a lot of gold ink on their materials. They thought it made them look rich. He asked one of them once how he got so many supposedly-smart people like doctors to invest in his schemes. The con man said that all you had to do was tell them it was a way to avoid taxes. He said they’d rather lose all their money than pay it in taxes. It’s stupid, but that’s the mentality I think a lot of them have.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: That sounds wonderful! I’m jealous
OzarkHillbilly
@narya: You seem to have things fairly in hand at the moment. If it begins to feel like it’s slipping thru your fingers, it helps to have someone you can talk to. My Minnesota sis was a life saver for me during Ma’s long final decline.
Baud
@Ken:
There is demand to find a way around the rates Visa charges for use of its payment network though. The idea is that blockchain tech might compete with that not because it’s public but because it’s decentralized rather than controlled by a monopoly or oligopoly. That’s the idea, anyway. There are many up hurdles between here and there however.
satby
@Soprano2: I would book now (obviously, since I did) because the prices are just fantastic. Countries that depend on tourism are hurting (everybody’s hurting) and the EU’s rate of vaccination is improving. I am a serious budget traveler, a trip like this was frankly out of reach for me before. Still a bit of a gamble, so travel insurance is a must.
Baud
@satby:
Right. But I haven’t heard anything more about blood clots. Maybe it’s low enough that it’s not news.
Falling Diphthong
Purely anecdotal, but: I am 52, and so I guess a Gen-Xer.
My investing philosophy is that I remember the crash of Enron, of Bernie Madoff, of bundled mortgages. If I don’t understand how it works, then I don’t want to invest in it.
Also too: I cannot imagine a real future scenario in which all fiat currencies have collapsed but the cloud holding the virtual currencies is Totally Just Like Now.
rp
As a gen x-er, I’m deeply offended. Most of us are too cynical and jaded to be awed by bitcoin. I blame the millennials.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@rikyrah: We checked out one Waffles & Mochi episode out of curiosity, and now we’re hooked and probably going to watch the rest of the season. She’s such a classy lady, and we both get such a thrill every time she’s on screen, and every time we hear a character talk about “Mrs. O”.
She also had a really charming sit-down with Stephen Colbert a few nights ago. I’m so glad she’s still on our TV screens. Not sure what her husband is doing these days.
Since 2008, whether or not FLOTUS made you feel that way has been one of my screening tests for sanity and membership in the sentient human species.
Baud
Is it just me, or does it seem like half of all advertising now is either crypto or sports betting? And, like, it changed almost overnight.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2:
I had a big case years ago where we used a retired con man as an investigator. He’d only done one short Federal stretch over a lifetime, and was fantastic at getting people to voluntarily talk.
He told me that his favorite game was to get people to throw big money at illegal schemes, that way, they wouldn’t go to police. He did have a scare though, when he sold a fictional load of phantom stolen tires to the father in law of a Texas Ranger, who used his official resources to track him down and threaten to outright murder him if he didn’t return the money (he returned the money).
Neat guy. He showed me how the quick change game is run at a cafeteria after a meal, where I watched him turn a $10 bill on a $7 meal ticket into something like $45. I knew what he was doing, and couldn’t follow it (he gave it all back after the “lesson”). Said when he was conning, he never missed a meal and always found places to stay.
satby
@Soprano2: The con man said that all you had to do was tell them it was a way to avoid taxes. He said they’d rather lose all their money than pay it in taxes.
Totally true. Most of the professionals I’ve known, hell anyone who IDs Repub, are obsessed with avoiding taxes. Talked once to a guy while the Powerball lottery was some crazy astronomical sum, and he said “imagine how much the government would steal in taxes on that”. My response? “I would fly to D.C with a check made out for the tax amount and hand it over personally with a huge smile, because I would still be in possession of tens of millions of $$ I didn’t have before.
They’re all fucking nuts.
satby
@narya: Safe travels and best possible to you and your dad.
OzarkHillbilly
Oh my Gawd… WTF is that bright yellow thing in the sky???
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Probably a UFO.
Ksmiami
@Mat: it’s a fraud wrapped in a bubble, packaged into a mania… Same as it ever was
Subsole
@Baud: Silly Baud.
Floors are for the rational.
And as the good Professor Krugman pointed out, this is all just a Silicon Valley reskin of that good old Ron Paul grade “buy gold!” herpityderpity.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Duh!!! Silly me.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Subsole:
“Buy gold certificates! Buy them now to avoid declining fiat dollars as a hedge against inflation and economic collapse! We maintain your gold in secure vaults!”
Ken
@Baud: Where are you seeing these ads? If it’s online, it may be some algorithm that’s decided you’re interested in crypto and betting (probably because of the wretched online hives you hang out in). I haven’t noticed them on TV, but I tend to watch shows tailored for the “ask your doctor about Pryzexus” crowd, with some cash-for-gold ads.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I also am hoping that Gaetz is indicted. Republican politicians seem to be distancing themselves from Gaetz. Most of the Republican candidates for Portman’s Ohio Senate seat planned to speak at a rally last Saturday in Strongsville, Ohio. All but one took a pass after it was announced that Gaetz would be a featured speaker (Candace Owens and Lauren Boebert were the other two; Boebert was a no-show).
A particular target for Gaetz at the Strongsville rally was district Congressman Anthony Gonzales, one of the ten Republican impeachers. trump flunky Max Miller is challenging him in next year’s primary. Gonzales got his licks in first Saturday, when he tweeted:
“Ending child exploitation remains one of my top policy initiatives in Congress. Anyone engaged in these heinous acts must be held accountable and taken off the streets.”.
Subsole
@Splitting Image: Which is hilarious, as some of them will also have been the FIRST suckers to get fleeced in all of this.
BruceFromOhio
Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace interviewed journalist Laura Shin with some very basic questions about bitcoin, and her responses are illuminating.
That it eats up ridiculous amounts of electricity to create is a deal-killer, as sustainability strategies are appearing more and more in company mission-vision statements and strategic objectives. Same with NFTs – as soon as people understand what it takes to make one, it becomes a distant, twinkling star of gee-whiz, rather than an actually useful and desirable method of ownership.
All it will take is one CME event, and all the toys stop working as we wake up to the dawn of a bright new day … in 1856.
khead
@Falling Diphthong:
This. All of it. We are even the same age. Also, seems like a good time to offer up the old comics collection if anyone would like to trade some crypto for it.
hueyplong
I’m a little risk averse when it comes to attempting to discern whether I’m at the right point on the timeline of a pyramid scheme when I’m flying blind.
My favorite quote is Keynes’ “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Which would be fine, if they weren’t ALSO too fucking weak to admit it once in a while.
Like, I’ve known stupid people who knew they were stupid. I could never hate them for it because they were just kind of born thus and you could tell they were trying to work with it.
But the goobergate crowd? It’s the bone-crushing stupidity married to the towering, tungsten-hard faith in their own infallibility that makes them a problem.
And by ‘a problem’ I mean assholes.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Has anyone else gotten spam calls from boiler-room-type operations that claim that they got your info because you submitted it to a cryptocurrency website? Because I spent the better part of a year fending off those calls on a regular basis (come to think of it, though, it stopped while I was away in the US for a month).
wenchacha
@Geminid: I wish the “mining” operation had actual real-life projects that need work. If it’s math calculations, solve some serious problems! Don’t just f*p away with numbers, do something useful for humanity.
MomSense
@Ken:
I’ve been dragging lately. My life is too busy and I’m a little crispy. Haven’t had the energy to do much of anything.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
I just threaten to kill them and every member of their family. Every time I do that, the calls stop for months.
I think they have their own “Do Not Call” registry.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Gaetz and that nutty Q lady from Georgia had a rally at The Villages recently. No other Republican politicians showed up. I think they know he’s going down. It speaks volumes that only kooks like Greene and Boebert are willing to be seen with him.
Subsole
@Baud: It’s not just you. And I’d say the split is more 70/30 crypto’s way.
Someone’s panicking. Or my browsing habits tripped a sucker-flag somewhere.
zhena gogolia
The NYT has letters supportive of Stefanik today. “She has a low conservative rating, so she’s not an ideologue! That’s good! Why are liberals all of a sudden in love with Liz Cheney?”
Not one letter pointing out that Stefanik’s previous liberal rating and present North Korean-style fealty to TFG are not signs of her not being an ideologue, but of her being a person of absolutely no moral standards.
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Cryogenically preserved, no less!
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: According to PopeHat on his podcast with Josh Barro last night, going from 22 down to 6 has no impact on the length of his sentence.
Greenberg is still stuck with minimum 12 years to maximum life sentence. Bringing the goods by identifying other wrongdoers, testifying against others, etc is HIS ONLY OPTION for reducing his sentence.
PopeHat said that in order for negotiations to have gotten this far, the prosecutors feel pretty certain that Greenberg can bring the goods.
We shall see.
BruceFromOhio
@Geminid: Ugh. Gonzalez is my rep. I give him much credit for his actions in March-April 2020, he was holding weekly town-hall conference calls that had OH DoH medical experts providing solid guidance on dealing with COVID, and had a good screener keeping the crazies at bay for the Q&A. He gave tepid-at-best lip service to TFG, would not repeat the stupidity points coming out of that corner, favoring instead the “chin up, we’re all in this together, and we’ll make it through” approach in addition to bringing the medical experts into the calls. It was reassuring to hear in those early crazy days, and a blatant counterpoint to the idiocy coming out of the caucus in DC.
He’s a younger family guy that embodies the few sane conservatives remaining in Ohio, as the rest of the soulless ratfucks reps go full frontal Q or worse (*cough*Jim Jordan*cough*). In the heavily gerrymandered OH-16, it’s unlikely any Democrat will ever pose a serious challenge. If this district has to be stuck with an (R), it’s far better to be stuck with a Gonzalez than any of the other creatures currently sliming for this seat. I’m on the fence of wanting him to get what’s coming because Republicans deserve to reap what’s sown, and hoping he comes through because at the end of TFG he did the right thing. And doing the right thing seems to make the fascists cry those bitter tears, which I thoroughly enjoy.
I suppose at some point I’ll have to pay attention to the shit-show parade of fail these idiots are putting on, just not ready yet. Events like that Strongsville rally will make an interesting anthropological study, treating it as such is the only way I could tolerate it without barfing.
narya
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, I saw a therapist after my sister died (in 1983), and a lot of those tools have stayed w/ me over the years. My brother is a little more challenging, but we have surprisingly little major family drama. I’m not a formal meditator, but I take a lot of the buddhist perspective and tools to heart as well. My goal is to support my mom as much as possible (their 65th anniversary is next Wednesday), be present w/ my dad if I get there in time, and do the needful things (like cooking, calling people, doing the dishes) as much as possible. Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
PsiFighter37
I finally bought some crypto earlier this year and still have a decent return (although obviously far less given recent price action). I am a bit unconvinced about Bitcoin’s inherent value other than people viewing it as digital gold, except with less practical uses (gold is still used in some industrial processes, as well as for jewelry). Ethereum, though, seems to be much more practical and has a lot more use cases.
Being a skeptic for too long, I think that the asset class is here to stay. However, I am also not a ‘true believer’ and couldn’t care less about the libertarian arguments about Bitcoin.
hueyplong
@WaterGirl: Totally buy that and am already putting Gaetz in the rear view mirror. Have shifted my lottery ticket-type hopes to the possibility he can finger DeSantis for something/anything.
Right now, DeSantis is my #1 threat to be GOP nominee in ’24.
BruceFromOhio
@zhena gogolia:
I supported her opponent, Tedra Cobb, for NY-21, and received steady updates on that election. Stefanik is and was the very worst kind of two-bit-soulless ratfuck Q-bait there is. A few letters to the FTFNYT moves that needle not at all.
Subsole
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: That’s a new one.
I did get calls from people impersonating the US border patrol, for a while. That was…interesting.
OzarkHillbilly
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I wouldn’t know. I always hang up before they ever get a chance to tell me why they are calling.
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I wish they had a “Do Not Call” registry. I get regular calls from a FOP org and it’s always the same guy who always starts with some version of “Where have you been?” I’ve gotten into it with him a # of times and he just keeps coming back for more abuse. Now, as soon as I hear his voice I just hang up.
Sometimes I submit to the desire to give it to these assholes but really, life is too short.
Danielx
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I have never understood the “gold certificates” concept. I mean, if you want to buy gold for whatever reason, by all means do so. But in the event of an economic collapse, possession of a piece of paper saying you own x amount of gold would be worth as much as the piece of paper.
germy
@zhena gogolia:
I saw Stephanik’s campaign commercials. She’s not my district, so I couldn’t vote for her opponent Tedra Cobb, but I live close enough to see every one of her “I’m just a regular country gal” TV ads.
One of Stephanik’s promises was to weaken an “out of control” EPA.
At the time, I wondered how that would be received by people who were horrified at the excessive levels of PFOA in their tap water. But she won her election!
The attitude in upstate NY is basically “I vote straight Repub unless the candidate actually eats a rat on the campaign trail. Even then, I vote Repub.”
Ruckus
@Joe Falco:
With a lotto ticket you actually have odds of striking it rich. Rather slim to none but still, higher than being paid in bitcoin.
germy
@BruceFromOhio:
So did I, and it was the first time I’ve ever received a handwritten thank you note from a candidate.
rp
@BruceFromOhio: OMG. She sounds like an idiot.
OzarkHillbilly
@narya: My father had Alzheimer’s at the time. Trying to keep him on an even keel was a full time job. That’s when I learned that lying can be a kindness.
“Where’s Mother?”
“She’s at the store, Pop. She’ll be home soon.”
“Oh, OK.”
15 mins later:
“Where’s Mother?”
“She’s at the store, Pop. She’ll be home soon.”
“Oh, OK.”
One time my little Sis told him the truth and he exploded in rage: “WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME????!!!!????”
I wanted to throttle her.
Timill
@satby: Mega Millions as of today, from usamega.com:
Federal Filing Status: Married Filing Jointly
Mega Millions Jackpot for Fri, May 21, 2021 $515,000,000 Gross Prize
Annuity: 30 average annual payments of $17,166,667
– 24% federal tax – $4,120,000
– Add’l federal taxes due (37% final rate) – $2,168,189
Subtotal $10,878,478 pa
Cash: $346,300,000
– 24% federal tax – $83,112,000
– Add’l federal taxes due (37% final rate) – $44,955,523
Subtotal $218,232,478
Subsole
@Danielx: If civilization collapses, I think I’d take the paper. Easier to burn for warmth, much better to stuff into your boots as an insulator, and I really don’t fancy wiping my ass with a gold brick, thanks ever so…
germy
@OzarkHillbilly:
About ten years ago we got a phone call from someone who claimed to be taking a political survey. My wife (who loves sharing her political opinions) picked up and started answering questions.
Because my wife is a brutally honest person, she often assumes other people are honest. This wasn’t the case.
The questions got more and more personal, more questions about our finances, etc. and she started saying “I’d rather not answer that.” Meanwhile, I’m gesturing for her to just hang up. Finally, she ended the call.
But the fact that she answered and talked, it apparently put us on their Call List. We’d get one call a day, then finally two calls a day. Sometimes 8am, sometimes 8pm.
Different people; sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, but always Just Wanting To Take A Political Survey.
Eventually I blew my top, cursed the hell out of them. Guess what happened?
The calls continued, but it became harassment. Sometimes they’d hang up. Sometimes they’d start asking questions, but I could hear laughter in the background. Whatever boiler room or prison they were calling from, fishing for personal financial info, they had lots of time on their hands.
At the time we had a land line, and the phone/clock/radio combo had a neat habit of generating loud feedback if you placed the receiver next to its cradle. I got so I could wave the receiver like Jimi Hendrix on his stratocaster. I hope I blasted their eardrums.
The calls never stopped until we cancelled our landline.
Geminid
@BruceFromOhio: I am curious about the effects Ohio’s new redistricting system will have. This law is complex, and does not seem to go as far as the new independent commission systems Colorado and Virginia have adopted. But I did notice that a sponsor of permitless concealed carry legislation said that it had to pass this session, because the new redistricting system will result in a smaller Republican majority in future legislatures. He may have just been hyping his crappy bill, though.
I think Ohio will lose a Congressional seat next year because of reapportionment.
New York will also lose a Congressional seat next year, and Democrats in Albany can easily make Stefanik lose the game of musical chairs. As Claudia Tenney won the 22nd Congressional district by less than 400 votes, some slick gerrymandering might knock out two New York Republicans
Last November, I voted for Virginia’s new independent redistricting commission, even though the legislature turned blue in 2019. But where states do it the old way, I am all for Democrats in states like New York and Illinois being as ruthless as Republicans are when it comes to redistricting.
sanjeevs
My elderly parents are both having medical tests delayed because of the ransomware attack on the Irish Health Service.
These fuckers want 20m in Bitcoin and the Irish government understandably are telling them to take a hike.
so not really seeing much good in having an untraceable currency right now.
debbie
@satby:
FSM, that sounds like a wonderful trip!
debbie
@satby:
Haven’t read through all the comments, but I heard this morning that Pfizer has been cleared for normal refrigeration for up to one month.
To be Frank
Bitcoin = Tulips. now with electrical consumption and ransomware
OzarkHillbilly
@germy: I once had a collector harrassing me over some bad checks my ex wrote, threatened to have me arrested for them. I talked to my lawyer about it and he said, “Oh yeah, I know those guys. They’re all ex cops. You haven’t hired me yet, so I can’t give you any legal advice, but I can tell you the statute of limitations expired years ago.”
So the next time I talked to the collector I said, “Well, I talked to my lawyer and he said you should go fuck yourself.”
I wish I’d had a tape recorder to record the invective coming my way for all eternity. He was gonna start with breaking my legs and work his way up from there. I hung up. He called back. I hung up again. He called back again.
Eventually he gave up. Where’s the fun in hearing “click” after 3 words?
germy
@debbie:
!
This is the best news I’ve heard today.
I’ve been looking for information on how long they expect the current vaccines to be effective. Boosters in one year or six months or not at all? I haven’t seen anything.
L85NJGT
@Baud:
CEO of Emergent was up on the hill making excuses yesterday, and Scalise was doing his best to defend his donor. J&J are having to go through 100 million doses checking for contamination, and production has never resumed at that facility.
J&J are using whatever they can get out of an Indiana and European plant, while Merck stands up production.
Fair Economist
I don’t think one action by Musk explains a cryptowide crash. More likely there’s something going on in the supports for crypto. It turns out one of the big banks funding crypto purchases is a pyramid scheme run out of the Cayman Islands and I’ll bet it’s not the only one. My guess is one of them hit an air bump.
sab
@BruceFromOhio: From your nym I thought you were from Ohio, but you are still in Ohio. I had no idea.
germy
@OzarkHillbilly:
He was so used to people being terrified by his calls, and then you end up on his list. He probably needed blood pressure medication after that.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: My dad wants to go home. But I sold his house to the neighbor who knocked it down. So I tell him it is under extensive repair and those contractors are so damn slow. Sorry contractors. He will never hire you so I am not hurting your reputation.
OzarkHillbilly
Add “unarmed Idaho teacher” to the list of things that will stop a bad guy with a gun:
Bluegirlfromwyo
@PsiFighter37: Same but wouldn’t touch Bitcoin with a ten-foot pole. There are cryptos working with the banks instead of being dudebro, you’re not the boss of me currencies.
p.a.
No clue abt crypto. Is it analogous to early US with state-chartered local & private banks? No oversight, no accountability, opaque ownership, wildly varying public acceptability of the various, multiple currencies?
sab
@Baud: It’s just you. I still get women’s blouses and that weird Oko pitcher.
different-church-lady
The techno-toyification of money.
I mean, it’s just part of the techno-toyification of every single goddamned thing, so why not?
sab
@satby: I am so jealous. I hope you have a wonderful time and send pictures. You do know that they don’t speak English as we know it in London? Just warning you.
JustRuss
@satby: I have a co-worker who’s retired military, full pension, and when he retires from this job he’ll be collecting a pension from the state as well. And he gets absolutely livid about how much of HIS money the government takes in taxes. I don’t get it.
different-church-lady
@satby: What is this, Game of Jabs?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
As a Gen Xer I have to say I don’t find crypto currencies interesting. I mean, I might throw some pocket change in the market near the bottom of a trough and hope another speculative bubble develops and I can sell near the peak and make me a lot of money from a very little money – basically the only way it interests me is as a scheme to fleece the true believers to make myself, if not wealthy, then at least better off. But there are plenty of other ways to cash in on speculative bubbles so it’s not inherently more interesting than any of those other options.
Roger Moore
@Soprano2:
I don’t think this is quite right. Bitcoin started as a scheme to invent a currency that appealed to technolibertarian goldbugs. In many ways it behaves a lot like an asset-backed security, except that it’s designed so the supply is inherently limited. That prevents inflation when someone discovers a new supply of the asset. But unlike physical assets, it can be traded virtually, so it’s supposed to be especially difficult to track and ideal for selling illegal goods, laundering money, and evading capital controls.
The last one is at the core of the current sell-off. China has been the center of the Bitcoin “mining” industry for a while because it’s a way for Chinese billionaires to evade their country’s capital controls. A bitcoin mined in China can be spent anywhere, and the Chinese government can’t stop it, at least not directly. Instead, the government has taken various steps to shut down the miners. Whenever one of these is implemented, a bunch of the miners are forced to shut down, and that drives down the price. If and when they decide it’s safe to start up again, they’ll come back on line and prices will bounce back. Serious steps to interfere with other illegal uses would likely have a similar effect.
OzarkHillbilly
@germy: I thought he was gonna burst an aneurysm on the phone.
@sab: After we put him in a home (a really nice, safe place) whenever I went to visit him he spent a lot of time telling me how he just wanted Jesus to came and take him. When it was time for me to go he would beg me to take him with, hanging onto my arm with absolute desperation and the strength of an NFL linebacker. After 3 or 4 of those heartbreaking goodbyes I began to say, “I’m gonna go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.” Then I’d walk to the elevator and get on without looking back because to see him sitting there alone and waiting for me to return would just rip the heart right out of my chest.
I knew it was a kindness. I knew that he’d forget I had even been there long before he would expect me to return, that that moment would disappear into the next without a trace. But it didn’t lessen my sense of abandoning him there.
CaseyL
I think cryptocurrency is played out except for the high rollers; I think NFTs are the New Thing.
I base that on a friend of a friend, whose entire 25-year business career has consisted of getting on the latest bandwagon of every barely-legal “investment” scam there is, and who has made a lot of money off it. He dropped out of cryptocurrency and is now focusing on NFTs.
RobertDSC-Work
As a Gen X’er, my only interest in cryptos is seeing how mining facilities are set up and what kind of machinery and computing power they produce. Otherwise I don’t care at all.
Ken
@p.a.: You forgot the computers, but otherwise accurate.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: I live in town. My sister (his favorite) lives out of town. She wonders why I don’t visit. I tell her I don’t because it upsets him. She doesn’t understand. His caretaker does understand, and would rather that my visits are rare. They upset him. Meanwhile his facility has ducks in a pond out the window. He likes ducks.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Damn. Makes me want to just call my pop just to say hi.
Cameron
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks – I really needed this today.
catclub
Umm, VISA and MasterCard can do hundreds of millions or billions of transactions per day. Bitcoin Blockchain transactions are incredibly slow. So, no.
artem1s
@Baud:
BINGO! how long before the rubes catch on that they are paying for someone else’s astronomical electric bills? And that if the hijacking gets really out of control, the government only needs to pull the plug on the server farm of their favorite currency to put a stop to that bullshit.
Douglas Adams’ B-Ark survivors who adopt tree leaves as their choice of currency are a perfect example of the idiocy of crypto – and how using and hoarding it inevitably devalues and destroys everything it touches.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@sanjeevs:
“But decentralization and freedom from governmental regulation and monitoring!”
– Glenn Greenwald
sab
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Do it! I am not sure mine would even recognize me. My baby sister won’t come in because she looks just like our late mom, and that could be really weird with dad.
catclub
It is an even farther cry from the 0 price (refuse to say value) it had in 2009. Which is crazier, a digital token falls in price from $60k to $37K overnight , or a digital token price goes from 0 to $37k on no earnings and no tangible product?
catclub
@CaseyL:
I have no idea. All I know is that if you bet against it, this market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent.
Kay
Amen. I think of it as low wage employers demanding a “maximum wage” be set in stone :)
If we can hold the House people will start to see what a higher wage economy looks like, that it benefits everyone but the tippy-top and they will like that. But we need more than two years to have it pay off in ways people will notice.
30 years of bullshit on wages takes more then 6 months to undo.
ArchTeryx
As a Gen-Xer, my primary experience with cryptocurrency is being unable to get graphics cards for the PCs I build because of these m’fers. It’s gotten so bad that NVidia is starting to deliberately nerf certain aspects of their graphics cards’ computational ability to make them unusable by crypto miners. (They, of course, have an all-computation card just FOR crypto miners because free market, bitchez!)
What a racket. Too bad I never figure a way to be on the ground floor of these, so my stillborn career doesn’t matter as much.
Ken
@catclub: Bitcoin’s slowness is by design, and part of the “mining” model. In fact, if they start clearing transactions too fast, they throttle back the whole system. They’ve already reduced the number of bitcoins rewarded for successfully processing a block.
At this point, the only reason I want bitcoin to survive is to see the contortions as they get close to “mining” the last coin. After that last one, they’ll need a completely new system — maybe they could set up a dedicated server to process the blocks, supported by a 3% fee on all transactions…
different-church-lady
@CaseyL: One can imagine the thought process: “Wait… if money isn’t real… but you can manipulate it to become rich… what other non-real things can we do that trick with?”
OzarkHillbilly
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Do.
My sons each call me at least once a week and quite often every few days. I always make the time to talk with them. It is something I never tried to do with my own father until it was too late.
different-church-lady
@Ken: Last season’s coins were just a dream?
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: At one point, my father thought I was my cousin Brunch (with whom he grew up). I went with it. As a bonus, I got to hear bits and pieces of depression memories, some I recognized from stories I’d heard, all rather disjointed and mixed up with every now and again a jewel of a detail.
germy
I saw this reader comment over at LGM, from someone named cundgulag, and it mirrors my own experience in that era. The only difference is that I was working in the publishing industry. But I witnessed the same deterioration in employee conditions:
From the late 70’s to early 80’s, I was putting myself through college by working at the customer service desk at a Sears, and also teaching in a maximum security facility in Upstate NY.
Sears was, at that time, a great place to work – especially for college students.
They allowed flex-hours, and even had medical coverage for part-timers.
And they held jobs for students who went away to college, and found spots for them at the store between semesters, and during summer break.
They even added any increase in minimum wage for those kids when they returned.
And then Reagan was inaugurated in ’81.
And everything changed.
Quickly.
The students who’d come home from college in December of ’80, worked that break, and went back to school in January of ’81, returned again in May expecting to find their old job waiting for them like before, but instead, were told they had to reapply, interview, and start all over at the new minimum wage – and no more health coverage for part-timers.
They were told their old jobs were gone due to restructuring, or some other corporate bullshit.
I had to comfort quite a few of them.
I looked for a union, found a couple of possibilities, and was about to set-up a meeting with the first one on my list, when I found out I’d been laid-off due to “restructuring.”
I had just graduated, so I knew I was ready to do what I’d long planned, which was to move back to NYC to look for a job there.
So I turned over my research to other employees who’d been to our planning meetings.
Within a few days, all of them found themselves laid-off too.
Funny koinky-dink, no?
Reagan, and the puppeteers who controlled him, had started their efforts to destroy the middle class, and whatever power it had.
Successfully, needless to say…
different-church-lady
@Baud: It’s really remarkable, isn’t it? For centuries we’ve been plundering the enviorment to extract physical resources, and now, instead of fixing that, we’ve invented a way to plunder it to extract an imaginary resource.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“libertarian derp plus technobabble”
nice to have my dumb guy’s vague sense of bitcoin, etc, confirmed by a Nobel Prize winning economist with fancy credentials
sab
@catclub: The evil side of me wants crypto currency to go kablooey, like Bernie Madoffs investments. Blow up all these people’s investments. It took us three hundred years to realize we need central banks. Time to remind folks.
narya
@OzarkHillbilly: One of the things I cherish is that, over the past number of years, I managed to get a lot of stories out of my dad and his two sisters. They both died in the past year (the 96-year-old just a few weeks ago). I think dad is just worn out and tired. I talked to mom this morning, and the cardiologist took her aside separately this morning and (a) agreed it was good that I was heading out there and (b) didn’t want to do any more tests or procedures. My SIL works for a home health agency, and will try to get someone to at least help him in the morning. he won’t want that, but I think if it’s phrased that it’s to protect my MOM (e.g., don’t want him falling on her) he might go for it. And some oxygen, maybe. Not much else to do at this point.
debbie
@germy:
I’ve heard maybe in October, but nothing definite. It also sounds like it will be the same vaccine again rather than additional components (probably not the correct phrase to use, but you know what I mean).
OzarkHillbilly
One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to sit at the just cleared dinner table and listen to my old man banter back and forth with his sisters/brothers as they talked about the “old days”. I don’t remember many of the stories but one that has stuck with me was how much they enjoyed sitting on the backyard fence and smell the aromas wafting down the alley from the bakery. They’d guess at what they were smelling and try to imagine how good it would taste knowing they would never find out because a Catholic family of 10 kids in the Depression were always going to be just this side of hunger no matter how much their father worked.
Another was the shame my father felt as he unwrapped his sandwich on homemade bread and how he tried to hide it from his schoolmates who all had store bought bread.
CaseyL
@debbie: I’m traveling out of state right about then, and was vaccinated in late January, meaning the possible expiration of immunity will be right about then, too. Fun!
Philbert
@germy: I’ve kept my landline for my official# for business calls and robocalls. I NEVER answer it. Solves that! Most robocalls sense the voicemail msg and hang up. Also 20 years back, calling 911 flashed my house address at the fire department.
catclub
@Ken:
I agree with this. And yet, people keep saying blockchain transactions can replace regular money transactions. All that stuff about replacing fiat currency IMPLIES replacing billions of transactions per day that happen now in fiat currencies.
Also, Did Satoshi own a coal mine? Somebody’s coalmine surely benefitted from bitcoin mining.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Baud:
Ethereum, which is currently the most active cryptocurrency in terms of mining activity, is switching to a Proof of Stake algorithm instead of Proof of Work – which allegedly will reduce Ethereum power consumption by 95%.
Betty Cracker
@narya: It’s hard to lose the elders, but it sounds like a mostly peaceful journey for him. Safe travels, and don’t forget to look after yourself.
Poe Larity
When the libertarian edge lords are proven right and the dystopian Mad Max world arrives, fiat currency collapses, the intertubes go offline, we’ll all wish we had a bitcoin wallet full digital money for bread and butter and to pay off the guards in our New Zealand bunkers.
Or something. I think it’s all a test for determining who gets on the first Golgafrinchan ship.
ruemara
I’m a little petty. I enjoy watching crypto currency crash.
Ken
@Poe Larity: Second. Bitcoin owners will definitely be on the “B” ark.
Kay
Guffaw. Trump Jr. ties DeSantis and Cheney = Pompeo
I call it for the cult leader. Why vote for the cult followers when you can have the leader?
Just Chuck
Boomers, Zoomers, Gen X, Millenials … hey assholes, people are being born all the time into different circumstances. These labels are just fucking lazy.
Geminid
@Kay: Josh Hawley can be satisfied that he is not peaking too early.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Just Chuck: those generational labels are on my list of words that pretty much make me stop listening.
BruceFromOhio
@rp: ikr??? I listened to the podcast when it was first published, and it was cringe-inducing. Kai tried to throw Laura some softballs, but even he started getting irritated with her. Now wWhenever BC is mentioned in the Marketplace news stories, he snarks on it a little with comments like “let me know when I can buy a pizza with it.”
I’m thinking he likely agrees with Krugman.
BruceFromOhio
If the cult leader is sporting orange and gazing at cinderblocks and steel bars on an daily basis, the list of choices will be one name shorter.
Kay
@Geminid:
Wouldn’t it be delicious if there was no NET gain from kissing Trump’s ass?
Romney = Haley in that poll. She got nothing for debasing herself.
Anyway
@Baud:
Is it just me, or does it seem like half of all advertising now is either crypto or sports betting? And, like, it changed almost overnight.
Yes, also lots more appeals for St. Jude and the like. I reflexively withhold donations when I see repeated ads tugging at my heartstrings
James E Powell
@Timill:
Still not enough to buy a major sports franchise, so why bother?
Just Chuck
Bitcoin, like most cryptocurrencies is materialized by “miner” nodes validating transactions by hashing them with the rest of the blockchain. Balances themselves are distributed through the blockchain as part of the transaction mechanisms. That means every transaction has to propagate through the entire network. BTC tops out at roughly 7 transactions per second. Visa on the other hand does about 20,000 per second.
There’s other blockchains with different designs that will scale better, but BTC at anything beyond a trivial experimental scale is fundamentally un-spendable. Pure speculation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: If trump does run in ’24, I’d put substantial quatloos on her being his running mate.
Actually I’d say she’s the odds-on favorite for Veep no matter who’s at the top of the ticket. “Oh yeah? Well if we’re so racist and sexist, what about….”
Kay
@Just Chuck:
The generations are useful for economic analysis and especially useful for Democrats.
You really can track the onset of Reagan and the increasing inequality of assets by generation. Lines up pretty neatly.
But other than that I agree with you.
narya
@OzarkHillbilly: OMG yes. My family STILL does this. Stories about my maternal grandfather (“Guido stories,” because that was his name) still were being revealed YEARS after he was gone. My dad worked for him, so my dad was the source of some. They’ve become part of the family lore.
Ken
Isn’t it remarkable that you can support a wounded veteran, an elephant sanctuary, a child with pediatric cancer, a starving and abused puppy, or a community of Russian Jewish holocaust survivors, all for exactly the same low price of $19 per month? And most of them will give you a blanket as a thank-you for your support.
Is there a generic charity marketing kit for these sorts of things?
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No disrespect to Kamala Harris (or Joe Biden, really, as a former VP) but I don’t think the VP matters that much to most voters. I thought political media exaggerated Biden’s role in Obama’s winning races because Obama is black, which neither Obama or Biden pushed back against because they don’t care what a win is attributed to. No one was voting for Joe Biden in 08 and 12. They were voting for Obama.
JaneE
If I could get one of those tokens with the smiling dog and it were cheap enough, I would buy (a) Dogecoin just to have one. I don’t think it works that way.
I have heard of businesses that are using blockchain for product tracking or verification but I have no idea how that would work.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@narya: My Mom would’ve been 85 next month, and five of her siblings are still with us. Most of their stories, especially my mom’s, I could tell along with them, but every once in a while there’s a new one. My dad and his sister were far less nostalgic, but every once in a while, if he was comfortable with the people around him, he would tell stories. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said to myself in the last two years “I wish I had asked him about…”
BruceFromOhio
@sab:
Yeah, sucks to be me. I can think of some other bluer places I’d rather be, but MrsFromOhio’s roots run deep here. And we’ve done very well in the Buckeye: I’m a Zipper, we’ve raised a couple of very happy, independent Bobcats, and everyone has flourished. It’s just the politics that sucks ass.
sab
@Anyway: St Jude is real. I know a couple of families who go there. St Jude Hospital is free, but they pay a fortune to local doctors. If St Jude wasn’t free, the whole thing would be unaffordable and the kids would die.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: usually I would agree– Obama-Biden killed off both “the curse of the Hill” and the “Democrats need a Southerner on the ticket, hopefully forever. But “owning the libs” and proving they’re not racist is a big part of trumpets resentment. And I would bet Pence brought a lot of Bible thumpers around for trump in ’16
Just Chuck
@BruceFromOhio: NFT’s represent any kind of token you want: a carbon credit would be a NFT. They don’t have to be “mined” like BTC, they’re more or less a different kind of transaction (which BTC will make vastly inefficient, but not necessarily so on other networks)
Blockchain tech is here to stay and is getting used in practical ways already. Cryptocurrency on the other hand is still tulip bulbs. Maybe not so in the future, but whatever the case it sure as fuck won’t be BTC.
sab
@BruceFromOhio: Long time family joke is don’t marry an Ohio girl if you don’t like Ohio. We always come home.
BruceFromOhio
@Baud:
Go visit cupshe.com once, and it will be bikinis all day long. This is a tested method with demonstrated and repeatable results.
James E Powell
@Kay:
For the not Trumps, it’s got to be name ID at this point. Nobody really wants to vote for Pence.
Kay
@James E Powell:
“People” forget this but I’m always eager to remind them- well, even if they don’t ask- Pence was unpopular in his own state. He was an unpopular governor when Trump rescued him. It’s classic Trump. He would never hire anyone better than he was. Has to be of equal or lower quality, hence how much all his hires sucked.
different-church-lady
@Just Chuck: If it weren’t for resentment-based conflict the internet wouldn’t even exist.
James E Powell
@Kay:
When I look at the state-wide elected officials from Indiana, I wonder how the hell Obama managed to win that state in 2008.
different-church-lady
@rp:
Jesus Christ, does she know whether her job is journalism or fan-fiction?
Freedom’s just another word for “no fucking clue”.
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Speaking of unmitigated fucking frauds…
Geminid
@Kay: Nikki Haley kissed the big frog’s ass, but she has not yet turned into a princess..
Subsole
@Poe Larity: These people are trying to figure out how to put explosive, Randing-Man brand explosive collars on the mercenaries guarding their survival dungeons so they don’t get their throats slit for the NFT to the last can of applesauce on the planet.
And that’s the win-state for their socioeconomic model.
A functioning human being with two neurons to rub together would look for a new model.
Alas, our modern aristocracy functions about as well as a glass asshole…
Subsole
@Ken: Preferably an external mounting…
Uncle Cosmo
@satby: Damn, hon, good work! That’s probably gonna provoke me to start looking into JFK/WAS – PRG ~3-wk r/ts starting in late September…
Subsole
@Just Chuck:
It’s like astrology, but instead of being born under a constellation of stars, you’re born under a constellation of marketing campaigns.
Get ready for the future, it is murder.
Subsole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The bible thumpers I knew weren’t voting for Jesus, they were voting against the “Demon-craps and Gives-me-thats” that Pastor always warns them about.
Now, Pence might be how they excused themselves to themselves, but they were always in the market for a devil. If not that one, they would have bought another somewhere lower on the ticket.
Ruckus
@Wapiti:
I didn’t see any such box.
Which of the 2 thousand forms was it on?
Also my taxes are pretty damn simple, I haven’t itemized in almost 20 years. I thought it might be worth it one year when my medical bill was $4100, but nope, standard was better.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Subsole: speaking for the quasi-Bible-thumpers I know, my very conservative Catholic relatives, they didn’t like or trust trump in ’16. I suspect they wrote in Reagan or Benedict. I avoid talking politics with them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett brought them around in ’20.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
Honestly, we need to keep them away from this place.
Ken
Wait, those are two different things?
Kay
@James E Powell:
Just cheerily lying on television. She’s really animated in the clip, smiling, lying her ass off.
It’s 100% acceptable in the GOP now. The real Trump legacy.
different-church-lady
@Ken: Yes. One of them must accurately describe and adhere to the nuances of the way the chosen subject actually works, or it’s a failure.
The other is the modern version of journalism.
different-church-lady
@Poe Larity: Douglas Adam’s made up-names >>>> George Lucas’s made-up names.
...now I try to be amused
@Kay:
Is anyone polling a GOP primary without Trump? That will be the real test of whether any of the remoras will get a return on their souls.
Soprano2
@narya: You are fortunate in a way – my father died of a massive heart attack when I was 21, and his mother died 3 weeks later. It was an awful summer, 1982. His family kind of scattered after that, because there was no one to replace Grandma (my grandpa on that side died when I was 8). I’ve lost track of a lot of that side of the family because of that.
Ksmiami
@Poe Larity: ammo, water, flour, propane and lighters oh and shelf stable milk… way more valuable than Bitcoin in a dystopian scenario- like what happened in Texas during this past winter
catclub
@Anyway:
No love for NFT sport memorabilia – which is both!
catclub
@Falling Diphthong:
Well put. You will have bigger problems in that case.
MomSense
@James E Powell:
Jim Messina.
Gravenstone
Have you approached any game studios with this pitch? Bethesda could probably use it in their next Fallout release.
J R in WV
@germy:
I get calls from people claiming to be Federal LEO working on something, and I’m of interest because mumble, mumble. I interrupt them with the question “Do you know that impersonating a LEO on a phone call is , all by itself, a serious federal felony punishable all by itself, because you’re using interstate communications??”
Then I say “My best friend is a LT in a computer crime unit, and I have all your data, not the spoofed number, your real IP address, to provide to that crime unit!”
I never hear back from that group of phone felons. Never.
Chris T.
@Geminid:
The thing is, a lot of bitcoin-miners don’t use their electricity. They steal yours instead. The same people who set up bot armies for spamming also set them up for bitcoin-mining, or you get cases like Joel Greenberg in FL who use taxpayer money.
prostratedragon
@sab: People I know who work in the federal granting process say St. Jude does some pretty decent research.
Geminid
@Chris T.: Still seens worthwhile to penalize the majority of bitcoin miners using their own metered electricity. It shouldn’t be too hard to crack down on the electricity pirates. People like Greenberg will get found out.
I think I read that Greenberg’s bitcoining troubles were the entry point for investigations that led to the rest of his crimeing. But I haven’t researched the story to dig that up again, and I could be mistaken.
Wapiti
@Ruckus: Looking back through my IRS forms, I can’t find it, but the H&R tax software did ask me that question. Perhaps they have identified it as a liability for their customers, and are merely covering their (H&R Block) tails in case audits find undeclared assets.
Related to this thread, and the decline in crypto stocks, the WaPo has an article about IRS plans to pursue tax cheats, which calls out crypto-currency as of particular interest…
sab
@Ruckus: The crypto currency question is on the front page of the 1040 form right below your name and address.
Ruckus
@Wapiti:
@sab:
As sab stated it is right below the address. As I now know because I just looked at my form and see that I’d checked it.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Roger Moore: Yes! Bitcoin is really handy for crooks and tax avoiders. That market for it will not go away.
Bill Arnold
Enjoyable thread to read, thanks all. (The Musk/Bitcoin/Tesla thing was fun, it was.)