I guess it wouldn't become worthless by inflation, since there are a finite possible number of bit coins, most of which already exist.

But would some amazing code breaking computer allow people to somehow copy or spoof or otherwise steal bitcoins? Shit's confusing.

Several years ago (2) it was under $500
One year ago it was around $1,000
6 months ago around $2,500
3 months ago around $4,300
1 week ago it was almost $20,000
Today around $14,300
https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/bitcoin

I do wonder what let up to this.

The guy was unjustly shot. I do believe a boatload of coin from the county will be in order.



This does go to show that cops don't' just shoot blacks for nothing-- Whites are fair game also.

Exactly. I see a phrase all the time:

'If there are aliens in our galaxy, why haven't we detected evidence of them?'

Perhaps because they are so different from what we even recognize as life that we don't even know what we are looking for. Perhaps the use of radio waves to communicate is something they haven't done in so long, that using it to send a message in space is unfathomable. Or perhaps they never even used that technology in the first place. It's possible that their own physiology would make such technology pointless.

The point is, we're looking for them in very human ways and expecting something very human to come back. Perhaps a civilization at a stage similar to ours out there is asking the same question and using a technology to search that we ourselves have no understanding of. They could be our galactic neighbors and our differing biologies and technology could be so different, that wouldn't even recognize each other as life.

On the flip side of that coin, I once had a UFO experience that was anything but 'lights in the night sky' and the object did things our planes couldn't hope to do. So who knows, maybe they are already here.

I don't disagree that weapons don't necessarily make anyone more free. I also can't say people are wrong to observe in a civil war level of unrest, a dissenting party armed with fully automatic weapons has more leverage than one armed with knives.

Freedom to practice religion is not 'fairly safe' without guns, unless you want to ignore attacks with cars, trucks, IEDs, and, historically, civilian airliners.

I am mostly pointing out that restricting laws on gun ownership to protect people is not so terribly different from limiting freedom to practice/express idealogies. It is readily demonstrable that BOTH those freedoms have directly contributed to civilian casualties.

The difference between say, banning automatic weapons, and the banning of affiliation with extremist groups like the KKK or ISIL is mostly divided along partisan lines, logically they are pretty much two sides of the same coin, with democrats and republicans each decrying one as necessary and the other as evil.

Itazura "cat coin bank" has been added as a related post - related requested by Mordhaus.

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Itazura-cat-coin-bank

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/

Was just having this discussion the other day.

It's one of the very rare things where a Mike Judge product doesn't make much sense [unintentionally].

It's nonsensical argue for a smaller file size. But on the other side of the coin, it screws everyone else up if you use tabs because then whenever other developers open the file and they [rightly] use spaces, they're screwed.

Anyway, check out that link I included above. The comparison between income of US developer and India developer is shocking.

*doublepromote

Mark's been on the money since about the time he wrote "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea", but there have been two significant developments in Europe that he seemingly didn't see coming: Portugal and the UK.

The Left Alliance in Portugal has basically been giving Schäuble the finger for two years now, with their unilateral end to austerity. How dare they defy the master of coin?! If Schäuble says you need another round of austerity, by God, you better tighten your belts, even if they are already around your neck.

Unsurprisingly, everyone going along with austerity without having a completely export-dependent economy is in deep doo-doo. Meanwhile, those pesky Portuguese actually managed to massively reduce unemployment, despite running a deficit that is entirely too small for their current situation. But that's a different story.

And then there's the UK. There's Corbyn. Tribune of the Plebs. Managed to get the youth voting by offering actual left-wing policies (the "radical youth", as the NYT likes to call them, while claiming that the warmongering, Constitution-shredding, wage-depressing, ecosphere-destroying "centrists" are not the real radicals). Managed to turn quite a lot of UKIP voters around as well. Within striking distance of the Tories, despite the media running 24h a day of drivel like "Jezza's Jihadi Comrades" -- Goebbels would be ashamed of the crudeness of the propaganda campaign by the Sun/Daily Mirror/etc.

The populist left is back, bitches. Corbyn and Sanders are the first steps past the neoliberal warmongers of the Third Way. The Obama experience of a corporatist disguised as a left populist may have given us The Orange One, but it also put another nail into the coffin of neoliberalism.

Antonio Gramsci, founding member of the Italian communist party, who was killed by the fascist regime of Mussolini, gave us the appropriate description of our time:
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

That's your Trump. That's your opioid epidemic. That's the EU's austerity program in Greece, doing twice as much damage as the German occupation in WW2.

All food is organic. If you wanted to you could try inorganic but it would not work.

Not all food is Organic®. Just coining a new marketing label does not make an apple healthier. You can make people fear pesticides to squeeze some money out of them but in the end they have to eat something. Without pesticides most people would just die. Of hunger.

That said in western culture there is this reluctance to eat apples that are not the perfect shape and colour of an apple. If labeling these imperfect apples Organic® helps sell them and get them eaten, why not? If you want it someone will sell it to you.

How has "potsquatch" not been coined already?

Alternative Facts is a term coined by George Orwell in the novel 1984. It Implies that the government makes stuff up and makes it a crime to argue with them.

1984 is now the best-selling book on Amazon. Hmm.

I just coined a term for my dislike of remakes....
I have redux reflux.