01.15.14
The Plutocrat’s Stratocaster (literally)
Fifty seconds in.
Currently, you could buy it with 122 bitcoins.
Bitcoin flack, they all look and sound the same, a special breed from high-button tech WhiteManistan.
Wow. Very rich. Wonderful coin.
01.13.14
JunkCoin world
Alternative digital currencies are a true nuisance fad, exercises by the libertarian nerd have-class with disposable income, all now for the furtherance of exploiting the greed and manias of their colleagues for Bitcoin-style instant wealth.
All of them characterized by growth in value based on nothing but the ideology of algorithm-amplified grasping. You have two flavors of them: Predatory devices in slow or fast-moving fraud, or jokes.
The creators of at least 70 different altcoins took Bitcoin’s source code and tweaked it. They created BBQCoin and Coinye — much to Kanye West’s disapproval — and Dogecoin — based on a meme — and Stalwartbucks — as a journalistic exercise from Business Insider. The Washington Post’s Timothy Lee has a nice explainer on why people are creating these. Some are serious; some are not. But that’s the thing that makes people so skeptical about digital currencies: they’re pretty easy to create out of thin air …
The author goes on to state if you invested 100 dollars in LiteCoin last year, now it is worth $30,000. You then get the interview with its inventor, another ex-Google pest, Charlie Lee, and it has not made him rich … he says.
LiteCoin mining rigs are allegedly, let’s repeat — allegedly, supposed to not be as easy to turn into a hardware escalation battle as BitCoin mining rigs. Reviewing these pictures — it’s just more of the same — except on a slower time track.
More shifty “money” for tech-obsessed assholes with all the same deeply-ingrained character flaws as Bitcoin speculators/fans, now seventy currencies in libertarian JunkCoin world! Seventy. Can we soon expect an even hundred?
Satoshi Ponzimoto — best name, ever.
12.21.13
The perfect ‘money’ for our time
The tech nuisance demographic that supports bitcoin is a subset of the right wing libertarian tribe. They view it as a way to do their part in destroying tyrannical government. Cody Wilson, for example, the young pest who was sure his 3D-printed plastic gun plans were a strike at government until the US ITAR rules shut him down has migrated to bitcoin wallet-making. (Feel free to add hilarious comments on the need for 3D printing plans for guns in America at the end of 2013.)
You find the same sentiments in old gold bugs, the old white guys of the Republican Party and the old white people known as “preppers.???
Bitcoin is just more high button. It’s literally a “money??? for stroking the every-man-for-himself psychology, a “money” that’s perfectly fit to tech sociopaths.
The being said, another fair assessment is that bitcoin is certainly a money for our time.
Although it’s dressed up as being something good for the world in its way of undermining and destroying central banking, it’s really just something that allows some people, a very select few, to make fortunes without doing anything, more specifically, without doing anything that is even remotely a social good. Just like the 1 percent, or Wall Street, or much of corporate America.
Pine View Farm pointed to another biting critique of bitcoin. Here is the link and an excerpt:
But someone’s already out there offering “Bitcoin mining computers,” which cost several thousand dollars apiece. (Notice that you can’t buy one with bitcoin … heh.) They’re selling you the dream of a “magical money-machine.” There’s a sucker born every minute, and that sucker … his “mark” … is you. Be aware. (One unit sells for $14,500.00 and “ooh, hurry up hurry up and buy one before they all get sold-out!”) You should know better. But they’re counting on you having gold-fever …
Another piece of the growing bitcoin scam is seen here, in a long advertorial aimed directly at the old people conned by the incessant ads for buying gold on Fox News and Glenn Beck’s Blaze website.
It’s a make-money-fast video and if you view it you’ll immediately notice the bitcoin name isn’t even uttered until you’re well into it. The revolutionary new money that’s shaking world government is initially referred to as the newest version of “Edison’s dollars.”
On bitcoin — from the archives.
12.18.13
The sharing economy (a continuing series)
Move over, Goldman Sachs. At the rate things are going, and assuming there’s a lot more extreme weather this winter, we may soon be able to add the ride-sharing firm Uber to the list of institutions loathed by nearly everyone, with the exception of those so rich as to pay no attention to what they’re being charged for things …
The more drivers who leave Yellow, say, for Uber, the nearer we get to a world in which only the rich can get around. Which, of course, may not be a bad idea, the rich invariably being nobler, harder-working, nicer-smelling, and generally more virtuous than lazy, malodorous good-for-nothings who can’t afford Samsung Galaxies or iPhones.
From my point of view, I can’t see Uber making much of a dent in southern California. Too many poor people and it’s not semi-pro want-to-be an unregulated cab driver nation waiting to happen.
It may take a couple years for it to sink in that you can’t rule the world from your smartphone everywhere, though.
Uber as a way to redeem your economic viability in West Virginia or Mississippi? Give me a break.
It is pleasurable to see bitcoin have its ass kicked by the world’s second largest economy, China. What countries will follow?
After crashing twice in the past few weeks, both due to China’s moves preparing for the elimination of the digital currency’s use, it’s still easy to imagine that bitcoin hoarders will work hard to push the value of it up again.
Which will only underscore its volatility, demonstrating that bitcoins are only for those who already have real money liquidity and the ability to purchase and sell large amounts of them quickly for speculative purpose. It’s a money for digital goldbugs who increase their worth by gaming it.
Bitcoins and bitcoin wallets are of no use to the hoi polloi who must use money to buy prosaic shit like food.
You can, however, buy a Tesla with bitcoins.
These things being the case, the Coinpunk will probably not conquer the world of tyrannical banking with his ultimate bitcoin wallet. And he just lost half his operating capital in the short term.
“A few drug users aside, no one appears to be buying [bitcoins] as a way to buy things,” reads the Economist, today.
Remember — these is much that can be delved in the blog archives using the search bar. It is great for finding stuff on the sharing economy, the new tech system of systems for reducing everyone to penury, for instance.
04.15.13
The Gold Bugs
My since long exited drummer was a gold bug. That is, he was a Fed hater, a true believer in the idea that the US should return to the gold standard and that “fiat money” was a fraud. Perhaps not that strongly, but enough to think the escape from gold and the Fed were the cause of lots of economic problems.
If you’re still checking, Mark, I still love you. That’s the arrangement of “Letter to the Taxman” we played.
Coincidental with the crash in gold is one for Bitcoins.
I’ve briefly addressed Bitcoins before here.
“Sounds like a Ponzi scheme,” said my departed old friend Don, about two years ago. More recently, one of the Internet mags, Slate or Salon, said the same.
Bitcoin enthusiasts have the same underlying mania as old-time goldbugs, an intense dislike of government, a toxically libertarian ethos. Like traditional goldbugs, they’re also hoarders.
Krugman has ragged on the virtual currency a few times over the years.
Today he devotes a column to it, hilariously calling Bitcoin “The Antisocial Network:”
What is bitcoin? It’s sometimes described as a way to make transactions online — but that in itself would be nothing new in a world of online credit-card and PayPal transactions. In fact, the Commerce Department estimates that by 2010 about 16 percent of total sales in America already took the form of e-commerce.
So how is bitcoin different? Unlike credit card transactions, which leave a digital trail, bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous and untraceable. When you transfer bitcoins to someone else, it’s as if you handed over a paper bag filled with $100 bills in a dark alley. And sure enough, as best as anyone can tell the main use of bitcoin so far, other than as a target for speculation, has been for online versions of those dark-alley exchanges, with bitcoins traded for narcotics and other illegal items.
But bitcoin evangelists insist that it’s about much more than greasing the path for illicit transactions. …
The similarity to goldbug rhetoric isn’t a coincidence, since goldbugs and bitcoin enthusiasts — bitbugs? — tend to share both libertarian politics and the belief that governments are vastly abusing their power to print money. At the same time, it’s very peculiar, since bitcoins are in a sense the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air.
It is momentarily amusing to peruse pictures of Bitcoin-mining rigs, the piles or racks of computers the enthusiasts use to carve the currency out of “thin air.” Actually, it takes electricity. Lots and lots and lots of electricity.
Since Bitcoin has been in the news during the past week, I’ve often thought of what would happen if I interviewed my fellow shoppers at Baja Ranch in Pasadena about it.
I am certain security would be summoned.
Another way of characterizing Bitcoin hoarders is to note the Winklevoss twins are two.
Call them the Nelson Bunker Hunts of Bitcoin.
The Winklevosses are famous for being in a pistachio commercial, that as a consequence of their legal brouhaha with Mark Zuckerberg over who originated the idea for Facebook.
In relation to that, Lawrence Summers once described the Winklevosses, in a brief comment that seems very broadly broadly applicable to Bitcoin true-believers.
This makes good sense because … well, just look for yourself.
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10.29.12
The Nihilists
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
From KPCC, Pasadena City College’s radio station, months ago:
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
The question occurs to me: Why have they NOT run Ted Nugent for political office? In a fit of rage, he’ll at least honestly curse a woman on national television, then explain it away buy saying he was passing a kidney stone and dosed with painkillers.
From Krugman, today, excerpted from a blog entry:
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Laugh or you’ll have to cry.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm.
From the Washington Times, today, in interview with Steve Forbes:
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
10.12.12
I was readin’ Atlas Shrugged, how the rich all get mugged…
I am so there at the Laemmle. For the SchadenFreude.
If only they could’ve gotten Marvel Comics to do it, the world would be a different place. Or not.
I gave a brief chat at the Cato Institute once. And you didn’t. Just ask Steve.
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09.25.12
The Paste Eaters
When you have to start you column like this (it’s like starting one with “It’s not always a bad idea to beat your wife”):
Gold is not just a lunatic fringe investment
Gold is often derisively referred to as an investment that only kooks who are preparing for the end of the world in a bunker can love. But it might be time to stop with all the gold bashing.
Sure, plans to return to the gold standard may still seem a bit extreme. (Sorry Ron Paul and your loyal minions!)
Over at CNN, it’s peppered with “I am not a gold bug” and the disclaimer, “The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica.”
At $1770 an ounce the average American in 2012 can really afford to make a killing in gold hoarding, lemme tell ya.
“Now I’m not trying to suggest that gold is the new Apple,” writes the paste eater, trying to have the glue and eat it, too.
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08.31.12
The crazies go into action
Gold and silver prices twitched when Ben Bernanke indicated the Fed might try to help the economy …
The price of gold and other precious metals jumped Friday, after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that he expects to take further action to try to boost the economy.
The Fed can try to prop up the economy by buying government bonds, lowering interest rates and other measures. Those moves can lead to inflation. And when investors believe inflation is coming, they often buy gold and other precious metals because they believe they are protections against inflation.
[Bernanke] stopped short of committing the Fed to any specific move. But he said that the central bank will do more, because unemployment is so high and the economic recovery “far from satisfactory.???
And the Paul Ryans, the near psychotic fans of Ludwig von Mises, the really nuts but wealthy members of the GOP, and the average suckers who pay attention to Glenn Beck recoiled and drove prices up.
Across the wires went the cry: They’re about to debase the currency again, curses on quantitative easing! Zim note! Paper money, ahhh.
We need to get back to sound money and precious metal coinage. When the fall comes all that will matter is gold.
You don’t have enough money to buy gold, anyway. You’d get ripped off. You even got took when you liquidated your jewelry at the pawn shop.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the consumer price index refuses to conform to the beliefs of charlatans, witches and goldbugs.
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06.03.12
Today’s dose of stupid
At this juncture I have no tolerance for right wingers, theocrats and stupid people. Wish it were otherwise but it can’t be helped. I’m flawed this way.
Anyway, the spam filter caught this bit over the weekend when a passerby tried to attach it to last week’s post on the proposed Iowa GOP platform:
“They believe a zygote is a person.???
You do realize that the term Zygote, like the terms: fetus, infant, toddler adolescent, teen, adult, and senior are quantifiers and not qualifiers of biological human life. So biologically speaking a Zygote is like an adult, but just at different stages of life. Even at the oocyte stage there exists 46 unique chromosomes with the entire genetic blueprint of a new individual. Chromosomes contain tightly packed, tightly coiled molecules called DNA. DNA contains all the instructions needed for this single-cell embryo to develop into an adult …
[snip — more stuff about abortion]
Also, for a long time the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), i.e. “the Central Bank’s Central Bank??? backed a gold standard as being the basis of sound monetary policy. Having a gold standard would reign in debt spending because it would constrain Congress/ Fed from creating liabilities out of thin air. So, guess which standard the political actors will support.
That’s ‘Zygote.’ With a capital Z.
Goldbuggism too.
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