File this one with the fiat money fear and loathers. The difference is that Bitcoin fans are obsessed libertarian young tech geeks as opposed to obsessed old nuts GOP/Tea Party white guys hoarding gold, heeding the commercial advice of Gordon Liddy and convinced the US dollar is going to turn into a one trillion Zim note.
If you download the Bitcoin software and read through the on-line site you’ll be tempted to try some bitcoin mining. Don’t bother.
I did it a couple months ago. You can leave your processor on for a century and maybe see the equivalent of a few bucks worth of bitcoins. Even semi-hard days of mining them are well over.
Think of it as the citizen’s gold mining crew shown in Pale Rider, except there’s no chance you’ll find the big rock like Spider Conway before he was gunned down by Stockburn and his marshals. And no Clint Eastwood as “Preacher,” either.
Bitcoin is all now Coy LaHood.
Maybe that will change.
But the info from F-Secure that a ‘bot controlling a Bitcoin mining operation was using purloined Twitter accounts certainly isn’t good news.
“Last month Symantec blogged about the potential of creating botnets used to mine bitcoins, without the computer owner ever knowing,” reads something from the Internets.
Security, liquidity and stability are now things one does not associate with Bitcoin. Which would seem to be very bad news, if not a death knell, for the currency. Readers searching through Google will find some wags have already come up with the new name — shitcoins.
If you have a lot of them, they’re allegedly worth something. If not, ehhh.
Bitcoins are generated all over the Internet by anybody running a free application called a bitcoin miner. Mining requires a certain amount of work for each coin. This amount if automatically adjusted by the network, such that the bitcoins are always created at a predictable and limited rate.
Believe this and you waste your time. Bitcoin exploitation is now the domain of speculators who can buy significant sums of them in the belief that value will appreciate according to the graph here. Or that value can be accumulated by exploiting Bitcoin exchange problems which cause rapid fluctuation in the currency’s value.
Unfortunately, practical bitcoin mining, which comes as a “feature” in every downloaded copy of the Bitcoin software, is totally out of reach
of Joe Average User now. (Somehow the “good boy” at the Atlantic never deigns to mention it.)
So as a currency, it’s no longer of any value to a middle class (indeed, there’s no compelling reason for anyone from the middle or lower classes to even believe in Bitcoins) — which would seem to be a requirement for the success of any newish money.
“Sounds like a Ponzi scheme,” said my friend Don, as I explained it to him at a small party a couple weeks ago.
“You should accept Bitcoins,” he added.
If you have a Bitcoin wallet, Bitcoin.org used to (at least about a month ago) suggest going to the Bitcoin Faucet (you can Google it) for some shards of the virtual currency. This to get you started and whet the whistle.
DD didn’t have much luck with that. “Sent!” said the Bitcoin Faucet, in metering out my milibits of a Bitcoin. No transactions, hours later, in the ol’ Bitcoin wallet. Not even an atom of a crumb.
Another fly in the ointment is the necessity of keeping up with everything happening re Bitcoins and the troubles of the sites built to service the networked currency. If everyone was faced with a similar but limited thicket of interesting dysfunction and intriguing trouble when using real money the homeless would rapidly become the largest segment in the American economy.
“We can’t balance the budget on the backs of people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,” the president said, renewing his call for higher taxes on the wealthy. “Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair.”
The Census Bureau reported last fall that 43 million Americans, one in seven of us, were poor. But what is poverty in America?
The most recent government data show more than half of the families defined as poor by the Census Bureau now have a computer in the home. More than three of every four poor families have air conditioning, almost two-thirds have cable or satellite television, and 92 percent have microwaves.
How poor are America’s poor? The typical poor family has at least two color TVs, a VCR and a DVD player. A third have a widescreen, plasma or LCD TV. And the typical poor family with children has a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation.
So with Heritage, you have the ready made Tea Party/GOP argument for eliminating food stamps because they’ve written that America’s poor are spoiled and with too much cheap consumer electronics in the apartment.
Of course, I didn’t see this while canvassing for the census. The poor people in Pasadena’s city center were definitely visibly poor.
“None of this means America’s poor live in the lap of luxury,” concedes the Heritage man near the end, apparently a little self-conscious over where he’s taken the reader. “The lifestyle of the typical poor family certainly isn’t opulent.”
Isn’t opulent. That seems safe to say. Where do they dig up these manglers of English and critical thinking?
Perhaps unsurprisingly to readers, the Washington Post (as of now) did not respond to a DD query on the banner ad it ran which pointed to sales for counterfeit US guitars made in China, trafficked on the Gibson brand name.
It’s the same thing you could access when you clicked through the Post ad last week. No American made Les Paul sells for the price advertised. Zero. Zip. Nada.
And, again, here is a video — one of many on YouTube — discussing Chinese made counterfeits. This is a significant problem for Gibson as well as other American manufacturers. And it is safe to say that it has grown beyond policing at the company level.
Postscript: You float on the Washington Post’s website enough and you’ll still catch the old ad sans the “Made in China” change. The Post simply won’t or can’t get rid of all of it although it’s become obvious a change someone had no original intention of making was made.
Jonathan May-Bowles, the activist-comedian who tried to hit Rupert Murdoch with a shaving-cream pie, has received a six-week jail sentence, Sky News reports …
May-Bowles, 26, wass blocked from landing his pie punch by, among others, Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, who jumped up from behind her husband and slapped the attacker.
Just before launching his attack on Murdoch, he used Twitter to announce: “It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat.”
If “better things” include: He got beat by a girl. That was Jonnie Pantywaist.
The consequences for 2010, a very bad night for the Democratic Party, when the extremists were let in.
They always wanted to destroy government and are implacable. The Democrats can’t fight that animus given the willingness of the Tea Party/GOP to shoot the middle class dog if it doesn’t get its way. (However, they are somewhat culpable in their inability to explain this to Americans, again and again.)
The civilians are not without blame. It’s as if elections are viewed as a recalcitrant machine. Confronted with a lit green button that didn’t work, one which left them feeling bad because of the destroyed economy, most simply pushed (or push) the red self-destruct button right beside simply because it’s different than the one that’s operating poorly. That’s idiocy.
For every Robert Reich who is carping on the left, there are a dozen unhappy Republicans who think the GOP is acting recklessly. John Boehner’s speakership is in ashes. Michele Bachmann in now polling about evenly with Mitt Romney. The GOP is having a huge internal fight and is loathed and mistrusted by the entire international community. They have been exposed for the radicals that they are, and the people disagree overwhelmingly with their behavior and their approach …
The truth is, the 2010 midterms were a catastrophe. They had horrible consequences. This weekend was one of those consequences, and it couldn’t be avoided through “leadership.”
The rest of the world knows the US has unstable government and is in what sure looks like irreversible decline. Most people here now get that, too.
Finally, it was just too sad seeing the President thank people for using Twitter and getting on the telephones.
Infernally, the banner ad for made-in-China counterfeit Gibson guitars seems to be everywhere. Obviously, one big Net advertising firm in the US spins these out as part of a package deal going everywhere.
And I don’t know who it is. If you do, put it in the comments or please e-mail me.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube has a fair amount of home video devoted to Chinese manufactured Gibson guitars.
The devil’s bargain forged by American manufacturing offshored to that country has resulted in an obvious ambivalence in American guys.
The counterfeits sell to American guitarists who can’t resist what they believe are great bargains. They know the goods are shifty but they’ll do it for the price.
What’s different this week is the bald-faced advertising of Gibson guitar counterfeits all through the Washington Post’s website. I’ve been there a half dozen times and the banner ad comes up everywhere.
But first, two YouTube vids — from last year — on the counterfeits. In the first one, you see the problem Gibson faces: The guy who promotes them as a steal — which they are — only not in a good way. This is common.
The second is a dissection of the instrument which is obviously can be discerned as a fake by people familiar with the real thing.
The situation which exists now is that there are more counterfeits being made than Gibson, and one imagines other domestic guitar makers, can police.
If you waste any time at all on these videos, you come away with the impression that the counterfeiters are fairly good. For the price, they make a fair guitar and the finishes are generally judged to be fine and professional.
You can theorize that American training and outfitting of a Chinese labor force has had something to do with this. It is only logical that Chinese manufacturing would become adept, or adept enough, with elements of it seeing no need to retain licensing agreements from American multi-nationals.
Finally, as with the US government, the Washington Post is a dysfunctional agency. There simply is no one home when it’s time to legitimately complain and demand that they do the right thing.
Here’s the page of the Post’s ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, with — ha-ha — the ad for counterfeit guitars right over his head. On the same page there’s no way to reach Patrick B. Pexton. One supposes you’re supposed to telepathically beam your messages to the newspaper.
The WaPo continues to refuse to do the right thing. Today, the newspaper still runs the ad selling made-in-China frauds and counterfeit electric guitars.
Here’s the small screen snapshot, larger one with date clearly visible in the link.
I can fill in alot of info about TT and Chinese guitars. I was curious as you and contacted TT and studied them from afar for many months to learn exactly what they were doing. Talked with their “sales staff??? , and I assure you, as you already know, they offer more than they deliver.
I study guitars, I have learned to build classical guitars, I know what’s right, and what to look for.
TT is just an outlet for many different Chinese dealers. When you sign in to their website, you can choose from many different American fakes.
What is really amazing to me, is that they advertise on sites that should know better.
Gibson customer service was informed. This reply came back on Sunday:
Thanks for the email, and for the information. We appreciate your interest in helping us maintain the Gibson name. This information will be forwarded to our Legal Department. Thank you!
