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I'm not going to buy any more cryptocurrencies until I get my next paycheck, which will be towards the end of the month.

There are some who regard BitCoin's quickly-rising exchange rate to be an investment bubble, much as the dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, as well as the real estate bubble that crashed in late 2007.

I agree for the short term but disagree for the long term.

That it is a bubble is evidenced by all the BitCoin Get Rich Quick advertisements that I see on Facebook. Doubtlessly they're appearing all over the Internet.

Most disturbing to me is an ad that describes BitCoin's rise as a "paradigm shift". If someone ever says the words "paradigm shift" to you, turn around and run as fast as you can. The dot-com boom was claimed to be the conceptually similar "new economy".

Cryptocurrencies sometimes crash when someone burglarizes an exchange by hacking its website. Just once so far - that we know of - the alleged burglary is an inside job. Mt Gox blamed its burglary on a flaw in the BitCoin BlockChain protocol. A forensic accounting investigation by the Japanese authorities led to the arrests of some of Mt Gox' top executives.

These crashes have all recovered quickly.

The current bubble is the result of naive investors buying lots of BitCoin. The most likely cause of a crash will be sales that are made by sophisticated investors and investment banks that want to realize their gains. There will come a point where even a small drop in price will lead the naive investors to sell as fast as they can so they can realize their gains before the crash.

Those same sales will be the cause of the crash as the naive investors panic.

When that happens I won't sell my BitCoins as I am confident the price will recover for the following reasons:

Each new BitCoin is minted by a cryptographic computational process denoted as "mining". The algorithm described by Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper placed as strict upper limit of 21,000,000 coins that can ever be mined. At present there are about 16,000,000.

The mining process gets more difficult with each new coin. The last coin is estimated to be minted a hundred years from now.

What to me is the best argument for BitCoin's long-term price is that increasing numbers of merchants are accepting it for payment. The first such merchant was a Papa John's that sold two pizzas in return for 10,000 BitCoins. Today there are 100,000 such merchants. BTC 10,000 could buy a vast number of pies.

Amazon doesn't accept BTC because it has its own payment system called Amazon Payments. But its competitor NewEgg has been accepting BTC for some time now.

There is a very simple way you can still buy pizza with BitCoins: purchase a Domino's eGift card at NewEgg then use that card to pay for your pizza delivery. I was doing just that with PayPal when I was working as a Mentor for CodeMentor.

Not long after that CodeMentor provided the option of paying Mentors with BTC. I haven't checked but I expect there are lots of other services that pay in BitCoin.

The IRS has ruled that cryptocurrencies are assets, just like stocks, bond and real property. One pays Capital Gains Tax on the profit one makes by selling one's crypto assets. Sales made from coins held less than two years are taxed as regular income. Assets held for two years or more are subject to the Long-Term Capital Gains Tax rate which for me is just 15%.

While I might buy and sell some of my cryptos I intend to hold most of them for two years. If indeed cryptos are in a bubble, the crash will have already occurred then recovered by then.

I might buy an Antminer S9 BitCoin mining rig but am having trouble making up my mind. My concern is that the fans might be too loud.

An argument for buying the S9 was made by a friend who pointed out that I could resell it. What's really ludicrous about his argument is that a new S9 costs ~$1500 for late January delivery whereas used ones are sold at Amazon for $3999 for immediate delivery.

If I did buy an S9 it would mint roughly one coin per year, as predicted by a BitCoin Mining Profit Calculator that I tried. My next paycheck will enable me to buy ~$12000 worth of cryptocurrencies. There is a strong argument for buying it but I remain uncertain.

I won't have to make my mind of for a while as Bitmain only accepts BitCoin Cash as payment. I don't have any BTC yet, but I do expect to buy some with my next check.

http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/missions/solar-system/vote-names-new-horizons-second-target-extended-dec-6/

NASA Extends Campaign to Nickname New Horizons’ Next Target

NEW HORIZONS: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds

(486958) 2014 MU₆₉

2014 MU69 Not a Good Enough Name for NASA: Help Name the Next New Horizons Target

Friday evening I tried to set up billing for soggywizards' G Suite Basic account.

Upon submitting my business checking account's routing and account numbers, I got the message "Invalid data".

I at first took that to mean I had entered the numbers incorrectly, but a few more tries convinced me the problem was on Google The Conqueror's end, so I filed a ticket.

First thing this morning Juan from G Suite support rang me up, told me he was unfamiliar with that error message, and asked if now is a good time for a screen share.

At the time I was on the bus on my way to my client's office, so I had to tell him that I could only mind-meld share screens tomorrow morning or late tomorrow evening.

Juan said he'd call at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

He also sent me an email with my ticket number.

G Suite Basic is only $5.00 per month. I just cost Google quite a lot more than my first month's service.

How the Republicans Broke Congress

Living the dream

In the Spring of 2010 I was driving a really nice car while wearing a grey pinstripe suit. I saw a man standing on the median holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I pulled up next to him.

I pulled $200 out of my wallet then held it up in front of him then sternly said "No drugs! No Alcohol! No cigarettes!" then gave him the money.

"You just got me off the street!" he shouted in great joy.

"I was once just like you!" I screamed in agony.

"Pay it forward bro. Pay it forward!"

I gave him my card then asked him to call me the next day. I never heard from him again.

I was so upset that when the left turn signal turn green I very nearly crashed into three cars. All three of them swerved to get out of my way.

During the summer of 2012 I walked into a restaurant in Oceano California while carrying a shopping bag and a kitty litter bucket then asked the manager for a job. "Your kitchen floor needs to be swept."

"I'm sorry but it's the end of the season."

I sadly walked outside then pulled a newspaper from a garbage can so I could look at its help wanted ads. A man who watched me do all this walked up to me then without saying a word he gave me one hundred and twenty dollars.

I bought food with it, and shared some with a couple other homeless people.

A few days later I walked into a pr0n shop in Grover Beach. The manager said "Put down the bags." I didn't. I just looked at him. "Put the bags down NOW!"

I put them down then said "I came to apply for a job," then offered him a flash drive with my resume on it. That resume had over twenty years experience as a coder, with the last ten years being mostly self-employed as a software consultant.

"I'm sorry, I can't accept that. You need to apply to our head office."

"No worries," I replied then put the stick back in my pocket.

"How much do you think I could make," I asked him "doing work that I regard as morally reprehensible?"

He went slackjawed with his eyes open wide. "More than this shop makes in six months."

He was correct: as a result of my experience as a Quantitative Investment coder I had been solicited dozens of times to write Sub-Microsecond Precision High-Speed Trading code, mostly by Bloomberg and Solomon-Page. I never responded to any of them.

Such high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street. Some Congresscriters have proposed a punitive very short-term capital gains tax so as to piss on all the billionaire quants but none of those proposals ever achieved traction.

I got paid today, in the form of a wire transfer from my client's Chinese subsidiary. I'm paid by China for Chinese tax reasons.

After work today I'm going to drop by the Portland Rescue Mission then donate a thousand dollars.

"Buy yourself something nice," I'll say.

I'm getting a similar wire in three weeks or so, when my clients OEM customers sign off on my macOS driver for a USB Video chip. My client just makes the chips, the OEMs build them into dongles for sale to end users.

When I get that final paycheck, I'm going to donate a thousand dollars to Right 2 Dream Too. It's more commonly known as The Tent Camp, and is a homeless shelter operated by homeless people.

R2D2 is quite forward thinking because both men, women and couples can sleep there, and one can sleep during the day. Every time I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I was able to spend the next day sleeping at R2D2.

I'm also speculating - NOT investing: speculating - on cryptocurrencies. I plan to divide eight or ten grand evenly between bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, etherium and peercoin.

Just now I bought $1000 of etherium.

My credit union's security people do not permit debit card withdrawals by coinable - "It has a high potential for fraud," the teller told me after he rang up their security people. Three $60 and one $200 EFTs went through OK but I am uncertain whether the credit union will permit much larger EFTs. So I'm going to break up the trades, with the dollar amount I buy increasing with each EFT so I can be sure they all go through OK.

When I get that last wire I'm going to donate a grand to CityTeam Ministries. I speculate - SPECULATE now - that I'll make quite a bit of money off the cryptos. From time to time I'll sell some then donate to the Blanchet House Of Hospitality, Union Gospel Mission, St Andre's Catholic Church, all of them in Portland, as well as Vancouver's Share House, a church in Vancouver that serves a free lunch, the St Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz California, Dorothy's Drop-In Center and Kitchen in Salinas, and Vancouver's Consumer Voices Are Born.

CVAB is a day center for mentally ill folk. They also do stuff like job training, they have six computers and a laser printer to enable the members to apply for jobs.

And an upright piano. The first time I saw that piano I was onto it like a pit bull on a pork roast.

"Consumer" is a euphemism for "Mentally Ill Person". I have a furious hatred of the word "Consumer". I call myself a patient. Look man, if you had heart disease, you'd call yourself a patient too, wouldn't you.

Two winters ago a Canadian Soylentil sent me three pairs of wool socks, wool gloves, three chocolate chip cookies, a Starbucks card and $50 cash so I could buy a pair of pants.

Please donate some of your own money to your community's soup kitchens, homeless shelters and rescue missions. I once met a disabled, homeless former welder who said to me "You talk to some guys on the streets, and they tell you they used to make six figures."

I didn't tell him I was one of those six figure guys.

I once earned quite a lot of money but for all the good it did me I should have burned the banknotes to stay warm on cold nights. But I live in a very modest way; I can easily afford to lose ten grand should the crypto exchanges collapse. I can easily afford to donate the occasional grand to those who serve Portland and Vancouver's homeless.

Amazon's Alexa is officially coming to Australia and NZ (early 2018)

"G'day, cunt!"

The "wisdom" I've learned, is that ethanol has 90% of the stored energy that gasoline has. That is, a gallon of pure ethanol contains 10% less energy than a gallon of gasoline.

Since most of our ethanol is blended, 10%eth/90%gas, then a gallon of fuel at the pump has 1% less efficiency.

Now, I've always kept track of my fuel mileage, since about 1976. Back then, I kept a notebook in the car - now I use fuelly.com to record all my purchases. Recently, I bought another vehicle - a 2002 Chevy Trailblazer. I started out putting ethanol free into it, because the previous owner told me that it gets better fuel mileage with ethanol free. I guess I put about six tanks of gas into it, before making purchases at random stations, whenever I needed fuel. (It is a minor inconvenience timing my fillup when I'll be close to the ethanol free stuff.)

Anyway, this vehicle is charted on fuelly.com as ranging from 10 to 33 mpg, with the bulk of them between 16 and 18 mpg. I was happy as could be to find that my ride was routinely getting about 21 mpg, and as high as 22 mpg. But then - ethanol. After a series of about 6 ethanol fillups, my mileage had dropped off to about 17 mpg. Hmmmmm . . . that's a much greater decrease than the advertised 1%!

A guy at work told me not to worry about it - the gas companies had switched to winter blend gasoline, and fuel mileage always dropped with that. I couldn't argue with him - yeah, it IS time for winter blend.

All the same, I went out of my way to fill with ethanol free. And, BANG!! I'm right back up to ~21 mpg again.

Something ain't right here. I'm sure there are some minor inaccuracies in my fillups. One time, I may squeeze the last drop into the tank possible, and maybe the next time a get a cup and a half less in the tank. That is almost certainly what happened with the one tank that shows 21.98 mpg - I just didn't get it filled exactly like always.

I'm wondering how much further my fuel mileage might have fallen, if I didn't switch BACK to ethanol free? And, where do all those lost miles per gallon go?

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chevrolet/trailblazer/2002/runaway1956/645719

Garrison Keillor fired by MPR: 'I put my hand on a woman's bare back,' he says (comments)

Garrison Keillor off the air after misconduct allegations (archive)

The Latest: Keillor says his firing is 'bewildering'

Garrison Keillor Jokes About Improper Behavior Allegations: 'All My Heroes Got Fired'

STATEMENT FROM MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO REGARDING GARRISON KEILLOR AND A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

State of sexual McCarthyism? Or was there a little more than a pat on the back?

Here's what he's known for: A Prairie Home Companion

The Meaning Of Meghan: 'Black' And 'Royal' No Longer An Oxymoron

Britain’s black queen: Will Meghan Markle really be the first mixed-race royal?

Oh yeah she was on a couple of episodes of Fringe.

Meghan Markle.