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Someone gave me 0.990 LTC a week or two ago. At the time that was about $54.00. It has since gone up to about $60.

I bought $60 each of BTC and ETH, paid for with EFTs from my business checking account.

BTC went way down today doubtlessly due to some burglar bragging that he just stole $32,000,000.00 worth of bitcoin by hacking into digital wallets.

CoinBase offers USD wallets if you're down with uploading pix of the front and back of your ID. So I can no longer use CoinBase for money laundering.

The great advantage of the USD wallet is that the transactions take place immediately, rather than having to wait seven days as happened with my EFTs. The price was locked-in when I ordered the purchase but I wasn't permitted to trade the ETH or LTC for over a week.

Now I have BTC 0.0253 that just now is worth $169.15.

My code is going to go beta by the middle of next week. That means I get paid. I'm going to buy one BitCoin - presently that costs $6,682.00 - as well as a mining rig.

The reason I'm doing this is that I have no other hope of funding a decent retirement. Even if I contribute the maximum of $6500 - the "catch-up" rate for people over 50 - until I'm 65, my retirement will have me living like a starving artist through all of my golden years.

So I'm speculating on cryptocurrency. Even if I lose it all, my retirement won't really be any worse than I presently foresee it.

I might form a 501(c)3 tax-deductible non-profit corporation to operate Soggy Jobs. If I do that I could give myself the employment benefit of a 401k, which will enable me to contribute about three times as much as my IRA permits.

I'm soliciting donations but they're not yet tax-deductible.

Google.org exists to give money to charities. I expect I can make a good case for contributing to soggy jobs. There are many philanthropic organizations; if I do form the non-profit I'm going to work with a grant writer to get me some of those Samoleons.

Whereas I have zero faith that the West has any capability, much less will, to solve its problems.

I believe my reply is instructive:

Let's take a tour of the problems that the West not only has the capability or will to solve, but actually has done so:

1. Wars -solved.
2. Pollution - solved.
3. Poverty - partially solved. Note the current economic systems of the West have also partially solved poverty in China as well through global trade.
4. Habitat destruction - partially solved with conservation and setting aside green space and wilderness.
5. Population growth - solved.
6. Mass education -solved.
7. Mass, global communication - solved.
8. Global trade system - solved.
9. Authoritarian clowns telling you what to do - partially solved for now.
10. Feeding the world - solved for now.

While I won't discuss all of these, I want to discuss the first three: wars, pollution, and poverty, the last along with population growth because the two problems are intertwined. These are the most stereotyped and the most often wrong when discussing problems and solutions.

So let's start with the problem of wars. Everyone knows that wars continue to happen. We even have a rather bloody one going on in Syria right now. Here, I claim that wars are "solved", yet we still have them. What gives? The first observation here is that wars are between multiple parties, states or significant sub-state actors (guerillas, paramilitary groups, terrorists, freedom fighters, etc). A single entity can't fix all wars. If party A and party B want to fight, party C is limited in what they can do to keep the two parties from fighting, even if they have legal police power over one or both groups. So a solution to war is merely the cessation of war between parties, not the ability of a third party to prevent war.

The key is to look at the developed world countries and conflicts since the end of the Second World War. If one looks at the list of the top 16 (all those with a Human Development Index of above 0.900), one sees that these countries, while often in conflict, particularly the US and UK, are never in conflict with each other. The only real conflict with any sort of involvement between these countries is the paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland which involved the UK directly and had significant private support from Ireland and the US citizens (though zero official support).

Otherwise, conflicts reduce to fishing boats bumping each other on the high seas and fall far short of any serious definition of war.

The lower tier (HDI between 0.800 and 0.899) still show remarkably low levels of conflict between members. Russia (as the controlling state of the USSR) has been in military conflict with other members (putting down revolt in Hungary in 1968, for example). Argentina with the UK in the Falkland War. In excess of a billion people, yet with only a handful of minor wars to point to.

Yes, these developed world countries often wage a fair bit of war, but not on those in the same economic class. This indicates a way to solve in the real sense, war. Elevate all countries to developed world status.

It's also worth noting that the number of deaths from wars has gone down over the past few decades globally as well. Everyone is partially benefiting from fewer and less bloody wars, not just the rich countries.

Moving on, let's consider pollution. It's long been a trite cliche to speak of pollution as if it's just as bad as it's ever been (particularly when complaining that no one will do anything about the environmental cause du jour until it's too late). For example, here's a study of ambient levels of smog components in Los Angeles air from 1960 through to near present (2014 I believe). Ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides ("NOx") dropped by a factor of four over the time period despite an increase in fuel use of a factor of three! That's an order of magnitude drop in pollution per unit of fuel (and keep in mind that vehicles became moderately more fuel efficient over this time period even with SUVs in the mix). More complex organics, volatile hydrocarbons (VOC) and peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN) dropped much faster with at least two orders of magnitude drop in concentrations of each.

There has been many environmental regulations over the decades, and these have had an effect. There's no more rivers catching on fire in Ohio. There's no more killer smogs in London. Yet it is frequent to see people to speak as if these problems were still among us, undiminished. You know, because we never solve problems.

The final one, poverty is the biggest problem of all, for not only does it cause immense suffering on its own, but it is a driver for many other social problems, most particularly overpopulation and a low regard for human life.

While I've hinted before at myopic interpretations of these problem, it's far more pronounced here both with the introduction of deceptive measures of poverty that both don't measure poverty and measure relative quantities that can never really go away. For example, there's a lot of talk of wealth and income inequality rather than more legitimate measures of absolute poverty (which actually measure a problem!). And sometimes those measures are used deceptively (such as a recent story which The convenient aspects of inequality is that it can never go away, and there's no obvious level which is good or bad. Then you get the conflations with real poverty even though it doesn't even remotely measure that (keep also in mind a tendency to declare that poverty is routinely declared to be people with the lowest percentage of wealth).

Let's take a cursory look at how inequality gets abused:

What I think is wrong with society is that, while I'm just barely on the comfortable side of the wealth divide, the gap is growing at a crazy pace. Prices I learned growing up in the 1970s have mostly inflated 10x, as has my income, meanwhile the bottom end of the income scale (virtually anyone below me on the job-value ladder) has only grown maybe 3-4x, it's pretty sad for the majority of the population.

Reality:

What evidence exists for this? I grant that there is wealth inequality and it has appeared to grow somewhat over the past 40 years. But there is no "crazy pace" to it. For example, we have a Pew Study that shows by their measure, the Middle Class shrinking from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015. Roughly, 20% shrinkage in 44 years. That's your "crazy pace". Even worse for your narrative, the upper classes grew more than the lower ones as a fraction of total population. So two thirds of the fraction that were no longer middle class were now upper class.

A particularly dishonest metric claiming an increase in global wealth inequality can be found in this story.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher.

The problems with that? 1) not actually measuring wealth inequality. What of the wealth of the 7.4 billion people who aren't billionaires? 2) downplayed that most of the increase in wealth (+17%) can be explained by the pool of billionaires increasing by 10% (145 new billionaires)! 3) Ignores that billionaire wealth is not equal value to those who aren't billionaires and thus, their wealth is exaggerated. Can't eat credit default swaps or even sell them easily for market price. But it made for a great tale of the "second" Gilded Age.

Here's another example from a linked essay rationalizing why the USSR didn't work in typical Marxist fashion:

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

So first paragraph is a work of art that slams the wealthy for having inordinate gains revenue (which simultaneously downplaying the wealth as mere "debt-leveraged inflation"). So why should we care about gains inequality? Who wants more "debt-leveraged inflation"? Yet it is portrayed as a bad thing even though the argument is sheer nonsense.

And then the author whines about how unfair it is that people actually have to borrow money for a house rather than just have one given to them on a silver platter.

Related to that is the common observation that the wealthiest X people have far more wealth than the poorest Y fraction of the population. As indicated here, there's a couple of enormous flaws with that thinking.

To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt.

[...]

The chart [2014 regional wealth distribution, Credit Suisse] shows China has basically no one in the bottom 10 percent of the global wealth distribution. At the same time, if you dig into the country-by-country data (page 107 in the Databook), it shows that America has more than 7 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants — second only to India. That is, to put it lightly, nuts.

Anyway, let me trot out some counterexamples for your consideration. First, let's consider those living in extreme poverty. The fraction of people who live in such extreme poverty (here, using the metric of at most $1.90 per day in "international $", adjusted both for standard of living price changes between countries and inflation) has been declining ever since 1820, the start of the graph in the link (that's almost 200 years of such decline). The absolute number of people in such extreme poverty has been declining, despite population growth heavily biased towards the poorest of the world, since 1970! It currently is around 700 million after peaking at 2.2 billion. Over the same time period, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty dropped from just over 60% in 1970 to under 10% in 2015.

Then there's my favorite example of reduction of global income equality. Over a twenty year period (1988-2008), two thirds of humanity (that's everyone in the world) saw at least a 30% increase in their income with the median increasing by over 60%. While the richest got richer, that still means a decline in overall wealth inequality due to the nearing of developed world and developing world incomes.

I'll note that poverty is a huge correlation with population growth (the other big factor being the fraction of women not in the workforce). In 1970, the global population growth rate was 2.1% per year. It has now dropped to 1.1% per year with the developed world showing negative rates before immigration (among everyone who is not first or second generation immigrants).

To summarize, there has long been a narrative about humanity that emphasizes our inability to solve problems. This narrative is grossly in error with the developed world demonstrating a number of solved or partially solved problems in war, environmental problems, and poverty and overpopulation. These solutions have come to the point that extreme poverty, which until 1980 was the usual condition of most of humanity, now afflicts less than a tenth. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement of the human condition ever.

Yet the games continue. This enormous boon is concealed between a web of selective statistics. Critics peer intently at various dubious versions of wealth inequality (often while simultaneously downplaying the value of the wealth they are comparing) because absolute measures of poverty don't give the right answers any more. Would-be environmentalists complain because poisons are poisons (look at the replies which ignore dosage and proper usage) while completely ignoring whether current regulation solves the problems they claim to care about and whether the role of the poison is necessary.

And for some people, it no longer matters how many people die in wars any more. Wars are equally bad no matter how many die. Very convenient for the peacenik who needs a cause that never goes away.

My view is that part of the problem is that we have a case of bad ideology which needs to invent exaggerated or even fake problems in order to act out showing concern. Partly, it's that we're going to worry, even if we don't enough to worry about. Whatever the case, I think it would be nice here to wake up and see what's being done right rather than bumble on into some idiotic and dreadful societal theater because of the Chicken Littles of the world.

I love what's happening with #SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Which did tremendously well in the Senate Commerce Committee. Senator Feinstein loves it. Senator Portman and Senator Blumenthal are sponsoring it. Sheryl from Facebook loves it, Facebook is all for it. 21st Century Fox, which is Fox News, loves it. Disney, which does great work with our precious children, loves it. Google, Oracle and HP, some of our biggest cyber companies, love it. Almost everybody loves it.

But some LOSERS don't love it. They don't get it. They say "Oh, SESTA is censorship!" It's not censorship. Believe me, it's not censorship. The Consumer Technology Association, the Internet Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation -- these are foolish people. They don't understand that we need to close up our internet. To stop the pimping that has turned America's internet into a big, big brothel. The biggest. As you know, we're having major, major problems with the pimping sites. The pimps have taken over our internet. SESTA can fix this problem easily and quickly. We can begin to #LockThemUp. China was having tremendous problems with its cyber, they got it under control. We must do the same. Folks, tell your senators, don't listen to the fools. Don't listen to the losers. Tell them to pass SESTA! We need it very badly. Time is quickly running out, we must act fast, and hopefully Congress will act faster and more effectively than anyone. I know one thing about Congress, if they work on it hard, it will happen. We DESPERATELY need SESTA. I am sitting in Beijing with a pen in hand, waiting for our senators to give it to me. I have pen in hand. Believe me, I'm in China, I have pen in hand. 🇺🇸🇨🇳

There’s now a lot more nerds in elected office. Seventeen candidates with STEM-backgrounds ran their respective races Tuesday, from Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam—a doctor—to Tiffany Hodgson, a neuroscientist who won a seat on the Wissahickon School Board in eastern Pennsylvania.

Many candidates decided to run only after President Donald Trump ushered in one of the most anti-science administrations in history. And a number of the campaigns sprung out of meetings with 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is helping scientists run for office.

“Voters are ready for candidates who are going to use their STEM training to base policy on evidence rather than intuition,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action, said in a press release. “Science will not be silenced.”

17 STEM Politicians Won Elections Tuesday

Folks, time zones can be very confusing. In Massachusetts they're trying to decide, what time zone are they in? Here in China, as you know, they don't have time zones. And it can be very confusing for a child when his father goes very far away, crossing many, many time zones. I know some of you just finished a tremendous election. Very sad for those of you who are Dems. Because my great Republican Party did amazingly well. While your party is dead. It's dead and the DNC doesn't know why. They don't want to know. But I think the very crooked DNC is a big, big part of it.

It's been a year since our tremendous election of November 2016. One of the best elections, probably the best election ever in the history of the world. In which I said we'd better stop business as usual and not be beholden to ways of the past which were not working. And the American people gave me a HUGE victory. Which was really a victory for them. Because I always, always put the American people first. Some of my great Republican candidates do too. And those who do have done very well. Congratulations to the winners! Big wins for my Republican Party in the House of Representatives. Massive win in the Electoral College! pic.twitter.com/7ifv5gT7Ur

But we had a couple of LOSERS. .@ChrisChristie is a big loser. Maybe, probably the biggest, because he's very, very fat. A big fat slob. He needs to go on The Biggest Loser to lose a lot of weight. He didn't lose weight, he lost the election. He gave me his endorsement last year, but it was a big negative for me. A huge negative, almost a disaster. I think he was angling to be @VP, can you imagine if I'd picked him? It would be like Laurel & Hardy!

Ed Gillespie, who never supported me, also lost. He's a hard worker but he's a LOSER. He was always against what I stand for, against Making America Great Again. When my terrific alt-right went to Charlottesville to protect our statues, protect our heritage, culture & history, he was against them. And it was a disaster. So he lost, big league.

It's a sad day for our great states of New Jersey and Virginia. It's not sad, because they voted out LOSERS. Who are Republicans. Who happen to be Republicans. But it's sad because they voted in Dems. Who are losers because they're Dems. Who are Dems because they're losers.

Meanwhile, I'm in China. Which is amazing. Very different from the USA, it's like night and day. The wealth of China is amazing, it's really something. We've made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. Thinking about holding a big rally in Tiananmen Square! I'm kidding. Obviously I'm kidding. The Chinese are very rich and very happy. Of course they're happy, they have everything they could possibly want. Except Trump hotels. I'd love to have big, beautiful Trump hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. I'm very busy right now but my people, if you're listening, you can think about opening hotels there. That will be a great day for China.

Had a great time in Japan and Korea. Japanese burgers & Coke are just like ours. pic.twitter.com/9RiaibqNLO Korean food is fantastic. Strange, but amazingly good. They have something called Taco Tuesday. Which they do every Tuesday. It's a big tradition for them. I had a taco 🌮 and a burrito 🌯 -- those are like stuffed crêpes, they make them with a thin, round bread like a crêpe -- for lunch there. And for dinner there was corn, ribs and TRIPLE chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. It's the threesome of chocolate. Which I never had before. I had double chocolate before, they added a third chocolate. To make it three. It was the best chocolate cake you've ever had in your life. It was my first triple, I felt like I lost my virginity all over again. Like I was a baby before this. For me it wasn't a triple, it was a home run. Tremendous! I'm going to tell the chefs at the White House, at both White Houses, all about Korean food. Maybe they can bake me a cake with four chocolates! They say travel expands the mind. I think it can expand the waistline too. But a slob like Chris Christie can get fat without going anywhere. pic.twitter.com/wyOdmqcFLd

Stay safe while I'm away. Above all, stay away from the NFL. Don't go to the games, don't watch them on TV. Boycott the NFL until such time as they respect Anthem, Flag and Country. And good luck. Good luck, everybody. #USAStrong #NFLBoycott #Neverwatch #BoycottTheNFL #BoycottNFL 🇺🇸

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey's statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former secretary of State of having been "grossly negligent" in handling classified information, newly reported memos to Congress show.

The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.

The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines.

[...]

The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.

"There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information," reads the statement, one of Comey's earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.

The sources who had seen the early draft, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits on or around June 10 to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was "extremely careless."

So... former FBI Director Comey apparently did at one point use the legally significant phrase "grossly negligent" which then somehow morphed to the legally insignificant phrase, "extremely careless" after draft changes by the Senate Judiciary Committee to Comey's statement. I wonder if Clinton apologists care any more.

I am installing McAfee antivirus on my wife's windows 7 laptop.

For years she has been telling g me that you can't do anything with Linux (as in everyone needs MS locked in programs.

Today, she is trying to send an MS Word doc to a publisher, but cannot connect to the website because her OS is sooooo slow and keeps freezing.

My response was "yeah, you can't do ANYTHING with Linux!"

After our usual win/Lin argument, i said I'd install antivirus if she wanted.

THIS. IS. PAINFUL!!! Soooooo slooooooow!

Her argument is that when Linux gets as popular as windows, my system will get slow too....
.....her tablet is Android, lol. She surf's through Linux servers. My daughter and son in law have Android phones (my wife and I don't have cell phones)..... So much she didn't know but now does.

She was so mad and frustrated at me until I pointed out that she was mad at her precious Windows, but taking it out on me, lol.

Getting some brownie points if this antivirus works. Crossing fingers. She'd be so much better off dual booting, but yeah.... Windows is teh best!

I don't have the cash for an FPGA so I'll give it a try on my iMac and my Xeon box.

I don't know much about the GPU on the iMac but the Xeon box has some manner of high-end card. It takes up two PCI slots so it can have its own fan.

I discussed this at Kuro5hin a while back, but those who knew something about cryptocurrency told me that the electricity would cost more than the bitcoins it produced.

Bit now BitCoin is at $7000. Surely I won't use more electricity than that.

If it works out at least a little bit, when I get paid I'll buy a mining rig.

I at first planned to use 1/3rd of my paycheck to buy equal amounts of bitcoin, lite coin and etherium. But I think it's quite likely that today's irrational exuberance isn't like to last as long as I would like. Yeah I could make some money but likely there are other ways I could make more. Like mining.

Soylent often reports that mining rigs are always in short supply. But I'm not greedy, I expect I would do just fine with last year's model.

☠️🚴☠️🚶💥🚚 ISIS terrorist in truck rammed people walking & bicycling in Lower Manhattan. Injured 12 & killed 8. 😈💥🔫👮 Ryan Nash of NYPD shot bad guy. 😈🔒👮 Terrorist in custody. ✈ Came from #Uzbekistan on a green card! 🏥🚑👮🙉👂 Officer Nash in hospital for ringing in ears. 🔇💥🔫✔ Unfair tax on suppressors! PIX11News/status/925444943912620032 pic.twitter.com/F0TexToiXd pic.twitter.com/nWhrxlqKFY #ManhattanAttack ?? #NYCStrong

(This is the 53rd of many promised articles which explain an idea in isolation. It is hoped that ideas may be adapted, linked together and implemented.)

I've been working on a video encoder and decoder which divides frames of video into square tiles and then sub-divides those tiles and applies a specified short-list of matching and compression algorithms to tiles of 256×256 pixels or significantly smaller. What real-time conferencing? Stick to MJPEG tile-types. Want lossless video? Avoid affine tile-types. Want maximum resilience? Minimize use of key-frames. Want best compression? Use everything.

In addition to viewing real-time or pre-recorded video, this arrangement can be used to display contemporary or legacy software which is running elsewhere. Indeed, it is likely to be used extensively for remoting LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Draw.

So, the video codec is likely to be used in scenarios where the majority of a window is plain white and the exceptions have a hard edge. I presumed that the patent-just-expired texture compression algorithms would handle this with ease. However, an ex-housemate suggested inclusion of the simplest historial method. Well, I'm not a complete misanthropic curmudgeon and I do listen to my friends so implemented a Run Length Encoding tile-type. Although, I wish that I hadn't.

Run length encoding schemes differ significantly and, in the case of the Amiga's IFF picture compression, may be defined ambiguously. A typical byte encoding would allow up to 128 repetitions of a following value or up to 128 literal values to follow. However, the cut could be defined anywhere. So, it could define 240 repetitions and 16 literal values. Or the opposite. There's no point defining one repetition and one literal because that's the same thing. Likewise for zero. So, definitions may be shifted by one or two values.

Should Run Length Encoding start afresh on each line? Implementations vary. The next problem is more pernicious. What is a repetition? If there is sequence of pixels and two pixels are the same, should an encoder algorithm cease encoding literals, encode a repetition of two values and then continue encoding literals? For 24 bit color, yes. For 8 bit monochrome, no. For 16 bit data, it depends. So, a dumb Run Length Encoder has to look ahead by one pixel. In some circumstances, a smart Run Length Encoder may have to look further ahead.

Stuff like this caused me to implement an assertion system inside my buffer structures. Specifically, there is a compilation directive which enables a shadow buffer with a type system. Arguably, it should be enabled by default but with intended usage of 3840×2160 pixel video divided into 64×64 pixel tiles and each of the 2040 tiles requiring multiple 4KB buffers, data-types on buffers would require a large amount of extra memory.

However, I've yet to get to the best part. I remember exactly why I didn't implement a Run Length Encoding tile-type. The RMS [Root Mean Square] error (or smarter variant) for Run Length Encoding is always zero. Therefore, when I include Run Length Encoding, the encoder invariantly chooses Run Length Encoding for every part of a video frame. Even if the choice metric is set to error divided by encode length, the result remains zero.

Run Length Encoding greatly improves quality but, also, it greatly increased encoding size. Attempts to restrict matches have been mixed. I've tried setting a minimum tile size and a maximum number of tokens per tile. However, it is easier to exclude it from the encoding process. This experience has made me slightly more of a misanthropic curmudgeon and I'm less inclined to take advice from people who know very little about codecs.