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Expensive ITER Fusion
Coinbase are Brain-Damaged
I sold all my Etherium with the ~$3000 proceeds going to my USD wallet. The Dashboard page has the correct amounts.
But the Buy/Sell and Accounts pages incorrectly claim that my USD wallet only has $0.10. So I can't buy the Litecoin that I intended to buy. It has been this way for over an hour.
I logged a support ticket but they're so busy it's likely to be a week until they respond.
I expect just about any other exchange would work better. This because Coinbase is the #1 iOS app. As with Linux and Red Hat back during the dot-com boom, I expect many people think Coinbase is the only place you can get bitcoin.
12-Year-Old Girl Flies From Virginia to Interview Roy Moore
Roy Moore Emerges from Self-Imposed Exile to Chat with 12-Year-Old Girl
Trump Group Sends 12-Year-Old Girl to Interview Roy Moore Ahead of Alabama Election
Millie in Alabama (5m49s)
Roy Moore seemed delighted to be interviewed by a friendly, innocent, and untainted young reporter. He touched her at 4m49s into the video.
Dennis Rodman Has Secret Message From Kim Jong-un for Trump
Rolls Roil
Racial dispute at beloved bakery roils liberal college town in Ohio
The three students were arrested after punching and kicking the white shopkeeper. The 18- and 19-year-old students said that they were racially profiled and that their only crime was trying to buy alcohol with fake identification; the shopkeeper, Allyn Gibson, said the students attacked him after he caught them trying to steal bottles of wine.
The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery. Members of Oberlin's student senate published a resolution saying Gibson's had "a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment."
Few colleges put the "liberal" into "liberal arts" more than Oberlin, which in the early 1800s became the first in the country to regularly admit women and minorities. But it also more recently has become, for conservatives, a symbol of political correctness gone awry and entitled youth.
News articles in 2015 quoted students decrying the school dining hall's sushi and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches as cultural appropriation. The divisive, voice-of-a-generation actress Lena Dunham, famously a 2008 Oberlin alumna, was quoted in Food & Wine magazine as saying, "The press reported it as, 'How crazy are Oberlin kids?' But to me, it was actually, 'Right on.'"
Kepler Announcement on Dec. 14
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA and Google are both users of the D-Wave "quantum annealer", ostensibly for machine learning purposes.
Porn Star May Have Been Cyberbullied Into Committing Suicide
What is August Ames Cause of Death? Porn Star Found Dead After Cyberbullying
Adult film star August Ames was found dead in her California home on Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed. The erotic actress, who appeared in over 270 films, was 23 years old.
The Canadian actress’s official cause of death has yet to be released by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office due to pending family notifications. However, some members of the porn industry believe Ames, whose birth name was Mercedes Grabowski, may have taken her own life.
Just two days before Ames’s death, the porn star was a victim of cyberbullying after she posted a tweet on Sunday saying she refused to perform with a male actor who did gay pornography.
Shortly after Ames’s comments about working with "crossover performers"—porn stars who appear in gay and heterosexual scenes—she was bombarded with angry tweets accusing her of discriminating against the LGBTQ community and being anti-gay.
Ames defended her stance, writing that she was not homophobic, but decided not to shoot with men who have done gay porn for health reasons. “I’m not putting my body at risk, I don’t know what they do in their private lives,” she wrote.
Therese Dreaming
I Bought $4000 of BitCoin Today
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.
