Yes, I spent a day in a grower's pesticide training course and have a certificate here in Ontario to buy and spray pesticides.
RoundUp like most pesticides is shipped and stored in a highly concentrated state. The farmer will then tank mix that with a whole lot of water to produce the actual usable pesticide.
It is deplorable that he used the word "evil" to describe Bitcoin. He fails to point out that Bitcoin is a system and of course it is possible for individuals to use this system to achieve some personal nefarious goals; but we have literally watched banks knowingly gamble huge sums of money in the centrally banked system and the whole system came crashing down. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin will not allow a few major players to crash the system, and then use the government to bail it out... and as a side note the government doesn't ever bail anyone out, it leverages its authority to force taxpayers (today and future generations) to bail out a system so that it can maintain the status quo.
> It is deplorable that he used the word "evil" to describe Bitcoin.
Krugman is clearly an intelligent man, but in his public writing he has a habit of declaring things he doesn't like as "evil."
Given we know he's not stupid, I assume it's to increase the attention he receives. Based on the re-shares from my left-of-center friends, it tends to work.
A few minutes after I posted that, I regretted that my comment focused on that. Krugman wrote another article implying that Bitcoins were "barbarous" and likened them to digging up mostly useless gold. I feel like he must think Bitcoin is serious because he is writing about it regularly- I wish I had focused more on his economic theory in my comment... maybe next time.
I think you are overlooking some serious changes to the way the Fed regulates the money supply in the last five years. They are printing over 85 billion dollars every month. The stock market is soaring... why? because the government is artificially controlling interest rates which makes the value of your dollars go down fast- so people are forced not to save their money in a bank account but instead put their money "into" the economy- wealthy people are putting it into hard assets, and people that don't have as much are dumping money into the stock market as a hedge that their savings is loosing value every day. The result is a market that looks like it is doing great but is quiet volatile itself.
I agree that we should be very careful to just suddenly start running around yelling "the sky is falling" but I have heard an economist at the Fed (during a banking townhall) say "We are in totally uncharted territory" referring to how they will pull back all of the liquidity they have pumped into the market.
As for your comment about the US government saying "Use US Dollars or else..." that may not be the way that it looks on the surface but the US Government is very heavy handed in how other countries are allowed to control their own currencies, how multilateral trade deals are written in terms that force other countries to give up control over their own monetary policy.
You are correct that individuals around the world views the US dollar as stable and prefer to keep at least some portion of their wealth in US backed treasuries- but I would caution anyone from thinking that this is a foregone conclusion.
The fed uses a few people to try and hit multiple targets all at the same time... they have to deal with a bureaucracy that favors age and longevity, they have political pressures (see the Greenspan article above), and they have to make certain that their decisions keep their institution (coincidentally not a gov't institution but a private company)alive. The Fed is first and foremost a US-centric org. Whereas cryptocurrencies use the global market to find their level- whatever people agree is the price is the price... set number of bitcoins, completely liquid, and can cross borders without blinking... making trade easier than has ever been imagined before.
Most people aren't willing to put a day and a price on their predictions. I will look forward to another post in two days of you either celebrating cause you spotted something, or explaining why your prediction didn't pan out.
Will do. BTC-e has already crashed down from $930 to $750 in the last 1.5 hours and volume is spiking there too. (it tends to be cheaper to buy BTC because of greater risk)
I decided to buy some as it fell. In the fifteen seconds it took to press F5, enter bid (of $25 below prevailing price) and click OK, the price had fallen by $70. So I think for the first time ever I ended up paying less than my offer.
It ended up at $690, about 15-20 minutes ago I think. Now? It's $840 again. (My investment in bitcoin is turning out quite well, but I'm actually quite glad I didn't spend all that much in the first place.)
I used BTC-e to sell 25 bitcoins and transferred the money into my EU bank account. It went through without a hitch, and I had the money in my bank account in 5 days.
Compare that to Mt Gox who would not accept my US identification + German residence & bank account at all, and even if they did it takes up to 6 weeks to get your money now.
BTC-e is legit. BTC-e also doesn't require nearly as much ID verification.
Because it's based in Bulgaria and no one knows who actually owns it. But it's good software and one of the few places you can trade other currencies like Feathercoin and Litecoin with plenty of liquidity.
...and funny you ask because a commenter just posted on my blog that Sheep Market Place was scammed out of $40 million in BTC which is a possible cause of all the selling:
If this theory is true, it shows that BTC lacks book depth and the current price is just speculation on the edges, not a true price for the entire stock of BTC. (That is, if a large portion of BTC users wanted to get out of BTC, they couldn't realize the nominal market price.)
Thanks, I found it now. Though, they speak Russian and support predominantly Russian payment methods while supporting zero Bulgarian payment methods so either they are lying or the Bulgarian company is just a shell.
Interesting analogy. A publicly traded company with transparent financials and corporate hierarchy vs. a web site that has an unknown company behind it, run by anonymous CEO.
Yeah sure, you're right. The CEO is probably an alien. There is no way a Bulgarian company could see the majority of it's customers are from Russia and adapt by offering convenient payment methods. Never mind that Russia is the biggest country in Europe and it's heavily policing outgoing bank transfers.
Dang- their kickstarter video was so incredible that all I wanted was for this project to work. The letter they have does nothing to acknowledge the let down of the people, and didn't take responsibility... both parts of legitimate apologies.
I agree that knowledge workers will be more productive if they reframe their time spent working to match their ability to focus on a task, but the logistical challenges behind managing people who work in this way would be a nightmare- it is easy to say that you would only track outcomes; perhaps I am not visionary enough but I think that the challenge is far greater than the author suggested.
I managed a software dev team this way - by outcomes. It worked great - at least from a developer productivity perspective. I knew my devs, knew who worked steadily and who worked according to a Dirac delta function (one guy was particularly spiky and narrow, and he could cobble together library code like nobody else) and who were in-between, and knew how to manage them and what to task each with.
(FYI, RP, "spiky and narrow", was "I need this at the end of the day"; XY was "disappear for a week, come back with what I asked for and a mind-blowing +1 we couldn't have predicted"; CC was "disappear for two weeks and return with the most beautifully architected, extensible, factory-based systems that were rock solid, customer ready, no costly bugs, ever".)
Where it didn't work so well? We were part of a PS shop, with billability targets and revenue expectations. It took some finesse to map the above behaviours to billable hours. My boss was tacitly on-board (he knew the personalities of my team, didn't ask how I managed them, and appreciated the results) but his boss, our VP, didn't know and it would have been dangerous for him to know.
So there are risks involved.
When my boss moved within the company, I followed him, RP followed me, and we did amazing things in an environment where that management style could be public knowledge (we were out of PS and out of billable revenue days and into a SaaS/SoA sort of thing, basically priced by value to the customer, before those were buzzy).
Hmm, there may be some information leakage in this post - but RP, XY, and CC know who they are. Great team.
Well depending on your background, & education it may have felt dumbed down but I have a lot of respect for Robert Krulwhich his RadioLab co-host won a McArthur "genius" award, and they have done (in my opinion) an excellent job of bringing science alive for people that either don't have the aptitude or didn't cross paths with the type of people that can inspire you to learn more about the universe.
it hadn't even crossed my mind that it would be something that big... but now that you say that, I wish that it had been some gigantic solar-system sized being... now I am totally let down- damn you Robert Krulwhich... damn you.
You spend too long in the beginning talking about your shirt... I have to spend the first 45 seconds before you start posing problems that I may have that buying your shirt will solve. Your video is good, and you narrating and talking is good- but having a shirt that is soft isn't a big concern for me... you hit on some great points about wearing it multiple times.. want to know why I buy smart wool socks because they tell me that my feet won't stink if I wear them a couple of times in fact as far as I am concerned it is the only reason that wool is smart- because it fixes a problem of stinky feet. Good luck!
Thank you. The silver, which breaks down the odor-causing bacteria and allows for multiple use, has consistently been voted as the most attractive feature. If I make a new video it will definitely focus more on that particular feature.
