Apparently they were going to let this balloon float along the continental U.S. for as long as the Chinese pleased until the public found out.

Not wanting to be embarrassed, Biden was forced to send in fighter jets to take it out. Then the administration makes baseless claims that the Trump administration also had spy balloons floating in U.S. air space and never took action. They're making excuses because this is a giant blunder.

There's two American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt. Ford and Tesla. Ironically enough Ford is an investor in Rivian. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Rivian is hemorrhaging money and Amazon having sunk its investment. I wouldn't expect every Amazon investment to be a hit. EV's seem like a volatile investment but of course Amazon was thinking they could incorporate Rivian vehicles into their delivery vehicle fleet.


Amazon is diversifying into businesses that can accentuate their primary e-commerce platform. Rivian uses EVs, and of course Amazon is a massive shipping company that relies on gas powered vehicles Amazon has already stated they plan to switch their delivery vehicles to EV's. The pharmacy company they invested in is going to be incorporated and marketed to Amazon prime users.

Human nature is generally not to rely on anomalies to influence decision making, but it seems as if so many of these centralized exchanges have gone down that it isn't sensible for people to continually keep their money on these exchanges and roll the dice that the next exchange that crashes isn't the one they keep funds on. My reasoning is ignorance -- they treat these exchanges as they do their local banks. Of course most local banks have the backing of the government and the government can generate funds on a whim if there ever was a liquidity crisis. Exchanges have no such power. Liquidity issues means the entire exchange bankrupts itself if they can't secure emergency funding (of course we knew FTX tried to secure emergency loans that fell through).

To your point, I don't think these exchanges will go anywhere. People are overly reliant on them.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/debt-balance-credit-cards

What's interesting is that credit card debt rose from 2016-2020 at a high rate, and of course there are peaks of credit card debt in the 08 financial crisis as well.



It's true that debt would rise if inflation is outpacing wage growth. But it's also a sign that the economy is probably on the downturn if people are relying on credit to pay their bills. This sort of debt is only sustainable if the economy would allow for people to pay off these debts. If there's a recession and people lose their income, all of a sudden this debt becomes a huge problem.

The universities themselves don't. They just harbor an ideology that could lead to violence. It's not as if these institutions are what they once were. No longer do they promote freedom of speech. They manufacture oppression at every turn and will accuse those who dissent as having character flaws instead of attacking arguments. Of course it's easier to attack character opposed to the actual arguments.

Communist regimes don't do very well if a decentralized currency competes with their own. There isn't any incentive for China to reverse the ban. It would only allow their citizens to free themselves from the deadly grip of the CCP.

Doesn't make sense for a business to take crypto if they're just converting it into stablecoins the moment they receive it. If it's a small business, the fees these payment processers charge them will take up some portion of revenue. And I would never recommend people use stablecoins. You're better off using your local currency if all you're going to do is convert the crypto into another currency.

Obviously there are businesses that take crypto and immediately convert it. But they're usually larger corporations that find it profitable to take in business for crypto users and will eat the cost of the conversion fees. A smaller business doesn't have a chance.

I wouldn't call it an addiction, I'd characterize it as an inevitable cycle once people begin to start compounding loans on top of each other.

Most people that start stacking loans have no idea how the interest rate will end up effecting them down the line. And if the penalties hit, the interest will increase and your credit score goes down so that future loans are at higher interest rates.

There are plenty of predatory loan companies that will make their businesses by having people pay off their debit with insane interest rates over the course of years.

The Biden-Harris "trans equity" fact sheet.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/31/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-advances-equality-and-visibility-for-transgender-americans/

Particular highlight:


Complete lunacy. All of it. They'll use euphemisms in order to avoid being explicit about the invasiveness of these operations. They'll throw in the usual buzzwords like "evidence based" to make it sound as if these operations are not barbaric. It was only recently the far left have been pushing for these things. They've been embolden over the last few years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

Really it was Trump's fault and Biden's fault. But the responsibility is not equally split.

Trump was President during COVID lockdowns and it was his administration that recommended restrictions under advisement of the great Dr. Fauci. Trump would also criticize Sweden for not locking down as justification for his poor decision making and inability to surround himself with competent advisers. Though that's a separate issue. Point being, he bears responsibility for lockdowns. The predictable result of paying people to stay home and printing money to stimulate the economy was obviously not unforeseen. Trump owns all of that. To his defense, he aimed to reopen the economy sooner than democrats did who would have preferred to create concentration camps for the infected, unvaxxed or unmasked.

Biden comes into office and makes matters much worse. He extends COVID-19 restrictions on the federal level and invokes trillions of dollars of new spending (build back better, inflation reduction act, etc.). He is senile so its mostly his party to blame. Trump usually makes his own decisions.

Correct -- oil companies have faced the brunt for high energy prices when energy policy is to blame.

Raw profit totals don't support the "corporate greed" profit unless the actual profit margins increased. Of course we don't know exactly what the margins of these companies are. If the EU was interested in cheap oil they have an avenue for that. Their refusal of cheap energy, at expense of their citizens, should not invoke demonization of private enterprises making record profits. They helped create those profits.

Tesla wasn't even investing at that point. They were trying to time the market and were attempting to make short term gains. Nothing wrong with that, but I just don't think they should direct their ire towards crypto if their short term investing strategy doesn't go accordingly.

They're still holding onto some crypto so their losses aren't realized until they sold. And obviously, anyone in for the long haul should not be concerned about what the day-to-day price is.

Once USD reached a 40 year high of inflation over the last few quarters it became clear countries would no longer hold as much USD in their reserves if their purchasing power was dramatically decreasing by virtue of not spending the cash. Couple this with aggressive sanctions and asset seizures, doesn't make sense for a country to use USD if the currency becomes useless over time or if the U.S. government decides they want to seize the currency for their own political ambitions. Not too long ago the U.S. froze 7B in Afghanistan's assets and redistributed it to their own U.S. citizens. 7B is nothing to a large country but the idea of having cash assets seized on a whim would be concerning if your country's government becomes adversaries with the U.S.

It isn't too unusual for the old institutional investors to disparage Bitcoin. A lot of these guys made their money with traditional securities and they're unwilling to recognize technological changes in the market because the bulk of their money was made in the past.

It's always amusing the mental gymnastics these people will go through -- if Munger suggests Bitcoin is nothing but gambling with a 100% house edge. Who exactly is the house?

Sugar is the most popular drug there is. The obesity rate is indicative of an endemic problem. It's not that fructose is any different in a fruit than it is in processed foods, though. It's only that the food manufactures add endless amounts of fructose corn syrups to things you wouldn't normally expect which makes the food slightly addictive.

Sugar isn't methamphetamine or heroin but it kills more people than hard drugs. How many lives could have been saved by telling people to loose a bit of weight instead of taking an ineffective COVID vax that no longer works? Makes you wonder.

DeSantis will run into the problem that Ted Cruz ran into in 2016: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/desantis-is-polling-well-against-trump-as-long-as-no-one-else-runs/

In short, the Republican party needs to be on board with one candidate if they want a legitimate shot at beating the democrats.

The primary system will allow Trump to take the nomination with a mere plurality of the vote. It could be that 70% of primary voters do not want Trump to be the nominee. If Trump maintains a plurality with his 30% with DeSantis trailing shortly behind and all other candidates taking their share of the vote, Trump cruises towards a primary win.

In case it may matter, Trump has already began attacking DeSantis presumptively before he's even announced his candidacy. He's nervous.

And uncoincidentally, I've seen the normal DNC/democratic propagandist all elevate Trump and ramp up attacks against DeSantis. The preferred candidate for Biden to run against is clear.

Seems like you're taking economic principles and conflating them together in a way that doesn't make sense.

Bitcoin is inherently deflationary, first of all. The total supply is capped, and the number of coins that can be mined decreased by a fixed amount.

Volatility is not inflation. Inflation is a supply and demand principle. Money supply backed by fiat can be modified by printing more new currency units. This causes demand to go up and consumer goods start to increase in price causing inflation.

Important to note that you can still see consumer prices go up even if the demand remains the same if the supply isn't steady. But you expect prices to stabilize once the supply recovers. Currency induced demand increases (ie introducing more currency units into the economy) essentially means prices never go down because it becomes difficult to take out money from the economy that's already been introduced.

Bitcoin doesn't have this issue so it doesn't make sense to take inflation and apply it to Bitcoin.

Well, if the crypto banks default on their loans, then that puts these home lender institutions in pretty big trouble. Might finally bring down the housing costs for folks in the U.S.

At this stage, it's within Bitcoin users' interests that these exchanges and crypto enterprises/banks stay operating. Every time a major exchange comes crashing down it sends the entire market downward. Obviously it's not stable for loans to be handed out every time there's liquidity issues. If these places can't maintain liquidity then they shouldn't be trusted with user funds.

You could keep coins on a hardware wallet, put it in a lockbox and entrust a 3rd party to pass the lockbox to your next of kin or beneficiary when you die. There wouldn't need to be a unique service for this because there's already ways to pass down property to someone after you die. A specific crypto ownership transfer service just seems like a waste. And to any observer, they'd be handing over something that seems worthless. They wouldn't know there's crypto within the device. Of course, this isn't really how insurance typically works. You'd need a will set up for this.

China's "ban" was theatrics. They've made no real efforts of enforcement but I'd caution that it won't last forever. They're trying to introduce CBDC's (digitalized Yuan) and I'm anticipating crypto crackdowns within China to force citizens to adopt their digital currency.

The popularity increase of crypto in China was riding off the back of global crypto popularity rise so it wasn't necessarily that the Chinese bad had the inverse effect itself. Lot of Chinese crypto users were already in the space which is why China tried to ban it in the first place.