Lockdowns make things better, because they dramatically reduce the number of people that each infected person is in contact with. This reduces the spread of the virus, and helps to keep it under some sort of control.
The way out of this is vaccination. Until we can get most people vaccinated, the way to control it is to keep the spread as low as we can. Masks, distancing, hand washing, lockdowns.

Viruses mutate anyway, particularly RNA viruses such as CV19. Each time the virus infects someone, it starts to make copies of itself. Sometimes those copies aren't quite perfectly accurate. These are random mutations. Not necessarily better or worse, just a bit different. What is happening now is that one of these mutations, which apparently is 70% more transmissible, is (largely because it has mutated to become more transmissible) spreading rapidly.

So yes, given the half-hearted government attempts to contain the 'normal' version, we'd need vastly more effective lockdowns against the new strain just to keep us at the current level of increasing infections. Fortunately we have the start of the vaccine roll-out now, which will help... and may or may not be sufficient to control this.

Spacetime does exist. Space and time are intertwined. Relativistic effects are experimentally verifiable. This is why Einstein is a big deal.

We will have to disagree! But please have a read about why Einstein's laws are a better approximation to reality than are Newton's.

Yes. This new strain is more dangerous because it is more transmissible. This increases the R number, the number of people on average that each infected person will themselves infect. It's the R number that determines the rate of increase (or, if <1, decrease) in new cases. A strain that is as severe, but is 70% more transmissible, is a big deal.

We have no way of knowing that. Personally, I've always been a fan of finite unbounded.

The balloon analogy is quite simple to understand. I assumed you were implying that space is expanding into 'nothing' or into 'more space', when that's not true. Space is all of space at the current time. The universe is expanding in the way that I outlined. If we take a snapshot of the current universe, it is bigger and has more space than a previous snapshot. But both have 'all space' as at that time.

Space is expanding. Atoms are not expanding. That's why. Space is not made of atoms, it is a collection of fields. Consider elementary particles to be field perturbations. Atoms are held together by electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force; this has nothing to do with the expansion of the universe.


If you are asking about the scale at which expansion trumps gravity, then generally it's at the galactic cluster scale. The Milky Way and our local group will continue to remain gravitationally bound as the universe expands. Indeed our local group will eventually collapse under gravity. But the next group over, the Virgo cluster, will get ever farther from us due to the expansion of space. The separation is such that gravity loses.

First, we don't know that it's infinite.
Second, it's expanding into time. Get a balloon, paint some dots on it. Now blow up the balloon. The dots get further apart. This is because the balloon is expanding as time progresses.

Yes, but if space is expanding everywhere all the time, then gravity is only going to overcome that expansion at a local level, not at a universe-scale level.

Yes. Rich people don't meet poor people. If they did, then there would be more empathy in the world, and less inequality.
For a billionaire's son at a private school in the US, the 'poor' that they know is the one kid at school who is only a millionaire's son. Other people in society are just that: other. The rich don't mix with the poor, don't see them as real people, don't understand they haven't had the same advantages, and don't have sufficient empathy.
And 'poor' is relative. Poor people in wealthy nations often have sufficient food, water, safety... but for many poorer nations, this isn't true, and these 'poor' would suddenly look rich. Again though, there is no mixing, and little empathy. People suffering in war-torn or famine-stricken nations thousands of miles away are, again, other.

XRP rose recently because of the Spark airdrop.
But the general pattern is I believe related to market confidence. Once some positive confidence is established, then BTC starts to rise. If the confidence then gets even higher, people drop out of BTC and start buying alts. You will often see that an alt boom follows shortly after a BTC boom.

There needs to be a more equal distribution of wealth and of opportunities to generate wealth. It's not great that we have billionaires, whilst more than 2 billion people don't have access to safe drinking water.

People don't need $$$ billions. Yes, they may have earned it, but in many cases they've had certain natural advantages to start with - being born into wealthy rather than impoverished nations as a start. If Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg had been born into refugee camps in sub-saharan Africa, they'd probably not be billionaires. There is a moral case for giving to the poorest.

It is important to consider not just bitcoin, but the wider world economy. Part of the reason for bitcoin's growth this year has been government responses to Covid, and specifically the huge huge bailouts. This has highlighted once again the weaknesses of fiat. So the case for bitcoin grows stronger. The other side I suppose is that the overall economic situation is taking a downturn, which could have a negative effect on bitcoin price. The important point I think is which of these drivers wins out.

I'm quite happy that it's bouncing around at $22-23k. We've had a massive end of year surge before, in 2017, and that really didn't end well. Slow and steady progression is much more desirable. Perhaps the caution we are seeing now is indicative of that new type of institutional investor.

Yes, Perez definitely deserved this chance. It will be really interesting to see how he matches up to Max. But more than this, if it starts to mean that both Red Bull drivers are challenging for podiums each race, then it puts a vast amount of pressure on Bottas to deliver. If races start finishing 1) Ham 2) Verstappen 3) Perez, then Mercedes have some real pressure on them to retain the constructors' title.

The minor corrections are welcome, really. It does look like some of that initial post-20k momentum has subsided, and it may well be that $25k provides some real resistance. Really I'm happy if we can continue to hold above that crucial $20k line for the next few weeks, to set up a solid basis for further growth.

It's good to see young drivers coming through, but Albon has had a chance and hasn't really shown much. Perez is the better driver and should get the seat, particularly after the way he lost the last one.

It's mainly psychological barriers now. $25k then $30k might provide resistance. Or things might tail off naturally before that point.
The other thing to consider is that there will inevitably be some FOMO and panic-buying kicking in. Once that reaches a certain point, and the charts start going vertical, then there will likely be some panic of the opposite kind, and big sell-offs as we correct back to a new support level.

Exactly. It's important to consider price points as a geometric progression rather than arithmetic. For example, $20k to $25k is a 25% rise. Although it means a price increase of $5k, this sort of rise would be much more similar to $10k -> $12.5k (+25%, or +$2.5k) than it would to $5k -> $10k (+$5k, or +100%).
If we want to look upwards from that broken $20k barrier up towards $25k, then we shouldn't be looking back at $20k - $5k = $15k as a mirror image, because it's not. Appreciate this is a simplification and there are all sorts of other factors to consider, but often for bitcoin % changes are more relevant than $ changes.

Some form of correction is inevitable at some point, you see it every time. But I'm not sure we'll see it in the next 3 days.

I think it's important to remember what a huge barrier $20k was. Given what happened in 2018, it is understandable that the current bull run was refused at $20k several times... but the upwards price pressure was so great that eventually the barrier broke. We are surfing a huge wave at the moment, but also don't forget that every single time that bitcoin surges upwards in price, eventually it stops and there is a correction. And the sharper the rise, then generally the sharper the fall. This isn't doom and gloom; the market is extremely buoyant at the moment and I expect rises to continue. I think it's more sustainable now than it was in 2017/18... but I think we should hope not for continuous upwards movement, but for it to take a break and establish a new solid support level first.

I don't agree with (or even know how to respond to) most of that. But certainly Trump did win the 2016 election, yes.

I would say that most mainstream politicians, Dem or Rep, care about power more than anything else. There will be some passionate idealists on both sides, of course, but for most, power is the aim... which is in large part why they are in agreement or near-agreement on most issues.

In general I try to determine where I think there is a gap between the odds that are offered and what the chance of the outcome actually is. Of course it's rare for us to be able to predict the odds more accurately than the betting company does, but you can take advantage of certain things, such as heavy betting in favour of a local team forcing the bookmaker to skew the odds somewhat unrealistically.

I don't know. Something about this doesn't sit right with me. I just don't find 'bitcoin is vulnerable because sacred rock' to be a convincing argument.
Our route to limitless free energy is probably commercial fusion reactors, which always seem to be about 50 years away from viability. Perhaps we'll get there one day, but even so it would be a steady flow of free energy with some maximum finite throughput, rather than the instant availability of infinity.