I disagree with that.  If exceptions are made for banned members to post scam accusations in their ban appeal thread, not only is it off-topic (it's in Meta and the thread has nothing to do with outside issues), it leaves the door wide open for more exceptions to be made for banned members to keep posting on the forum when they shouldn't be.

Naim027, I've supported your ban appeal from the start and still do, but I don't think you should have posted that here.  I'd love to hear what the mods have to say, because this is the first time I've seen someone do this in a ban appeal thread.

So the economists say (and since I'm not one, I'd be a pompous jackass if I vehemently disagreed).  However, as with so many other things, it's the degree--or in this case, the rate--that matters.  My non-economist brain tells me that all is well when wage inflation at least matches price inflation but that situations like those in Venezuela or even Weimar Germany, i.e., hyperinflation, are bad.  Really really bad.

I'd also say that the inflation rate of the 1970s was pretty bad, and that wasn't even close to hyperinflation.  I can't remember how high it was, but people still remember it to this day--and now when I go shopping for food, it seems like prices of certain items keeps going up week by week, so I have to wonder if we're going to see the inflation rate get as high as it was 40+ years ago.  It definitely seems that way.

Oh yeah, by the way: just when we thought gas prices were on their way down to acceptable levels, they shoot back up to nearly $4/gallon.  In California I think it's more like $6/gallon.  And I know it's much more expensive in Europe, but it doesn't seem to bode well for the economy as a whole in the US.

You talkin' about me?

I had to take a look at the PMs in my inbox to see how many requests for post history reviews I've gotten from members whose usernames fit that pattern, and there were two (though I deleted the ones from members I've banned from making further requests).  And it seems like the members with four digits after the name are the least likely to make decent posts--granted, I'm not presenting proof here, just saying what my own spidey sense is tingling about.  There are a lot of fine, upstanding members of the community who have the [Name][1-3 digits] format as their bitcointalk handle. 

Maybe all of that is in my head, but I distinctly recall the time before the merit system when I was tagging shitposters and I'd come across that pattern constantly.  End of off-topic rant.

I don't know about tipping in any other country than the US, and to the best of my knowledge restaurants aren't required to pay the servers a minimum wage (and someone correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll have to re-read this thread to see if anyone has since I mentioned it before).  And if they don't have to, they're not going to, especially since the practice of tipping has become so entrenched in American culture.

Food delivery drivers also expect to be tipped, and I'm not sure if their employers pay them at least minimum wage.  Anyway, I would disagree with you that the economy is so bad that people can't afford to tip.  If that were the case, they probably wouldn't be eating at restaurants, taking taxis, ordering food, etc.  This isn't the first time money has been tight, and it won't be the last.

Sweet Jesus, that's so pathetic a thing to do that it could only happen on bitcointalk.  Seriously.  I don't think anyone would go through all that trouble to paraphrase (and hence plagiarize) someone else's post on plagiarism anywhere else. 

That member, Belinda1732, apparently hasn't been banned yet since their post is still in that thread.  Did anyone report that to the mods, by any chance?  Nobody mentioned they did so. 

As an aside, I've developed a general distrust of members with usernames in the format Belinda1732 used, which is a capitalized name followed by a series of numbers.  I've seen so many of them get busted for various shit over the years that I've become totally prejudiced against them--it might be illogical, but what can I say.  It isn't as though we're lacking alt farms and account farmers who have limited imaginations.

Nah, I don't see this as anything all that serious.  After all, it's just a poll about how a bunch of people, who are most likely wealthy, feel about one relatively small area of California.  If the Silicon Valley region was so bad, real estate prices wouldn't be so high that these people would be complaining.

And if it gets too lousy to live there and the corporations realize it's becoming a problem, I'd be willing to bet they'd start letting employees work from home.  You'd think in the tech industry it'd be relatively easy for workers to not have to commute or even live near the company they work for.

I haven't seen what houses and apartments are going for in the San Jose area lately, but everything around there and in California in general is and always has been super, super expensive.  I've been to CA before, and I remember gas prices being so much higher than in my state, which has always had above-average gas prices.  I'd love to live there, but there's no way I could ever afford it.

Edit:

Whoops!  I didn't read your post until after I'd written mine.  Wow!  I really wonder what kind of jobs those people have who rent the one bedroom apartments, either within or outside the city center.  They might be places to crash (like second-dwellings) for highly-paid tech employees, but I can't imagine all of them are.  That blows my mind it's that expensive to live in the SV area!

Hey, that's only what I've seen in movies.  I've never been there and certainly have never purchased drugs from that country, but to anyone who might know I would pose the question: aren't Mexican pharmacies notorious for selling lots of medications over the counter which in the US and most other countries would require a prescription?

Oh, about the guns, it came to mind that I seem to recall there was a member (BayAreaCoins or TheButterZone, perhaps?) who was selling a firearm that he had, but only to someone licensed to own it.  I get those two members confused for some reason, and I don't have a reference link--this was well over a year ago that I think I saw the post/thread, and it could be that I'm imagining it.

My point is that a sale like that would be completely legal, but I'm not sure what Theymos would think about it.  It's not as if it would be equivalent to a darkweb sale.

I think he probably meant report one of the posts with a message to the mods to check the user's profile for other instances of plagiarism, although that's not the right way to go about it--or it could just be a misunderstanding due to language.  Either way, if the member in question hasn't been banned within maybe a month I'd probably report those posts again.  I don't think this is a case where "leniency" should come into play.

If you're referring to Theymos there, I seriously doubt it.  The only member who might have Theymos in his corner is Coolcryptovator, or Cryptovator, or whatever his name got changed to.  Twice.  Sorry, I'm not bitter about being refused a change of username.  Not at all, not one bit.

I'm not going to bust your balls too hard, but read:

I'm assuming that the flurry of requests I've gotten has been the result of me creating this thread--I can't see any other reason why both would have occurred almost simultaneously unless word spread (particularly in the gambling discussion community)--and so in going with that assumption I'm making a further one, that members have actually read my rules before PMing me.  I know you did, but you obviously didn't read closely enough, else you wouldn't have asked that question.

So please, as they used to say on TV back before all of you were born, "Reading is Fundamental".  RIF.

Mexico, probably.  By the way, this isn't the first time anyone was trying to sell benzos here.  There was some user from a couple of years back (or multiple ones, I can't remember) shilling some site out of Asia that shipped a very potent, very short-acting one, and IIRC he was doing it in the trading discussion section by marketing it as a nootropic.

But oddly enough, what he was shilling is legal in the US, probably because the FDA hasn't banned it yet.

Yep.  But the mods have done a damn good job over the years of nuking threads in which people tried to sell all sorts of illegal things, like stolen credit cards, fake ID docs, and probably tons of other crap.  Those threads never lasted long.

Yeah, about that.....I strongly suspect you're not the original owner of your account and I'm not giving you any merits.  Your account was registered in 2011, and back then all of the posts were intelligent and in nearly perfect English up until 2013, after which there's a huge gap in posting with the account returning in June of this year. 

Upon returning, it's nonstop shitposting in very broken English, and the substance of the posts indicates that Detritus is only posting to get paid.  Either Detritus suffered a brain injury so severe that he went from being very knowledgeable about tech to being unable to compose a single sentence without errors and demonstrating considerably less proficiency in the technical aspects of crypto OR he bought/hacked the account.

It's probably off-topic, but I'd like to hear opinions on this, and I'm going to use this post as reference if I decide to tag Detritus.

That's roughly the entire population of the United States if I'm not mistaken--but I have to wonder how many of those followers were paid for (for whatever reason) or otherwise represent genuine fans of hers.  I don't know much about her, as I'm not that into modern pop culture, but she's basically famous for being famous, right?  Sort of like Paris Hilton?  In any case, I'm sure she does have a lot of real followers, but whatever.  With Instagram or Twitter, you can follow anyone and it doesn't mean that much.

Yeah, I've been seeing quite a few Youtubers shilling that scheme.  It's pretty obvious that those Youtubers are being paid, and if it wasn't already then most if not all of them tell you that they're being sponsored by this or that.

I didn't see what KK's Instagram shilling looked like (and I've never used that site), but I would think it might be much less obvious when someone is being paid to promote something.  I could be wrong, but on Youtube it seems very transparent.

Look at all these fines the government is handing out, eh?  I'm not saying they're wrong in doing so, but it seems like they're cracking down on people and/or institutions that they probably wouldn't have a year or two ago.  I see that as a sign the country realizes it's going broke and needs to do a little fundraising (lol).

A whole section?  There's that one thread Mbitr mentioned, and I think that's more than sufficient.  I hate to say this, but it's almost like you're asking for there to be a kiddie's section of bitcointalk where finger paintings can be displayed, and if Theymos has ignored all the other requests for new section additions (NFTs, for example), there's no way in hell he'd go for this one.

Memes have their place, of course, but you're the first member I can recall who's ever suggested them having any sort of space on the forum dedicated to them.  Ick.

I've added an update to my rules, which is that I don't need reminder PMs and ask people not to send them.  Right now I'm absolutely slammed with requests for post history reviews, and I've been chronically short of sMerits.

Reminder: Read my rules and abide by them.  I'd also like to say that if you're a shitposter who, in my judgement, wouldn't ever be able to increase the quality of your posts (most likely because of skill in writing), I'll most likely send you a short PM telling you as much and then block your PMs.  Sorry I've got to be so harsh, but my offer and the responses I've gotten have turned this into an exercise in pure Darwinism.

I'm going to leave this thread open for a few hours in case anyone wants to reply.

Not only that, I'm not sure if bitcoin correlates strongly with anything except maybe the stock market--and I haven't seen any data on that.  Stocks fell pretty hard yesterday, and I'm pretty sure the big players on Wall Street don't put a huge amount of weight on a small change in unemployment numbers, which were good to begin with.

Bitcoin has been trading sideways for a while now, in the $18-21k range and it looks like it's just waiting to break out in one direction or another.  I'm sure a lot of us have seen that happen a few times before, and if my memory serves me correctly the last time BTC broke out of a sideways state it shot up to its ATH.  I'm hoping whenever we do see some price action it isn't going to be in a downward trajectory--that would be really bad, because it'd take a long time to get back to $63k (I think that's the ATH).  Keeping my fingers crossed.

Yeah, you might be right about that.  I've noticed that there are way fewer threads dealing with merits, especially ones started by newbies and/or lower-ranked members who think they've been overlooked by merit-givers, and it's been that way for at least a year, maybe two.  More signature space does mean more potential earnings still, right?  I don't know if that's true for bounties, but I'm pretty sure it's still the case for bitcoin-paying signature campaigns, so it's sort of puzzling to me why we've seen this trend (not that I'm complaining).

And hey, I "supported" 3 newbies this time around!  That's better than I usually do in the ranking, though it's still not how I'd like it to be.  Anyway, thanks for the update, Coin-1.

I'd like to point out that those restaurant guys wouldn't know if you're going to tip them or not until after you've eaten your food (unless you're referring to repeat customers known to be non-tippers).  In any case, that made me chuckle.  I don't think that's a serious risk in restaurants in the US, because it would have to be the server doing it, and there's usually too much visibility for them to get away with it.  Not saying it's impossible, just unlikely.

Speaking of the restaurant industry, those servers don't even make minimum wage IIRC and depend on tips to make up for the difference.  I'm not sure how that system came about, but it's a pretty messed up one if you ask me.  Taxi drivers I'm not certain about, and honestly I'm not a big fan of tipping anyone.  You pay for a service, that's the way it should be.  Giving money voluntarily (but being expected to) in addition to that rubs me the wrong way and always has.

Ah ha!  If I had any sMerits, I'd give you a few for teaching me a little bitcointalk minutiae that I wasn't aware of (pssst...tell the boss to up my sMerit allocation, tx)

That's a weird find, OP, but I'm much more interested in what those deleted posts were all about, and what the deal was with humanrightsfoundation.  I remember that username, but for the life of me I can't remember what kind of drama he was involved with, or when.  I guess that would be an off-topic discussion, but I'm still curious and I'll have to take a look at their profile.

Exactly, and I'd say at least 90% of people on the forum treat bitcoin as an investment and not as a form of currency that they actually use, even if they believe it's a form of money.  That's why there's so many threads dealing with bitcoin's price and general stuff about the crypto markets.  It isn't because people see a loss of buying power if bitcoin's price falls so much as a devaluation of an asset.

There are indeed a lot of merchants that accept bitcoin nowadays, but I really wonder how many of their customers pay for things with it.  I'd be willing to venture that it isn't many.

I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but when I see the word "factoid" I don't immediately think it's referring to an untruth but rather a small snippet of something true about a particular issue that doesn't delve into minute details.  Personally, I think it's an appropriate wording in this case, though obviously if someone not familiar with the word looks it up like you did, they might come to the wrong conclusion about the content.

"Facts" or "fact list" or "summary of facts" would be decent choices too IMO.

And yes, I'd like to see this get written, and as to the bitcoin/PoW thing, I don't see why they both can't be mentioned in the same line--like I just wrote it, because it kills two birds with one stone.