No vaccine can be 100% effective against virus. And influenza virus is especially problematic, because they mutate so fast. And that is the reason why flu jabs for a particular year may not work for the next year. Related viruses such as MERS, SARS and COVID also exhibits the same tendency. And regarding COVID, this phenomenon can be noticed even now. Many of the vaccines are not being effective against some of the mutant strains. Anyway, in the United States a lot of people believe that wearing of masks is against personal liberty. These guys now have a justification to not to wear them, if they get both shots of the vaccine.

There are so many possibilities:

1. BCCI is adamant on conducting the tournament in India. England, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand.etc would refuse to participate. In the end we may have a 6-team or 8-team competition instead of 16-team championship.

2. BCCI agrees to move the tournament to the UAE.

3. BCCI forces the ICC to postpone the tournament to 2022. In that case the next year's world cup needs to be either cancelled, or postponed.

Also, the ICC is still complaining about the lack of clarity on tax liability. As per the Indian laws, 46% of the revenue needs to be paid as tax. If the tournament is conducted in UAE, then this amount will be waived off. The BCCI has announced that they will be willing to pay a part of this amount, but ICC wants them to pay 100% of the tax.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57291530



The Roman Catholic church operated dozens of "schools" until 1978 for indigenous children in Canada. Some 150,000 children attended these schools, where they were forcibly converted to the Semitic religion and prohibited from speaking their native language. Official numbers are that 3% of these children were killed and their bodies buried in unmarked graves. However, according to unofficial numbers, the death toll ranged from 15% to 30%. Many more were sexually and physically abused by the clergy who ran these "schools".  

The church has refused to apologize for these murders and till date it hasn't paid a penny in compensation to anyone (similar to the case with all the instances of genocide carried out by Vatican ever since 1492 in the Americas). However in 2009, the Vatican released "an expression of sorrow". Well, that was 6 years before the most well known genocide perpetrator Junípero Serra was promoted as a "saint".

Experienced users won't be in despair even if the prices remain suppressed for two or three years. But he is talking about the majority of the cryptocurrency users, who entered the market after 2019. These people invested in Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) as a result of FOMO, and are always vary about fluctuations. When they see the prices going down by 40% or 50% in a week, the decision is made to dump all the holdings and make the exit. The second group may hold on for a month or two, but if the correction extends beyond that, then they will also make their exit. And for the pre-2013 users like me, this present a great opportunity to accumulate coins at cheap rates.

A few days back, there was a statement from the ECB which made it clear that they will not make any adjustments to their schedule, in order to accomodate the IPL. Now this is going to create a lot of issues for the BCCI. What they are going to do now? Are they going to ask the ICC to postpone the T20 World Cup? I don't think that the ICC guys will be very excited with this. Because the World Cup was already postponed once, in order to accomodate IPL 2020. Also, should a franchise league be given a higher priority, when compared to a global event?

XRP has given good returns to those invested in it, during the early days. So a large portion of the cryptocurrency users believe that it is OK to invest in this coin, although the ideologically driven users may take a more hostile stance. And another factor is that despite all the arguments against the premine and centralization, these issues have not translated to actual weakness on the ground. The promoters seems to be capable of keeping the coin alive and thriving, despite the hostility from large number of users.

Bitcoin was never meant for instant payments involving small amounts. It is suitable for medium and large sized payments with a time gap. There are certain sectors which may prefer such type of payments - remittance, cross-border transactions.etc. And that is the reason why I get surprised every time when someone complains that he can't use his coins to pay for a coffee or a burger. For this purpose, either you need to use fiat, or some of the altcoins with a smaller gap between the blocks.

No. Doge has been in existence with 2013. And when did Elon first tweeted about Doge? In 2021? Till now, there is no formal linkage between Dogecoin developers and Elon (either directly, or indirectly through Tesla). And moreover, Dogecoin also has a PoW algorithm similar to Bitcoin. And Elon is a known opponent of the PoW algorithm. He want the cryptocurrencies to change to the less secure PoS algo. And unlike Ethereum, the Dogecoin developers are not even considering a shift to PoS. They are fine with the existing setup.

Bitcoin is still trading at sub-40K levels and you should not waste much time and buy back your coins (probably at a loss). I don't know which coins you were holding, but the alts went down on average by 40%-50% and that means that you will incur a higher loss if you buy them back. Anyway, don't get disheartened. Take this as a lesson. During my initial days (in 2012), I also did several mistakes with my coins. It's all part of life and I hope you will be in profit very soon. BTW, there is no point in regretting about past mistakes.. treat them as valuable lessons.

The opposition to XRP mostly comes from various facts such as - the large level of centralization with XRP (which is opposite to the basic principle of cryptocurrency), 100% premine and manipulation from the promoters. Even those who oppose XRP admit that the Ripple foundation has the means to keep this coin alive in the near term. So no one here actually claimed that Ripple is going to die out soon. We are mostly concerned with the issues that were listed above, and not with the exchange rates. For those who are not concerned about the centralization, XRP is a good investment option.

The main issues with Japan are the high taxes on profits from cryptocurrency, complex laws that discourage crypto-based businesses and the lack of mining farms (due to high cost of electricity and hardware). And now coming to India, the authorities have taken a very hostile stance on cryptocurrency and even now the laws dealing with Bitcoin and other cryptos are in the grey area. And more than the government, the bureaucrats seems to be a problem there. Ever since India became independent in 1947, the governments and bureaucrats have taken a negative stance on new innovations. And that is applicable for cryptocurrency as well.

Many thanks for the insight into the mining situation in China. Sichuan is a mountainous province with plenty of hydro-electric potential, so they don't need to worry about the emissions. Both Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are very arid regions and the electricity generation mostly comes from thermal power plants AFAIK. It is natural, since these two provinces also have huge coal deposits. I don't know whether it will be easy for the miners in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang to move from thermal energy to solar or wind sourced energy, because first of all it was the low cost of electricity which attracted these large mining farms to that area.

One of the reasons why he rejected the fight against Crawford was that it was scheduled to take place in the middle east. Pacquiao wanted his farewell match in Vegas. This year, there was enough room to arrange two fights for Pacquiao, but his team was too adamant about salary and other terms. Now I don't think that he will take part in any match other than the proposed fight against Spence. He will probably announce his retirement a month or so before the fight, and hopefully it will generate a lot of hype and revenue.

^^^ We are still in the initial stages of the ODI Super League. Each team will be playing a total of 36 ODI matches (3 each against other teams) and right now Sri Lanka has played only 5 matches. More than 80% of their matches are remaining, including those against weak teams such as Netherlands, Ireland and Zimbabwe. But they need to be careful from now onwards, because teams such as Bangladesh are far ahead of them. Also, because of the CoVID 19 situation, there is a chance that at least some of these planned matches will be called off.

Being a cryptocurrency investor since 2012, I guess I have more knowledge when compared to most of the other posters about what happened in 2013/14 and 2017/18. At this point, it will be interesting to analyze what caused the crash in 2018. China had zero contribution to the 2018 dip. What happened was that many of the shitcoins got pumped by 100x or 200x in 2017, due to the overall hype. And after a certain point, the promoters of many of these shitcoins dumped their coins and made the exit. Some of the most infamous cryptocurrency scams (such as PlusToken and OneCoin) also took place during the 2017/18 period. These scams triggered the correction of 2018, which was further exacerbated by various other factors.

During the initial stages, no one want to compromise. Both the sides think that their part is right and therefore the judgement will be in their favor. As time passes, they realize that only the lawyers are getting rich and a favorable judgement is nowhere in the horizon. Eventually they will be forced to swallow their ego and pride, and go for a settlement.


Agreed. Even arbitration can go on for many years and these players probably don't want to take that risk. They just want to carry on with their career (many of them are in coaching roles now), without creating much controversy. At this point, going against the BCCI can cause issues for their current job as well.

The level of entitlement is surprising. First of all they are offering the vaccines for free. And remember that these vaccines are quite expensive. One dose of the Pfizer vaccine costs $37 and on top of that there are logistical complexities to take care of. Storage of the vaccine is very difficult, as it needs to be kept at extremely low temperatures. A large part of the tax revenue (which is affected by the economic downturn resulting from the pandemic) is going towards the vaccination program. And despite all this, people demand more and more freebies.

Apart from China, the other two major East Asian nations have taken a more moderate line towards cryptocurrency. The problem with China is that they face a lot of issues related to capital flight and tax evasion. And nowadays the population has become more innovative and they are starting to use cryptocurrency for these purposes. On top of that, China want the CBDC (Digital Yuan) to be more popular, and they view Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies as competitors to the digital Yuan.

Indian courts are useless. It takes around 20-30 years to get a judgement. One of my friends had a property dispute and after 25 years they had an out of court settlement to resolve the issue. If they had waited for a judgement, then it could have easily taken another two decades. Since overseas players are involved, I would advise them to go for international arbitration. Only such judgements can force the BCCI to make payments with due interest. Really feel bad about the players.. after all the hard work they end up unrewarded.

Inflation is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the days of the gold standard, there was hardly any inflation. However, as most of the countries discarded the gold standard and started printing banknotes without any control, the inflation rate went up. It just confirms that inflation results from incompetence of the governments. When the government fails to balance out its budget, it is forced to print more and more cash to cover the gap. And this results in inflation.