I was mad at Samson, because I made a bet in favor of Rajasthan Royals and I lost it. Arshdeep bowled well, but we should not forget Meredith who conceded just 8 runs in the 19th over. 21 runs were needed from 12 balls, which was achievable. But Meredith got the wicket of Lord Tewatia, and then apart from the six, bowled a really tight over. Jhye Richardson would be really disappointed. He conceded 55 runs of his 4 overs, which was incidentally his most expensive bowling performance in T20s to date.

Here in India, the top most slab (43%) kicks in if you earn more than $665,000. But very few people will come under that category. And here only around 2% of the population pays any income tax. Agricultural income is exempt from income tax, and more than half of the population is consisted of farmers. Those who earn less than $6,700 per year don't have to pay any income tax (that amounts to more than 90% of the population). If you take a home loan and go for 80C and reimbursements, then you can avoid income tax even if you earn around $12,000 per year. 

Well.. I don't think that we have that luxury. Right now, around 8 vaccines are being used by multiple nations (Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sputnik V, Janssen, Sinovac, Sinopharm and CanSino). There are a few more, such as the ones from Bharat Biotech and Vector Institute that are being limited to usage in a single country. I have no problem in inoculating everyone with the same vaccine. But the problem is that we don't have enough doses to do that. And even with 8-10 different vaccines, only a small part of the world population has been completely vaccinated till now.   

Yeah.. the governments were just looking for an excuse to start printing money like crazy and they got it. Take the case of United States. The latest stimulus amount to $2 trillion!!! Can you believe it? $2 trillion in banknotes created out of thin air. And US is not the only country. A majority of the world nations (irrespective of whether they are developed nations or the developing ones) have announced big stimulus measures. This is just crazy.

You think Samson did the right thing? I would disagree.. he should have taken the single and given the strike to Morris. Or even tried for the second run. Bowlers were not that bad. Riley Meredith bowled an excellent 19th over, which swung the momentum back to Punjab Kings. And then Arshdeep Singh was impressive in the final over. And for Rajasthan, Chetan Sakariya was sort of a revelation (and this is the first time I am hearing about him).

@Haunebu and JSRAW, my bad and sorry about that. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to the rules. You guys are right.. this time we don't have a lot many participants. Last time, if I remember correctly, we had around two dozen. This time even the defending champion refused to join the pool. Anyway, life goes on. Now we can concentrate on the entire tournament, rather than worrying about our standings for each round.

BTW, looks as if I will get 0 points today. Punjab Kings may make 220-230.

The problem is that you hear only about success stories. Those who lose their money very rarely post about it. For every project that has made a profit of 10x or 20x to the investors, there may be at least 50 others which have made them lose their capital. It is like a lottery with the new altcoins. If you are lucky, then you can become rich almost overnight. I know one user who had invested in two dozen different altcoins, and still failed to receive a profit from even one of them.

Congratulations. You predicted all the three games correctly. I can see that Royse and Teosanru are also having 4 points, but they predicted only two out of the three matches correctly. Maintain the lead for another four matches, and you will be left with the reward for winning the first round!!! BTW, best of luck for today's match. I can see that we have made opposing choices for Punjab Kings vs Rajasthan Royals.

At this point, you can't really compare BNB with ETH. Right now, BNB is mostly known as an exchange token and not many projects are opting for the Binance chain. ERC-20 Blockchain is still preferred by the vast majority of the projects (irrespective of the sky high fees). In the smart contract sector, it will take a long time for BNB to catch up with Ethereum. So these talks about BNB replacing Ethereum sounds a bit premature for me.

I won't be surprised if that happens sooner than that. The American population is getting less and less productive, due to rising tax rates and an increase in illegal immigration. The immigration system in the US is quite strange, as it gives preference to unskilled labor, against highly skilled individuals. Farm workers and other blue collar laborers can easily immigrate to the US, but someone with 10 years of experience in aeronautics or engineering needs to wait for 10-15 years to get an opportunity to immigrate. On the other hand, China is not encouraging such behavior. They allow only a small number of migrants, and only those with the topmost skill level are able to migrate to China. 

I am not from the Philippines, so don't know much about his performance as a senator. But if Lorence.xD is correct, then Pacquaio should wait for a decade or so, rather than jumping in to the fray next year. One thing I know is that Rodrigo Duterte is extremely popular. But he won't be able to run again, due to term-restrictions. IMO, Philippines needs someone like Duterte to continue the good work, rather than a public figure like Pacquiao who have very little experience in politics.

Here in India, the managers can't force anyone to come to the office (although a lot of them still ask their reportees to do that, which is against the law). For my part, I am working from home for the last 13 months. And I have to say that this is the best time of my career, since I started working a decade ago. Obviously I feel bad for those who are not given the freedom of working from home. But they need to think whether to continue working under such exploitative conditions or not. My advice is not to work for a company that doesn't respect you.

You can't generalize governments all around the world. There are some regimes which tried to ban Bitcoin. Perfect examples are Thailand, India, Bangladesh and Bolivia. But at the same time, there are others which were receptive towards cryptocurrency from the very beginning. I am talking about countries such as Japan, Germany and Switzerland, which legalized Bitcoin and regulated it's trade from the very beginning. And then there are the vast majority of the countries, where the legal status of cryptocurrency is unclear.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency. There was no premine and the inventor (Satoshi Nakamoto) never attempted to make profits out of his invention. Even in 2010, the total market cap of Bitcoin was only around $3,000. On the other hand, most of the ICOs are priced in tens of millions of USD now, if not hundreds of millions. There is only a small chance that they will be successful in the long term. And even if they are successful, I don't think that they will provide huge returns like what happened with BTC. Because they are already overpriced. 

BCCI needs to increase the number of overseas players from 4 to 5. IPL is more like an international tournament now, and it will be unfair to limit the number of overseas players per team to such a small number. Hopefully that will be done once they increase the total number of teams form 8 to 10 (probably next season?). I guess SRH was in a dilemma. They can't drop Warner and Rashid Khan. And the competition was between Jonny Bairstow, Mohammad Nabi and Kane Williamson. Nabi was selected over Williamson, since he is an allrounder. 

If the government has blocked the broadcast of the tournament, so there can't be any "legal" avenue to watch these matches. You can watch pirated feed in YouTube or Facebook. These are not legal, but as such you are not commiting any offense. One step further, you can use a VPN or subscribe to some online streaming websites. But here it gets murky in legal terms. It is against the law, although the chances of the authorities acting against you is very minimal.

In the past, there were instances where the governments tried to ban gold. Did that worked? Definitely no. The same will happen this time, and the results will be even more stark because of the digital nature of the cryptocurrency. In many of the developed countries, the authorities have realized that it is not possible to ban cryptocurrency. So they have started regulating it. However, there is no shortage of idiots in developing nations and here in India the government still want to make possession of cryptocurrency a criminal offense.

CSK was a very good team, but that was a decade back. And the problem for them is that the same players are still representing the franchise even now. They seems to have learnt no lessons from their experience during last year's edition, as the team is still full of players who are above 40 years of age. Take out Suresh Raina, Sam Curran and Ravindra Jadeja, and CSK would be having zero chance of victory against any of the other franchises in the IPL.

What happening with XRP right now is a bear trap, and those who rush to invest in this coin will regret about their decision later. The SEC lawsuit was just a symptom. The disease remains. The biggest problem with XRP is that its market cap is inflated through artificial means. The promoters hold somewhere around 80% to 90% of the circulating supply (either by themselves, or indirectly through Ripple foundation and other bodies). And only a small part of the supply is in free-float and thereby the XRP exchange rate is kept at a very high level (despite not having any real life usage).

Right now, 99% of the altcoins are going up because there is a Bitcoin rally. A lot of new users (and some of the experienced ones) are investing in altcoins because they think that Bitcoin is overpriced and the potential returns are not high. However, this can't go on for ever. We are witnessing several shitcoins achieving multi-billion USD market cap. Eventually, at least in some cases the promoters will dump their holdings and then vanish from the scene.