I wrote a bot that congratulates other bots for replying within 100 milliseconds to a Trump tweet.

It got banned after three posts.

This behavior is required by law. A long time ago the Supreme Court altered corporate behavior forever with a ruling that corporations have a duty to their stockholders only, and aside from taxes, absolutely no responsibility to the community at large. They also recently decided that politicians have a duty to represent their supporters, not their constituents. Then they established that a corporate person has a Constitutional right to free speech, with a decision that redefined political bribery out of existence- at this point corruption can't be prosecuted unless someone can find a legal document where both parties agree to a quid pro quo.

This is what happens when you use a few narrow issues like abortion and guns as litmus tests for judgeships. Since judges have lifetime appointments, Trump has wisely chosen to nominate Hitler Youth who apparently haven't even seen a single episode of Law and Order, and he is rapidly filling all the seats that Congress left empty during the Obama administration.

It will turn out to be a Ponzi scheme, even though it didn't start out as one. Unlike traditional securities trading, with cybercurrency there is a complete lack of regulation that might prevent market manipulation by a small number of holders. And 40% of the market is controlled by a handful of shady characters. This won't end pretty.

John McAfee's Twitter account has some funny stuff in it about tulips: He explains why the Dutch tulip mania happened:

In other words, if only the tulips were made of plastic, this never would have happened.

He also has negative things to say about gold:

"Gold? Bah, I have something more valuable, bwahaha!" I have to wonder at this point whether he's managed to talk his wife into a stainless steel wedding ring. He's talking about the relative price of gold vs. Bitcoin as if the gold is going to be responsible for the fluctuation, and not the Bitcoin with its crazy, unstable valuation relative to the rest of the economy. But of course it can't be a bubble:

Keep in mind, he is sitting on a lot of them:

I don't blame him. If I had his Bitcoin portfolio I'd be filling my cart at overstock.com right now and tweeting crap like this.

There are a number of indications that Bitcoin has organically evolved into a Ponzi scheme, even if it wasn't engineered to be one.

• No intrinsic value: An ounce of gold is a viable commodity, and there is significant demand for it just for industrial applications, despite what McAfee says. In fact the financial industry's fondness for gold presents a hindrance to the technology industry. With Bitcoin, what is the fundamental value? "Here is a large integer and someone had to burn X kilowatt-hours to find it. And it is a member of a set of numbers that have carefully engineered scarcity." Not exactly something that makes you instinctively reach for your wallet full of fiat money.
• Fragile perceived value: No matter how sound the mathematics behind cryptocurrencies are, they are not well understood by investors- and even an understanding the math of the "new paradigm" doesn't necessarily translate into appreciation of the currency's value within the "old paradigm" in which all the rest of the economy still operates. It has the same flaw as fiat money- its paradigm is irrelevant unless everyone agrees to accede to it. Furthermore, everyone knows that everyone else understands what "LEGAL TENDER" means. The math behind cryptocurrency is somewhat too esoteric for people. Most of us will not behave like rational actors who were taught number theory and blockchain algorithms in grade school. Everyone knows they don't understand the esoteric math, that most other holders don't either, and that everyone else is thinking: "This stuff might just be Monopoly money after all." When the price drops, market participants will not employ any significant algorithmic complexity in their decision making. They're going to panic. Blockchain mathematics will have a showdown with human psychology and will lose.
• It's useless as a currency. It quadrupled in value over three months. Then just during the past week it plunged 25% then shot back up. For something that is passed off as "money", the price fluctuates so violently that it can't be used as a form of cash- it's only suitable for investment. The whole purpose of a currency is to maintain a stable valuation for economic transactions. Everything that makes something a great investment makes it suck as a currency, and vice versa. Traditional "fiat money" often has problems with inflation and deflation, but considered as a currency, Bitcoin is experiencing serious hyperdeflation; any economy truly based on it would be in a tailspin right now. It's only useful as cash in transactions where there is no alternative- usually involving ransomware, drugs, weaponry, or human trafficking. While it's true that a lot of sellers are accepting Bitcoin, that's because of the same deflationary pressure which is averse to buyers. (Or anyone not sitting on a mountain of this stuff, needing to quietly unload it- like guess who above.) Once people realize this stuff does not perform its nominal function as a currency, and it becomes widely seen as an investment vehicle undergoing a rapid bubble, the dynamics of traditional bubble will take effect.
• Concentrated ownership:1000 people own 40% of the Bitcoin market. These are the earliest investors who are profiting from the scheme. These days, we're seeing a wave of more naive investors stampeding in like new Amway recruits and driving the price up. Any time a single early investor makes even a modest transaction, the entire market wobbles like a slowing bicycle just from people speculating on his motives. Collusion among even a small group of these guys will trigger a market panic that prompts the rest of them to also dump their holdings. This will happen extremely quickly (i.e. within minutes) since the law has not caught up with cryptocurrencies- there are no regulations in place to prevent market manipulation like there are with ordinary securities trading. Anyone with a long position and a brain has set a trigger in case Armageddon happens while they're asleep or driving, and these things will undergo a chain reaction like a room full of mousetraps. The Bitcoin market will literally collapse faster than a neutron star during a supernova.
• People are beginning to call it a Ponzi scheme. Historically this has been a reliable indicator that something is in fact a Ponzi scheme, and furthermore, it's also nearing collapse.

Frankly these idiots currently in power are making Sharia Law or Any-Other-Type-of-Law sound better and better every week.

I typed in my last name and found that both my parents submitted the exact same text:

This is highly suspicious because these two don't agree on ANYTHING.

The federal agency responsible for enforcing these laws is the CFPB, which is getting shut down.

I used to prank the neighbors by using "methlab" as the SSID. When I moved to Utah I changed it to "pornstudio". (There are too many meth labs around here.)

Oh come on! That would take forever!

Has anyone done a study on how well left handed people play chess?

Let's make a new rule. If you're left handed, your starting position has the king and queen on swapped squares. Then we can see if lefties have a natural advantage there too.

...and everyone else should pay for them.

That way, www.leftyslefthanded.com will be able to hire new workers and create jobs that are filled both by left-handed and right-handed people!

Is that a crime? Anyone know?

Thanks for explaining it. It seems some people are really dense. Any political party opposed to this will disappear from the Internet.

But think of all the new high paying jobs this will create for people who throttle websites!

(At least until all their jobs are replaced by a block of code that will take someone five minutes to write.)

When the Citizens United decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, this was written by Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion:

And now these same corporations have been given the freedom to control what you can see on the Internet.

Oops!