You do not know the differences among Ponzi schemes, speculative investment, and currency.

You lack the elementary comprehension of the matters you so vehemently lecture others about.

You keep describing speculative investment and calling it a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves paying returns to earlier investors from the contributed capital of later investors, while misrepresenting the returns as new funds generated by the successful performance of financial investment. Bitcoin does not pretend to be a performing investment. It holds itself out as a marker in limited supply worth whatever equilibrium of value it holds among the collective traders who independently adopt it as a currency. You might think this scheme mad. You might argue that it could only be a fraud. But it is not remotely a Ponzi scheme.

By pretending to know what you're talking about when describing a Ponzi scheme, you are just shouting down others while you have nothing worthwhile to say on the subject.

You might eventually have something of value to say, but not until you stop polluting your analysis with false claims of superior knowledge.

            The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government

Works fine for highways and truckers.

Or it might be used to discover every cell phone number in the vicinity of a political assembly or protest.

And assuming one phone number per demand.

From the article: "In addition, we received about 3,200 warrants or court orders for “cell tower dumps” last year. In such instances, the warrant or court order compelled us to identify the phone numbers of all phones that connected to a specific cell tower during a given period of time."

Actually, the hyper-focus descriptor is bogus.

Isaac Newton took off lots of time to be Chancellor of Exchequer. It was a hard job. He had to hang people for counterfeiting and all.
Vladimir Nabokov was Russian lepidopterist who happened to be English-language writer. Or was it the other way around?
Which was Benjamin Franklin's hobby -- science, publishing, or statecraft?
And Thomas Jefferson? Architecture or political philosophy or revolution?
Omar Khayyam? Administration? Poetry? Astronomy?

The kind of success-monitoring monomaniac described in the article fits someone like P T. Barnum, one of history's greatest show promoters.

So if hyperfocus is the model of true genius, then all the artists ought to be grateful to be swept into the true genius of such types.

He divided all military personnel into four quadrants.

Slow-minded, lazy -- assigned as footsoldier
Slow-minded, energetic -- dismissed from corps
Quick-minded, energetic -- staff officer
Quick-minded, lazy -- commanding officer

Are we enraged killers? Do we think killing someone repairs something else?

If we kill out out anger or if we kill according to the irrational calculus that one death offsets another, then we share a common indulgence or a common delusion with angry and vengeful murderers.

The death penalty is nothing more than a political appeasement and an opportunistic exercise of our worst impulses.

Ah, but does killing a murderer prevent future deaths? Is the death penalty just a prophylactic extermination, a cost-effective way to save lives? If so, let's put it somewhere on that list of cost-effective ways to save lives by killing a few people -- the one that starts with Attorneys for Tobacco Companies.

Sorry. I considered installing the dual-unit spedometer into the wording but thought it might seem punctilious and condescending.

This is the crowd I grew up with, so I may be the unkowning carrier of disinformation, but here is my read:

All drove very fast. They did get ticketed frequently stateside, but the personnel office had resources. Justifications were welded onto all damage.

A small number drove mad fast because they couldn't pull out of some high-danger mentality even after the helicopter lift. They flouted the law like city kids who are "in the system", since they felt doomed anyway. You can see that kind of driving around the exits for military bases, where soldiers drive ninety to work because that is their permanent risk profile.

But most were just trying to feel the thrill, to act like the real thing. They had race-car training and cop evasion training and could surprize you when they decided to treat some ordinary sight as a threat. But they suffered that ordinary human pathetic weakness for emergency powers and a starring role.

Of course, the British are pioneering. Wait for the feedback effect, when someone challenges the phony backstory for a traffic death, and a file is opened on this new strain of domestic saboteur.

Britain has significantly fewer fatalities per billion miles driven than Germany. This may partly result from the difficulty of finding a lane fast enough to kill. There was a point when New Jersey had the highest automobile insurance rates in the United States and the fewest deaths per billion car-miles, because everyone was stuck in bumper-car traffic.

And that is why you will not sit on a jury. You mind has been polluted by experience and reading.

It is not reasonable to ask you to suspend the epithets and other personal criticisms, because your observations appear to be truthful, you warning well-meant, and your anger righteous.

Still, please do hold back, because your state of anger and contempt puts you in a fighting stance, and it makes calming your reaction seem more urgent than monitoring the police.

Your frustration is not the problem here. It isn't even one of the effects of the problem. It is the effect of others' not seeing or not wanting to see the problem.

There used to be a category of personalities known as "anti-social". They were criminals, even though the cops had nothing on them. It turned out that a lot of them were just very loud early-warning sentries who saw injustice where most other people saw happiness and order.

You hold a well-polished mirror to the police. Keep the attention there.

Police forces are not baskets of individuals. They are organizations, and those organizations train and direct their personnel. Humans generally adapt to the culture of the organizations where they are attached.

You let the culprit escape if you debate whether all, most, or only some cops are bad.

Fixing the missions and organizational designs of police forces is within our political power.

L. Frank Baum published a series of (mediocre, weird) children's books, from around 1900-1910, all with OZ in the title.

The term Oz was derived from his filing system. He had two or three filing cabinets, the last one labeled O-Z.

The claims to trademark by movie companies are entirely court-muscled by the despicable showboats who call themselves "entertainment lawyers."

just what DNA discloses about the current metabolytes in one's system?

I'm pretty sure your DNA does not change when you have a beer, and I'm pretty sure there are no DNA mutations that uniquely and reliably signal the ingestion of any psychoactive substance.

Now, maybe other tests are done as well, and the DNA is used just as a label for your file, instead of "sample subject #012345".