When a couple of my friends started posting "now is a great time to buy into BitCoin" messages on my Facebook feed a couple of weeks ago, I had a feeling the BTC price was about to take a strong downward turn. It is never a good sign when the "true believers" begin actively recruiting new buyers into a price bubble.

The collapse of BitCoin as a speculative investment is inevitable, and its own success will be its downfall. The speculative frenzy over BTC is based strictly on artificial scarcity. The problem is that there are an infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies. If only X amount of gold exists in the world, there is no replacement for it, assuming you desire the exact physical qualities of gold. But if only Y digital coins exist, it is trivial to create another digital coinage with a slightly different protocol that behaves exactly the same way as far as a user is concerned.

The boom in BTC has led to several new competitors, with similar frenzies growing around some of them. And given the low barrier to entry, you can expect more and more competing digital currencies to appear. It is only a matter of time before people realize that they're fighting over a particular set of tulip bulbs while standing in an infinitely large field of tulips. Once that happens, the speculative bubble will pop for good for all digital currencies. In the long run, this is a good thing, because once the speculators are gone, some digital currencies may actually prove useful as a real medium of exchange, with values that don't fluctuate wildly from one day to the next.

The ultimate irony is that even if Mr. Kim had taken the exam, and failed it, he still would have earned an 'A-' in the class.

Now he will suffer the ultimate punishment for a Harvard student: he'll get a 'B'.

In any case, the party who made BitCoin is filthy rich, and will only get more so by an exponential margin as time progresses, BitCoins get lost forever, and no new ones are mined.

The time window in which the person or party who created BitCoin can get filthy rich is finite, and may already be starting to close.

The speculative frenzy over BTC is based strictly on artificial scarcity, and scarcity over a bunch of digital bits, at that. (I find it amusing how some of the same people who condemn the enforced artificial scarcity of digital media via DRM have embraced BTC while remaining completely oblivious of their cognitive dissonance.) But BitCoin's success will be its downfall.

There are an infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies. If only X amount of gold exists in the world, there is no replacement for it, assuming you desire the exact physical qualities of gold. But if only Y digital coins exist, it is trivial to create another digital coin with a slightly different protocol that behaves exactly the same way as far as a user is concerned.

The boom in BTC has led to several new competitors. Already you see similar frenzies growing around some of them. And given the low barrier to entry, you can expect more and more competing digital currencies to appear. It is only a matter of time before people realize that they're fighting over a particular set of tulip bulbs while standing in an infinitely large field of tulips. Once that happens, the speculative bubble will pop for all digital currencies. In the long run, this is a good thing, because once the speculators are gone, digital currencies may actually be useful as money, with values that don't fluctuate wildly from one day to the next.

But I do think the BTC bubble may be popping soon based on one observation: I have seen some of my friends who are BTC "true believers" now posting on Facebook and advising everyone to buy into BTC. When the believers start actively searching for more buyers, you can see the writing on the wall.

GM isn't just an assembly line. It is the keystone in an entire supply chain. GM goes under and so does virtually every Tier 1 supplier as well as Ford and Chrysler. Even the CEO of Toyota admitted publicly that GM being liquidated would have hurt Toyota badly because they depend on many of the same suppliers. My company would have been out of business entirely and we are a Tier 3 supplier to GM. And we would have been just one of thousands of firms that would have collapsed. Even Tesla would likely have collapsed because the supply chain would have imploded. Tesla depends on many of the same suppliers who would now be bankrupt.

Your company hasn't really been saved - instead, the government pushed out the day of reckoning by about 10 years or so, but GM is doomed, regardless.

The Detroit business model depends on everyone buying a new car every 3 to 6 years or so, and on every family owning at least one automobile. Unfortunately, a tidal wave is headed in the direction of U.S. automakers, and it will start hitting them before the end of this decade.

That tidal wave is the autonomous vehicle. As self-driving cars become more commonplace, more and more people will realize they don't need to own a car when they can just as easily rent one on demand just by pulling out a smartphone. The result will be a much smaller auto fleet that is in almost continuous use, as opposed to a larger fleet that is only used occasionally by most drivers. Annual auto sales will plummet, and Detroit automakers that can not or will not adjust to this new market will once again find themselves facing bankruptcy.

And who can fill in the gap? Google, for one. Google's self-driving technology will need a vehicle. Why shouldn't Google build fleets of GoogleCars and deploy them in every metropolitan area? Without any vested need in maintaining a certain level of sales to support a unionized workforce, Google can become the new personal transportation company to replace the obsolete Detroit business model. If your company survives the transition, it will wind up selling parts and services to a entirely new breed of auto makers like Google. I doubt very much that the traditional Detroit automakers will be able to adapt.

What is left of GM, Ford, etc., will manufacture a much smaller number of luxury or specialized vehicles, in addition to their own brand of self-driving vehicles. But the current business model of "a car in every garage" will be a thing of the past.

Go to most science and engineering departments in the U.S. today, and you'll find senior faculty members sitting on P&T (promotion and tenure) committees who would never qualify for tenure if they were judged by the same standards they apply to junior faculty. You'll meet assistant professors who've published more journal papers in two years (and brought in more research money) than a full professor has done in his entire career, while being told it isn't good enough by the P&T committee.

That double standard is not lost on the younger faculty, nor does not make them happy. To add insult to injury, the younger faculty generally tend to be better teachers, as well. It is a topsy-turvy world where the people in charge are often the least qualified of anyone there.

If they work, they'll work big time, but I really worry about lawsuits.

I tend to think the lawsuit fears are overblown. In the U.S. alone, 35,000 people die each year due to human drivers, at a cost of about $200 billion annually, paid for by everyone's insurance. We seem to have no problem living with that.

If autonomous cars can cut that fatality rate to 3,500 or even 350 deaths a year, the savings will be so enormous that it will be cost-effective for the auto companies to partner with insurance companies and create a general fund to reimburse those people who may be injured due to an automation failure, regardless of fault. The federal government already uses this concept with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It provides no-fault reimbursement of vaccine-related injuries, because letting vaccine makers be sued out of business would result in more deaths and injures in the long run.

And keep in mind that accident rates will only continue to drop as the automation improves with time. Moore's Law is inexorable.

Does this mean we'll all gain the constitutionally protected right to fling poo at each other?

In what dream world do adjuncts earn $15k per 3-hour course??

I should have been clearer about that. That $15K included maintenance and supervision of two different teaching laboratories, on top of teaching a 3-hour class. So essentially it was a $30K / academic year salary for what was practically a full-time job. Not surprisingly, they still found a Ph.D. willing to do it.

You're right, typical adjunct per-course fees (without additional responsibilities) do run about $5K for STEM classes at a decently large school. No one is going to choose that over a full-time industry job.

Additionally, tenured professors will be bullied by the administration if they underperform. That can get very nasty.

On the other hand, I can tell you (based on first-hand observation) that you'd be astonished how much bullying underperforming tenured professors can tolerate.

These types are not going to give up guaranteed employment. They simply grow a thicker skin. Furthermore, they learn how to strike back. For example, if the department chair tries to increase the teaching load of a non-performer, the inevitable result is horrible teaching reviews and angry students changing majors. The administration very quickly learns to just leave the non-performers alone and wait for them to retire.

The better alternative, of course, is to hire non-tenured faculty. Much easier to get rid of (if necessary), and in general more productive researchers and better teachers.

Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.

Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.

The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.

As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.

The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.

Being a cheapskate, I didn't want to an exterminator to rip open the wall, with repairs to the wall that might have cost thousands, as was suggested. Instead, I ran a shop vac hose next to the opening, sucking up any wasp that tried to enter or leave the hole. After 24 hours, the shop vac was 1/3 full of solid wasp mass, maybe 10000 of them as a guesstimate. I left it running for a week, each day finding fewer. Then I ran it during the day every couple of days, finding less each time.

A friend of mine had a bunch of yellow jackets nest in the wall of his weekend cabin many years back. He debated sealing up their entrance hole, but knew they would just chew some new openings in the wood paneling.

So he did something different. He got a very high speed, high torque fan, one that ran so fast that the metal blades were almost invisible, and mounted it over the entrance hole late at night while most of the workers were in the nest. He removed the fan guard, turned on the fan, and waited for the sun to rise.

The yellow jackets couldn't see the fan blades, and very obligingly flew out the entrance hole to be instantly ground into a fine mulch. The pheromones released by their demise drew other yellow jackets to the opening, looking for a fight, and they likewise got ground into paste. After that, it was a orgy of insect death.

He ran the fan for a few days, until he could no longer see anything coming out of the hole. Then he fired off a very long blast of wasp spray into the hole and sealed it up. Problem solved, and without a single sting.

This is worse than bullying, it's sexual harassment and extortion.

It may even be worse than that. He had lots of photos of underage girls, and that he told one of his victims that he didn't care how old his victims were.

The Feds may pile on some child pornography charges once they examine all the evidence on his computers.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. I am not a laywer, and neither are cops. So while they can harass you their interpretation of the law doesn't necessarily hold up in court. And even then it's up to the prosecutor whether or not they want to actually pursue it.

Point taken. However, even if the charges get tossed out by a judge, or the prosecutor declines to prosecute, you've just spent a few hours of your life fighting a battle that could have been avoided. Police have the ability to your ruin your day if they so choose, even if nothing ultimately sticks in a court of law. I chose discretion over valor and avoided a pointless legal exercise that would have gained me nothing.

Why did you consent to the search?

An excellent question, which a lawyer friend of mine also asked me when I told her what had happened. (She said I was crazy to consent.)

I consented because I quickly realized the cop was not going to let me say, "No, you cannot search my car", and just let me drive off. He was determined to search my car. I had Arizona plates (this was in Tennessee), and apparently a lot of drugs were being transported from the Southwest into this area. I also did not have a permanent address ("No, I'm just staying with a relative") and that also set off some flags.

So I had two choices: stand up for my constitutional rights, and possibly spend another hour or two being detained and questioned using whatever excuses the cop could think of, or just let him search my car, find nothing, and let me drive off a few minutes later - which is exactly what happened.

I want to emphasize that the state trooper was unfailingly polite to me the entire time, and I to him. But he was not going to let me drive away without a fight, and I was not going to spend a few hours of my life seeing just how far he was willing to push it. You have to pick your battles in life, and I had nothing to gain by fighting this one.

No, you only think that you're not doing anything illegal. You have no concept of just how many laws cover every single thing you do. Or, for that matter, don't do. Legal experts know better. So do the people who monitor the street cameras when you step off the curb prematurely.

THAT is the problem. If someone for whatever reason decides that they don't like you, they can pull that data and metadata and use it as supporting evidence for whatever transgressions they deem suitable to nail you for.

It isn't just online. The average U.S. citizen breaks (by some estimates) about three federal laws each day, not to mention countless state and local laws. A cop who knows his laws can stop and detain you just about any time he chooses, because he'll be able to cite at least one law that you broke.

My own anecdote: many years back, when I first began working at my current job, I was commuting back and forth from a relative's house while my wife and I were looking for our own place to buy. I would travel about 20 minutes by interstate every morning and evening, and always observed a lot of state troopers pulling people over in the evenings. What I did not realize at the time was that this particular stretch of road was a major drug corridor, and that the troopers were looking for mules hauling large stashes.

One night I had to work late and was driving home after dark. Knowing how active the patrols were, I made certain to set my cruise control at the speed limit, so I wasn't particularly concerned when I saw a state trooper in my rear-view mirror - until the lights started flashing.

At the time I still had my Arizona license plates on my car, and the cops were sure they had a hot one. After a 15-minute stop and search of my car, I was on my way home. But what was the state trooper's excuse for stopping me?

You know those little plastic frames that auto dealers put around your license plate, with the dealer's name on it? Well, as it turns out, where I live it is illegal to obscure any part of your license plate, which means that I was breaking the law by having that plastic frame overlap my plate along the edges and corners. It gave the state trooper probable cause to stop me. At least he didn't give me a ticket.

The moral? Don't assume that this sort of behavior by the authorities is anything new, just because it happens online.