they sell themselves.

Either that or they're so unavoidable that people pretty much have to buy them, so crappy AI sales agents are quite enough.

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Meh. Boeing's recent safety record is worse than Airbus's, but flying with either of them is still significantly safer than driving a car, which nobody thinks twice about doing.

Where is the evidence that this was the case, though? When the U.S. has something like that happen, there's a formal inquiry, there's a public documentation trail showing why the actions were taken, and the consensus is that they made the right call more often than not. We're not seeing that from Israel, or if we are, it isn't being reported, and that's disconcerting, particularly given the rate of these incidents.

Hiding among civilians is not the same thing as using protected sites to run operations. One person in Hamas living in an apartment building with his/her family is not equivalent to storing vast quantities of weapons and munitions in a protected location, which is what that exception was intended to allow.

Blowing up schools with children inside is never okay. Blowing up hospitals with patients still inside is never okay. Giving them enough warning to get innocent people out is an absolute minimum standard of human decency, and failing to do that means that you're deliberately targeting civilians, hence a war crime.

The Netanyahu government can hide behind pedantic interpretations of international law all they want to, but when you look at the big picture, you don't rack up a 10:1 civilian to militant kill ratio if you're operating within the bounds of international law. There's just no way. Typical U.S. wars were less than 1:1 (ignoring any indirect deaths, which are hard to compare). And no U.S. war has ever deliberately prevented aid from getting to the innocent victims of that war. The things that the Israeli government has done are, IMO, nothing short of unconscionable. It isn't just a few incidents; it's a clear pattern of lack of concern for innocent human lives, repeated almost daily.

At this point, the U.N. commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel's actions are clear war crimes and that the intent is tantamount to genocide. There's really no defending the Israeli government's actions. They went way, WAY too far on way, WAY too many occasions to give them the benefit of the doubt. And regardless of what happens with Iran — and mind you, going after Iran's government for their proxy war against Israel is at least arguably a legitimate military action — I think it is still critical to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for war crimes committed in fighting this war, if only to serve as a deterrent to electing similar governments in the future.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

Oh, I'm sure the sentiment is real. Popularity of the current government officially hovers around 50%, with a significant minority very much in favor of setting the whole government on fire (but also a not-small minority that wants to keep the status quo, and they have the guns and soldiers).

What I'm questioning is whether they're angry enough to do something about it and powerful enough to take on the entrenched power structure. After all, those sorts of mass protests in authoritarian countries tend to paint targets on the chests of the participants — in some cases, in a very literal sense (with laser scopes). And more often than not, the power vacuum gets filled with something worse, or with something so weak that it quickly topples in favor of something remarkably similar to the government that was previously in power.

But maybe this time will be different. One can only hope.

The right equipment already can extend that range further... in some cases up to 30cm with a high Q antenna. This is what malicious actors use to get people's cards in sketchy airports and markets the world over. I'm not sure the extra range from .5 to 2cm in nominal use is worth giving thieves more range to work with.

How about vendors who are having problems just start using better equipment. I use square in my little restaurant and have never had an issue with it. This seems to be solving a non-problem at the expense of introducing more.

That would be very risky. It's more likely the court would order the administration to enforce it immediately. The administration would appeal that up to SCOTUS, but SCOTUS has already made its opinion very clear and would almost certainly uphold the order. At most they might slow walk it. Trump might simply refuse to obey the court order, but that's a very big step with a lot of risk for him, and while he might well take that step in some context he cares enough about, this isn't it. Not without a really big payoff, anyway.

No, the status quo is the best outcome for ByteDance. AFAICT, no one other than ByteDance and Congress has standing to sue over enforcement, and Congress isn't going to, so if ByteDance doesn't the courts can't intervene. ByteDance can just keep slipping cash to Trump and he can just keep extending. That's a win for ByteDance and a win for Trump. If you believe TikTok's influence over young Americans and the data it can collect is a national security risk, then it's a loss for the American people, but no one cares about that. Even if you don't believe that, it's a loss for Congress, whose authority is being flouted -- but the current Congress seems fine with that in a hundred other situations, so why not this one? ByteDance has no motive to rock this boat.

Emma Watson: Higgsley Squigglebotham. Five-nine-two Elkdale Terrace. Zero-two-zero, five-six-four-one, seven, seven, seven, seven.

Gives me the chills. :-D

On Sunday, June 25? Maybe that was a typo and it was supposed to be the 15th. Alternatively, the last time June 25 fell on a Sunday was in 2023, which tells you when the AI was released that wrote the post, and the only question remaining is which AI created the video.

I don't put a lot of faith in anything posted on X these days.

Iran buying? The bigger problem is the other way around. Iran is supplying drones, missiles, etc. that Russia is using in their war with Ukraine.

Good comment, but next time, don't forget to mention that Powell was a Trump appointee, confirmed by a Republican-majority Senate. It helps drive the point home of who is really responsible for all of this, and explains why Trump's damage to the economy didn't end when he left office.

Very well put.

Crypto bros think what they'll get from regulation is respect and trust, and they're right. But that respect and trust will arise from transparency, and that transparency will also show that the emperor has no clothes. Proper regulation of cryptocurrencies will spell the eventual end of cryptocurrencies, at least as they exist today. It'll take a while, but it will happen.

Perhaps along the way someone will come up with a cryptocurrency design that actually works as a currency, providing convenient, fast, low-cost transactions that somehow manage to be cheaper than moving numbers in an audited bank database. But unless that happens, real scrutiny and regulation of cryptocurrencies will just end them.

With very critical difference that the stuff sold by the Wall St. bros is repackaged ownership of real stuff. Real enterprises that make real products for real people, real commodities that people need, real debts that people have made legal commitments to repay, etc. The Wall Street bros.' stuff has actual value behind it, even if that value is obscured through many layers of packaging.

What the crypto bros have to sell is nothing. Nothing at all. The early promise of cryptocurrencies was that they would make transactions more flexible and cheaper, but cryptocurrency transaction fees are sky high and transactions are super slow. Then came the idea of tying them to smart contracts, but that idea is foolish for reasons that I'm happy to explain if anyone wants to know.