I have been doing this every winter for years, and I do not use GPU's. I buy obsolete ASICs off Ebay. I do not usually make money, but I generally do better than I would with a heat pump. Overall it has been moderately profitable though - when you average in the one year I made a $5000 profit. That year the bitcoin price was absolutely in the gutter in the fall - used bitcoin ASICS were relatively cheap - I picked up 3 relatively only slightly obsolete ones at a low price - then bitcoin surged that winter and I was actually very profitable for a while. The "clinical associate professors" comment that it is futile because you are unlikely to find a block is completely without merit - you join a mining pool and over time get paid very close to the predicted average amount for the hashrate you contribute.

Often it is due to a distortion caused by the government. For some 'green' power producers there are government subsidies that reward certain power producers with a tax credit based on how much electricity they produce. In other cases, the government requires power companies to buy power at a certain price from power producers whether it is needed or not - net metering can be an example of this. If you get a tax credit for each kilowatt of 'green' power you produce, it to your advantage to keep producing even if the price of power goes negative - as long as it does not go so negative as to cancel out your tax credit. After all, the 'fuel' of wind and solar is free.

That would be the idea - the idea is that the drivers own their own businesses and hire lyft to provide support services to that business.

But then you have to pay taxes on the nominal interest you receive- so your purchasing power slowly declines even with TIPS.

In our area, when a group of private doctors tried to open an urgent care facility, the local (non profit) hospital sued them saying they were illegally going into the emergency business (in voice of certificate of need laws) and would take all the paying customers leaving the hospital with the non paying ones. They eventually settled - the urgent care agreed to only be open normal business hours on weekdays (no evenings or weekends) and not to provide certain types of medical care. The hospital emergency department is such a disaster (and so much more expensive - cost is 10 times as much for lower quality care) that sometimes when people have a medical need on a Saturday they will wait till Monday morning to get it seen at the urgent care.

Also, we need to keep in mind that slavery varied depending on the culture. In some ancient cultures people became slaves (voluntarily or involuntarily) for a set period of time to pay off a debt. In some cultures slaves owned other slaves. When you hear about slavery in a culture that existed two thousand years ago, it might be something different than what was done in the American south - where people were bought and sold and treated like animals.

If Blackrock decides to fork bitcoin - it will not change the number of bitcoins in circulation, it will just create another (probably low value) competing cryptocurrency.

Actually, El Salvador does not have the problems I mentioned, because they do not have their own national currency. Their national currency fell apart and they switched to using US dollars. Their inflation rate is the same as the inflation rate in the US. Of course, using US dollars carries with it the disadvantage that the US government gets to indirectly tax them by devaluing the dollars they have in their possession through inflation. Examples of countries that have the problems I mentioned would be places like Venezuela and a lot of those african places. I read an article recently about how - in spite of the decrease in the value of bitcoin in the last couple years, it is making all time highs when measured in the Turkish currency due to the extreme levels of inflation they have had their, so add Turkey to the list as well.

You most likely live in a wealthy relatively stable country where, even though there is a lot of dishonesty in your monetary system, your monetary system is reasonably stable compares to a lot of the world. In many corrupt countries, bitcoin fulfills some of the functions of money better than the national currency. Even here in the US, if you held your wealth as dollars over the past year or so you lost ten percent of your wealth due to the antics of politicians. Bitcoin would not have been a good solution if you lived in the US, the dollar is more stable, but there are countries where the value of the currency drops 90% or more in a year. There are also countries where the government may wake up in the morning and declare certain denominations of paper money no longer legal tendrr - tough luck if you have them in your wallet. Bitcoin is not a good solution, a better solution would be commodity backed honest money, but it is an attempt to correct some of the problems with politically controlled money. Unfortunately, with the exception of bitcoin and a couple of others, most of the cryptocurrencies have little to recommend them.

Actually, both the house and the senate recently voted - largely party line with the support of a few democrats in the house and senate - to overturn the Biden administration's new interpretation of the clean water act that extended its reach. Biden just vetoed the bill and went ahead with his expansion. At least the Supreme Court put the brakes on that overreach.

It may well be that these chemicals need to be restricted, but their manufacturers should not bear the liability. It is not like the chemical manufactures set out to dump these chemicals in the environment. They sold them to other companies that used them to make products that improved the quality of human life. They were legal to manufacture and until recently their disadvantages were not known. When they first started making them they were thought to be very safe. You will be able to find a period of time where the manufacturers were aware of the potential problems they could cause - with increasing certainty as more evidence piled up - but you do not immediately shut down making a chemical that many sections of the manufacturing sector depend on at the first hint of environmental problems. If anyone should bear liability it should be closer to the end user - the people who decided to put these chemicals in places where they would end up in the environment - but once again when they first started putting them in products they thought they were safe. Even with our current knowledge we can not stop making these chemicals - they are irreplaceable in some industrial processes- we just need to have strict rules to avoid putting more of them in the environment.

In most of the US it is illegal to start up a new hospital or add capabilities to an existing hospital unless you can get a "certificate of need" from the government. If the existing hospital serving the area says there is no need for another hospital most likely your application for a certificate of need will be denied. There was even a case in one US city where a hospital wanted to add a neonatal intensive care bed but could not be approved because the other hospital in the city objected to their certificate of need application. After the application was denied a child died because the specialized ambulance needed to transport a premature infant between the hospitals was busy. After this the hospital applied for a certificate of need again and was denied again - the other hospital argued that the death could have been prevented if the mother had given birth at their hospital rather than the competition. At least part of the hospital monopoly in a highly area in the US is often created by government regulation.

I have mined bitcoin off and on myself, typically during the winter under circumstances I would have been otherwise running an electric heater - obsolete bitcoin miners are cheap and give out exactly the same amount of heat as an electric heater of equivalent wattage. I have never used Poolin, but I think from reading their announcement I might know what is going on. I noticed they were switching bitcoin mining going forward from full pay per share to pay per last n share. Full pay per share means the pool pays the people running the mining machines regardless of whether any blocks are found. Pay per last n share means the pool pays the miners whenever it finds a block in proportion to how much work each miner did. A full pay per share pool mining bitcoin can have liquidity problems due to bad luck - it is not statistically unusual to have dry stretches due to bad luck to where a full pay per share pool will pay out millions of dollars worth of bitcoin with no or very little bitcoin coming in. Statistically these would be balanced out by good periods where the pool takes in many times more than it pays out, but a pool can be bankrupted by liquidity problems during periods of bad luck if it is not well capitalized. Another possible issue with full pay per share pools is the potential for malicious actors to mine on a pool and actively throw away any blocks that would win. There are a number of reasons a malicious actor might do this - ranging from spite to being involved with another pool and wanting to cripple a competitor - but the point is that it does happen. Given the low pool fee most pools charge - 1-2% is common - if one percent of the users are throwing away blocks the pool will lose money. Users like full pay per share pools because all the risks fall on the pool operator and it is easy to audit if the pool is paying out what it should, but from a pool operator's standpoint they can be very risky.

"but I've thought for a while that rather than this one party Whitehouse we have, we should have the one that gets the majority vote be president, and the next most votes becomes vice president." This was actually the idea the founders of the country had. The idea was that whoever got the most votes in the electoral college would be president and the second most - who it was anticipated would be from an opposing faction - would be the vice president and would provide an extra vote in the senate to counterbalance the president. Unfortunately, the political parties figured out how to game the electoral college.

Extinction - no. There is lots of land mass on earth's surface that is, now, too cold for humans to inhabit easily. IF the earth warms 4-5C, there will be a lot of disruption and suffering in some areas, some areas will become much more habitable, people will move around and humanity will survive.