Topic: I am very confused. (Read 10283 times)

But that why there are companies like bit-pay.

I started accumulating around the time that Mt. Gox was down, and in a relatively hurried manner because I was concerned that it would become harder to do for regulatory reasons, and also was worried about the price going up.  I've been wrong about both, and am obviously deeply in the red.  Nobody should feel the least bit of sympathy for me since I was fully aware of the risk and even the developers warned strongly of the possibility when they mentioned it at all.  If anything people should be snickering at my condition and that is perfectly fine with me.  If anyone loses money going the other way, you can bet I'll be doing so.

Anyone who lost their hard earned money investing/speculating/mining Bitcoins did so of their own free will.

Anyone crying about it now and blaming it on manipulators/speculators/early adopters/the Bitcoin "rich" or anyone other than themselves needs to take some personal responsibility.

Yes, some people are poor. What makes them poor is they have less money then the middle class. Who are middle class because they have less money than the rich. I'm in that chain well below rich.

If you fall on hard times, your family helps, your friends help, your neighbors help, your local community helps. You do what you can to be productive and help the people helping you. If they seem to be doing well while you are mysteriously unsuccessful you take their advice and quit fucking up. Yes, sometimes you lose your shit. But unless you are a real fuck up, you always have your family, friends, neighbors, and community. If you are such a sorry fuck that none of those people will help you. Then you ask a church for help. And when people who have pledged their eternal souls to helping those in need give up on you. Well then... Why the fuck should I give a fuck about you!

Most every argument I've ever had about such things tends to come down to dignity. "Why should I have to lower myself to ask for help?" Isn't the fact that "I'm in need" enough?

NO! It's not fucking enough! Ask for fucking help when you need fucking help. If no one will help you, it's not because the rest of the world is a bunch of bastards. It's because no one sees value, for you, in the path you've chosen for your life, AND you are not even attempting to provide any assistance to others. If nobody will help you, then they are giving you advice. Take it. Change your ways. Be decent. Be useful to someone. And quit fucking whining.

You know what's great about common people? They can only fuck up in minor easily fixable ways.
You know what's scary about leftists who give organizations nationally critical responsibilities? They fuck up in massively catastrophic ways.

The fuck ups have ZERO to do with motivation or belief in the right cause. It has nothing to do with absolute power corrupting absolutely.

The folks that fucked up the mortgage situation really were trying to help those who didn't own a home to buy a home. Those people were elected democratically by the people to work for the people, and they were. They were honestly trying to do that job in the way they saw as most helpful. They created massive bureaucracies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They promised *all us citizens* would guarantee repayment of mortgages defaulted on by random anonymous needy citizens who didn't have to convince their neighbors of their need or even shared commitment to the community. All they had to do was fill out a government form and "poof" they were in need. It is a dignity thing. People in need shouldn't have to publicize their need. They should just magically get the help "they need". And they did.

And how many needy but too dignified to ask people did there turn out to be? A SHIT LOAD!

It wasn't wanting to help that fucked things up. It was changing a need into an entitlement solely to preserve the dignity of the potential needy that fucked things up. It was using anonymous bureaucrats evaluating forms by well defined but ill conceived rules. It should have been folks with a vested interest looking other people directly in the eyes.

For christ sake people got loans for 9X their annual salary with no money down. Terms that didn't even required them to pay the full interest on the loan! Your folks (leftists/liberals/socialists) made me guarantee these anonymous "sweet heart" loans.

Now the needy but too dignified to ask for help are defaulting on their loans. Why? Because without the prospect of others getting even better "sweet heart" loans, no one is left to buy their home and relieve them of the debt that YOUR FOLKS made me entrust to them.

And you are asking me to feel sorry for the defaulter you shouldn't have given the loan to. And the builder you shouldn't have started building. And the real estate agent you shouldn't have started selling. And the home depot guy you shouldn't have started improving. Fuck yeah all of these people used to be doing great! You were giving them my money for free!

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The moral of the story is, don't trust ANY body or ANY organization with the power to fuck things up for EVERYBODY. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. Not even fucking God. Because whoever is given that responsibility will eventually fuck things up for everybody.

Spread the responsibility around even at the risk of non-optimality and non-conformance. Evolution shows that works best over the long term. Individuals will fuck up. We can fix individual fuck ups. Even leftists. But gather them all together and put their brightest in charge... That is a fuck up we cannot fix.

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So you want to know why I'm out of work?

Because I don't feel like fucking working. I quit. I live off of my personal savings from having been productive and having delayed personal gratification. Now I get to smile and be happy. I do what I fucking want (including trolling web forums). I pay my "fair share" of taxes, which thanks to your folks was actually negative last year. Yes, I quit work out of spite, and your folks gave me an earned income credits. (Woot! Go Left!)

And you know what? I'm not going to pay off the loans you made me guarantee. Nope. Not a penny.

You see, there's this valley in Colorado...
well that's another story.

It is worse than that. It is coming from taxpayers! And if your employees are taxpayers, yes, it does come out of the pocket of employees!

Tax payers pay for all newly printed money that the Fed gives to banks and different plunge protection teams that constantly and massively intervene in the stock market to not allow it to fall and go where it deserves to go (and keep market above option strike price. otherwise options will be worthless). This is the way people and their pension savings are robbed nowadays. This state of the economy is also known as biflation - During Biflation, there's a rise in the price of commodity/earnings-based assets (inflation) and a simultaneous fall in the price of debt-based assets (deflation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biflation

In other words, ignore my question, ignore my point, ignore the poor. You've actually ignored just about everything I've said about the poor in my last couple posts. More compassionate conservatism, I guess (lol, how long did that phrase last before you guys couldn't keep a straight face anymore). Fuck you.

I earned my money. My money is my business. But feel free to feel sorry for me if you want. I'd give you a Bitcoin address for donations, but hey I'm not a leftist!



I googled for you.
The median annual earnings for a CEO in the United States were $140,350.
The Wall Street Journal reports the median compensation for CEOs of 350 major corporations was $6,000,000 in 2005 with most of the money coming from stock options.

Notice the part that says from stock options. That means the compensation comes directly from folks who buy the stock the CEO sells. It does not come out of the pocket of employees. Stock options mean, employees have the option to buy stock at the same price as the day the option was granted. If the CEO does well, he benefits. If he does poorly, he doesn't. As for golden parachutes. That is really between the stock holders and the board of directors. They have to pay those bills.



That is because there is a lot more ways to be wrong than there are to be right!



I didn't say squat about Orwell except that I didn't enjoy reading him. If he couldn't get his own message across in all those pages, please don't mandate I read the cliffs notes as well!

Ayn Rand...  Now that was a Utopia in Dystopian clothing!  I hope you read Atlas and are not just babbling on about it.
Can you imagine the outcry if we tried to make Atlas required reading! You liberals are really quite lucky Ayn made John Galt an atheist! (Which I am by the way. Yes, that's right. An educated southern conservative atheist. Us Republicans are all the same!)

Anyway, It's been fun pushing your buttons. I'll leave you to your dark dreary delusions, and I'll get back to my bright cheerful reality.

If you believe in my right to rule myself, then you should agree that I decide whatever to do with my life, what includes the result of my labor, i.e., my money. And if I decide not to give my money to an armed group that I don't approve, that's nothing more than I ruling myself.

But I've read other of your posts in this thread, and no, you don't believe in the right of people ruling themselves. You support direct, brutal violence. You're a sociopath. I was correct when I said people like you are the reason totalitarian governments ever came to be. Your other posts make it even more clear.

Hey, I'd love to see a raise in the minimum wage. Try to find a Republican politician who agrees with me. Many of them these days are calling the very idea of a minimum wage unconsitutional (nevermind that the Supreme Court rejected that argument 70 years ago).

Of course, you'd have to do a tad bit more than raise the minimum wage to afford a $100,000 operation on a minimum wage salary that's currently closer to $14k a year.


With what? Family money? Savings from previous jobs? Savings that would be impossible for someone who never had a good job to begin with? Family money that doesn't exist when your family has none?


How many workers get a severance package that's 20 times more than what an average worker makes in a lifetime? Because that's what CEOs are getting these days. Is it really that much of a risk if your punishment for failure is a lifetime of being a multi-millionaire who doesn't have to work? If so, where can I sign up for this horrible risk?

A CEO's worst failure is a common man's Powerball Jackpot. This is the system you're defending.


Again, this is what you imagine things to be. There is a range of opinion on the left, even in America. Meanwhile, politicians on the right are all taking scores of "purity tests" to ensure they all have exactly the same views. Which one sounds more like a rigid, unquestioned orthodoxy to you?

I hate having to even defend Democrats because they're nearly as corrupt as the Republicans, but it's a simple fact that their base represents many more diverse points of view than the Republican base.


Actually, I'm saying you shouldn't be twisting authors' messages and lying about their beliefs to fit your own agenda. Nobody on the left is trying to posthumously turn Ayn Rand into a liberal.

This is an unreasonable demand. You will never have enough intel on anything as an ordinary citizen, it's just about insight (e.g. Why do you think they committed a murder-suicide?). I could ask the same question to you about all the non-existent and made up intelligence you have, that made you attack secular dictatorships to make them become religious shitholes. If you were so interested in fixing the region, why did you use Iraq against Iran, why did you stand by while your vehicle of destruction killed thousands and thousands of innocent civilians and used chemical weapons against them? Despite the fact that you were fully aware of the chemical weapons used by Iraq, you decided to shift the blame to Iran instead. And when they made peace with Iran, you attacked Iraq because they used chemical weapons? How convenient is that? And tell me when did peoples of these two nations ever were a threat to your security? Sorry, but you have been gamed.

These examples can go on and on, and are not at all specific to the US. Is it too hard to comprehend that there has been an increasing amount of people that would sacrifice themselves in order to harm you? Are those the ones that are being gamed?

I witnessed (sort-of, I was always in the next building or next block) a couple of suicide bombings myself, some were nationalistic (mostly left-oriented) and some were Islamic terrorism (interestingly enough, Islamic ones not only target synagogues, but also banks, so this is not entirely off-topic). In both cases, the common denominator was that the attackers were totally hopeless regarding their goals. This theme is almost universal in suicide bombing cases. Granted, the bombers themselves could be misled by their leaders, but they aren't the only responsible party here.

Don't get me wrong, I don't sympathize with violence at all. My point is, the threat of "religion" or "brainwashing techniques" are imaginary. Leaders of both sides use nationalism, religion, patriotism or whatever to orient their subjects to attack the other side for their own interest. Don't you at least agree with this?

Back to the previous layer of discussion, financing these wars is not something I want to work for. That's why I think taxes are not fair. I should be able to donate my money to whatever cause I choose. I guess libertarian way is to vote with your money, and it makes sense to me. It's not the only way of course. There could be an amalgamation of public not-for-profit services and private businesses, but the State is a no-no for me.

Back to Bitcoin? I guess it's very tangential. Bitcoin still helps if you have a socialist agenda, if only with banking cartels, unless you specifically want to prevent all free business.

Anyway, feel free to delete my post if you find it off-topic.

The problem I have with Liberals (and I guess Socialists too) is they never ask for anything that solves the problem.

Why don't we raise the minimum wage to a level where everyone can pay for their own health care, and can save for their own retirement. Why do we need to build government bureaucracies to get in the way? Certainly you can't think the government saves money through efficiency.


I don't have to look at the 9%. I am one of the 9%. But I still pay my own bills. Therefore, I'm entitled to say it.


If a CEO gambles millions of dollars of stock holders money on new machinery so that three workers can do sitting down what twenty workers used to break their backs over. And the gamble pays off by lowering expenses and increasing production. And his gamble both pays back the capital investment and returns extra profit. Then who deserves a reward? Who would take the fall if the decision turned out badly?

Don't give me abstract CEOs get rich. Workers get poor. Plenty of CEO's got fired. Plenty of workers started their own companies and became CEOs. In between, lots of workers stopped getting chewed up by antiquated machinery.

Nobody ever was lazy. But you don't earn what you want. You earn slightly more than what you can be replaced for.


It means I deliberately don't live with those people. It is a fallacy that conservatives don't understand the view of the left. We do. We often have the same goals. However, we think the mechanisms you propose for meeting our shared goals, are wacko. Most of us are too busy to talk to wackos.


There is a general liberal pattern that goes, 1) we have a problem. 2) find the smartest guy. 3) believe he'll save us. 4) everyone must do exactly as he says.

The results are invariably. 1) we still have the problem. 2) the smartest guy was the wrong choice. 3) the left blame the right for the failure because they didn't believe strongly enough. 4) the right blames the left because they made everyone do stupid shit that didn't solve the problem.


Really, this is a prime example of the point I'm trying to make.

It is not enough that we make every damn teenager in the country read Orwell. Now you want to piss and moan because we are not demanding he be read for the right (oops) left reasons.

Yes, some guy who works two minimum wage jobs just to put food on the table and has nothing left at the end of the month is too stupid to save for retirement. That's clearly the problem, not the fact that he doesn't have anything extra to save. I'm sure he'll have an awesome time trying to pay for private insurance as an elderly person.

Even if you blessed the whole population with incredible ambition and great education, we still have a massive service sector with jobs that need to be done no matter what. Those people work hard (even McDonald's is harder work than you'd think), but apparently they don't deserve any kind of decent standard of living or health care. You don't want a government to redistribute your money, but somehow you think billionaires do a good job of it?


How do you look at a 9% (effectively closer to 20%) unemployment rate and say something this stupid? Those people who have applied for hundreds of jobs and found nothing? Lazy. The ones who work jobs that pay so little that they qualify for government assistance? Also lazy. The fact that when you adjust for inflation, worker salaries have actually gone down over the past 30 years even though productivity soared and CEO salaries went up by an order of magnitude? Probably also the fault of lazy workers.


I have no idea what this means in the context of half the population of America. I guess when you don't know anyone with views to the left of Limbaugh, it's easy to argue against what you imagine their beliefs to be. Or what AM radio told you their beliefs are.


Where did I say that Ivy League educations were superior? I just said we needed more education. And a whole lot of those small college guys are corrupt, too - it just doesn't make national news. And of course bailout money didn't only go to the biggest banks. Over 1,000 banks took bailout money, and over 100 of those have since failed.


Your personal opinion of Orwell isn't the issue. The fact that we censor him and use him to indoctrinate kids against all leftist thought, when he was both a leftist and highly opposed to censorship, is. It shows that your free country ain't quite as free as you think, but hey, it looks like you're fine with that.

The problem is you see social security and health insurance as mandatory because unlike you, other people are too stupid to save for retirement or pay their own medical bills. What I'm telling you, is my retirement and my medical bills aren't your or anyone else's problem. I've relieved you of the burden of worrying about me. Now either ask for my help in taking care of "you" or go take care of yourself.

But don't randomly declare there is an entire class of "special" people who are entitled to me taking care of them. Without need even for them to ask me for help. That is the part of socialism that fucks things up for everyone.


Woot! You pay your own bills. But for some reason you feel warm and fuzzy thinking maybe one day you won't have to.


Sure it does. They are off protesting to themselves happy as clams. I drove past them the other day. I didn't run them down or throw tomatoes. But I didn't bother to go over and offer them free soup either. They're not homeless. They're camping.


The point was not the folks from the most elite highly respected universities run the biggest banks. The point was these folks of the most elite, most respect, most highly educated order, ran them into the ground. The point was those barely educated folks from middle America, turned out a shit load more ethical and competent at banking than the highly educated elite.

If we are going to "help the needy" the last thing we should do is but some Ivy League fuck head in charge of a massive government bureaucracy with highly implausible goals. The salvation army will get there faster, the food will be better and they won't require you to believe in their cause is just.


I don't confuse them at all. My maternal grandparents left Europe to get away from the Communists. My paternal grandparents left Europe to get away from the Socialists. And my parents left the East Coast to get away from the Liberals. It's really not that complicated. Each time we build something, you folks show up wanting it.


Quite frankly I never liked Orwell. Didn't really like Huxley either. Dystopias are for whiners.

I think there's a pretty close correlation between the price of a Bitcoin and the currency's popularity.  Assuming that the wealth of the average Bitcoin user is roughly constant over time, we can assume that there is a more or less fixed amount of value V per user that the average user wants to keep in BTC form.  Suppose there are U users, and the Bitcoin price is P, and the number of coins outstanding is N (currently about 7.5 million, and growing slowly and steadily).  The total value of all Bitcoins in existence can then be expressed either as V*U (number of users times average value stored per user), or as P*N (price per coin times number of coins).  Thus, we have that V*U = P*N.  

Rearranging this equation, we find that the price P = U*(V/N), and thus we can see, the Bitcoin price P (measured in stable currency units) at any given time is directly proportional to the number of active users U at that time, given that V/N changes only relatively slowly over time.  Past users who have given up on BTC and cashed in all their coins don't count as "active users."

Since the price has been falling pretty steadily for a while now, and by quite a large amount, this tells me that more people have been giving up on Bitcoin and abandoning it, for various reasons, than are being newly drawn into it.  Thus, I'd say it's pretty fair to state that it is dying, at the moment.  

(Caveat: This situation could change pretty quickly if there were some emergent crisis in the traditional sovereign currencies, and lots of people were suddenly desperate to find someplace else to put their money.)

It's not just the libertarians, who are relatively few, but the people who would take advantage of, say, the ability to not have to pay social security. You make stuff like that voluntary and it turns into a massive mess. You get rid of it entirely, and suddenly millions are trying to find affordable health insurance on the private market at age 70, when poor people these days can't even afford it at age 30.


You mean that claptrap about the evil liberal universities? I had to shut it out of my head because the stupid was starting to hurt.  The difference between your two lists of universities isn't political, it's monetary. You listed a bunch of small state schools next to the most expensive, elite private universities in the U.S, and then acted surprised that the biggest banks in the country are controlled by people who graduated from the richest schools. Seriously?

You also randomly confuse liberals, socialists (me), and people trolling as pro-U.S. Imperialism Marxists, suggesting that, like most conservatives, you see the whole spectrum of left-wing political thought as one giant grey blob.

Which makes things really confusing when you see quotes like:


Every publisher in our totally-free-we-promise country decided to cut that quote off after the word "totalitarianism" on book jackets to protect you from the influence of anything even vaguely leftist. Which is kind of exactly the type of misleading censorship that Orwell warned us about, but oh well.

One would presume that those who lost family members are 'experts' on the details the 'official version' of 9/11 and how the report was generated because they would have tended to have paid more attention to these details than the average Joe.

But almost all of them took quite a generous settlement from the US Government on the condition that they forget it and move on as I recall.

Any they are experts...why, exactly? Cause they were there? If that's the case, I gotta find some better employment, cause I am pretty sure by those standards I can run the Fermilab particle accelerator; I went on a tour there once.

Things don't seem to have changed much in my absence over the last couple of months.

Oh hey, we've got a "ignore user" feature now, that's cool!

I'm not sure if that will be better and I'm not sure if Obama still has troops. I'm sure though the new government will try to keep all those troops far from home - Uganda, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast or whatever. It doesn't already matter if there is oil there or not. The important thing for the Wall Street government is to keep troops far from home. Yes, this is where the US government resides now. This is why people protest on Wall Street not in front of the White House in Washington! Coup d'etat took place in 2008 and the US government moved from the White House to the Wall Street. The so called QE's done by Fed are just ransom money paid by the fake government (at the expense of taxpayers) to the real government body on Wall Street.

I expect some of them are actually anticipating an up-turn in the price of Bitcoin, eventually, and wish to take as big a position as possible.

If such an up-turn in Bitcoin occurs it will be kind of fun to see how many of the same people will come back and crow about how smart they were and how much the guided the herd over the cliff.

In fairness, certain of these people have been consistent and vocal in their warnings about the decline in Bitcoin prices demonstrating that it is good practice to listen to and weigh all perspectives.  Another fraction, however, seem to be more of the Johnny-come-lately type riding the down-wave and hoping they look clever.