gehringer_2

SO found testing a time available at a CVS in A^2 tomorrow. Couldn't find anything when we looked before leaving town on the 20th. I have one scheduled tomorrow at the U's student/staff service. I'll be interested to see if they have moved back into the bigger room where they started in 2019. They had shifted to a smaller room this fall after they waived the weekly testing requirements for the vaxxed.

and the ultimate irony that has emerged is that we can only know what it should cost to buy some real object with BitCoin et al by first ascertaining their value against the standard of the US (fiat) dollar.

It's not a Ponzi - A Ponzi is a specific scam based on pyramiding which is not what crypto is. I don't think many people ever spend much time thinking about what money actually is and how it works. We assume that somewhere in prehistory, the very first commerce was barter, but it's obvious that barter becomes logistically inconvenient really fast, so the idea of an intermediate value storage medium - money that is, emerged pretty quickly. But what to use? Well you couldn't use anything too cheap and easy to come by because by definition those things can't hold more value than they are worth themselves, so things like rare metals, fine sea shells, and gems are all good candidates, and rare metals the best because you can actually 'mint' them and put convenient data on them to reflect their value. But there was still a problem, which is that the supply of even these rare metals was subject to wide fluctuations based on mining discoveries and bank hoarding or even jewelry styles, and supply didn't necessarily increase as economies tried to grow, which has a stifling effect. So national economies could be thrown into inflation or recession based on a mining find somewhere. Not a desirable situation. But finally in the 20th century the light went on. You don't need the actual medium to be worth anything in and of itself at all, as long as someone controls the supply carefully- the supply will establish the value, the thing in itself can be worthless paper (or computer entries now), as long as it's secure (hard to counterfeit) - and 'fiat' money was born. But the key to fiat money is that someone is managing the supply - and managing it well. That is the only way it works. The idea of crypto was its value was supposed to have some 'real' basis in the cost to mine it, but that obviously doesn't actually work to maintain stable value. The problem with crypto as currency is exactly that its value cannot be controlled as needed. No one can remove crypto from circulation when its value is falling and no one can inject it when the economy is expanding (at least any faster than the mining process, which to the degree it is controlled, is controlled by factors untethered to overall economic need. Things like the price of chips and GPUs and electrical power drive mining costs (and your ability to use malware to hijack other people's computer power!). So the way I would put is that the one thing Crypto is not is money. It much more akin to gold, and it suffers all the same failures, and in fact more, as money as gold ever did. Despite some governments doing it wrong sometimes, in the main fiat currency has been a huge improvement over gold/silver, just as I believe it will continue to be over crypto, at least until someone comes up with a crypto system different from any out there now. Though one thing which is does do is function as an untraceable transaction medium for black markets, which is probably what will keep it alive from now on.

Fusion is still a long way over the horizon - but I do think we will see safer more modularized fission reactions systems as part of the transition away from fossil. To me, Crypto is the purest of pure speculations. Crytpo is worth exactly what anyone wants to pay for it at the moment, which could be something or nothing. It's completely unmoored - which is precisely why it will never actually replace government issued money. The crypto creators held the concept that money detached from gov could be more stable and thus more desirable - that governments are evil manipulators of their currencies, but they had it exactly backwards. Despite what the Von Mises school adherents believe, the methods in systems like the US Federal Reserve are powerful stabilizers of the value of the dollar. Sure it's 'manipulated', but manipulated with the object of stability and predictability, which is why people like to use it. That is exactly what crypto lacks. Plus currenty the issue with the 'mined' cryptos is that the only profitable way to mine them is to steal the power and/or CPU cycles to mine them because the power and CPU to create one is worth more than the crypto is - so the whole process has become based on massive theft.

you have to guess how long you are going to live. If you are looking at 20+yrs of retirement, a high percentage of fixed income may be too conservative even once you retire.

The SO was working for Oakwood when Beaumont bought them out. Having spent most of her career at tertiary care facilities she was sort of hoping Beaumont would upgrade the level of sophistication in the clinical labs, which was pretty middling. No such luck.

Given the way players have been dropping this season I'm starting to wonder if someone needs to take a look at the strength and conditioning staff. Maybe a review to make sure they're taking advantage of the best current science if that hasn't been done.

Fake news I'm sure.

It goes back to the fact that the whole knowledge verification system in our society has broken down. This article is straight up, but to a colonic devotee it's just another internet citation, no need to believe it any more than the latest nonsense (and expensive nonsense at that) from Ms. Paltrow.

congrats if you had the over today.

They don't have the LBs to deal with a guy like Penny.

On the level though, this is nice to see. Campbell is again getting everything that the personnel he's got can give.

good, since your right tackle had two holding calls on the drive..

I guess his hand is 100% now...

Or have been elected to Congress.

Point a Minute. Carroll reliving his USC days.

Lions look good for about 5 min. Now back to your regularly scheduled draft sweepstakes.

Bucs are done with him - at least for now. He's been released.

C'mon - seriously Arch? When the was the last 'terrorist' attack committed by anyone that came across the Southern Border? The 911 guys didn't get here that way. IIRC all the events since then have been home grown. The Latin American poor are not interested in jihad, they are interested in paychecks. Tell me what am I missing here? Yes the border needs to be managed, but immigration is nowhere near the top of the problems we have in the US. (Well, top of the GOP imaginary problem list maybe) And drugs come across the border because Americans pay for them.

FIFY. (gonna be hard to get another gig after that.)

and back to back penalties. Worst game I've watched them play in a while.

Wings have thrown in the towel. Oesterle could have blocked, Lindstrom spectating.

Yup. And Hronek should have had the puck cleared in the right corners 5 sec before the goal but he was slow and played off. Bad team looking bad.

Scrums in front of the net after a save are getting ridiculous in the league again. They had done a good job of clamping down on that for a few years but it's been coming back in a big way. It was stupid back in the day and it's stupid now.

The wall was a dog and pony show. People find ways around barriers as long as there is motivation. Until the US gets serious about punishing the employers that draw illegals they will continue to come. Don't hold your breath on that one.