Tag: Money
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Dealing with and maybe profiting from inflation
Last July, I wrote about inflation as it seemed to be back. Six months later we can definitely say that it’s back, with prices up about seven percent compared to a year ago. Certain goods and services are a lot more expensive, generally the stuff you need every day like food, gasoline and shelter. What’s…
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Who’s really profiting from crypto?
So I’m continuing to explore cryptocurrencies and specifically why anyone would want to buy them. One obvious reason is greed. While returns on most cryptocurrencies is marginal or negative, as pretty much anyone with a computer can make their own cryptocurrency, the big name cryptocurrencies tend to appreciate exceedingly well. They get a buzz, so…
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Cryptocurrencies and true financial value
Until recently you could buy a Tesla with BitCoin. Elon Musk though recently changed his mind because it was an environmentally unfriendly currency, since newer mined BitCoins are mined using tons of servers, many of which use electricity generated by fossil fuels. So Musk is going toward more environmentally benign cryptocurrencies. There’s a lot of…
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Mindlessly profiting from a pandemic
You’ve probably heard that the pandemic has made the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer, at least here in the United States. The U.S. gross domestic product actually fell in 2020, but according to Quicken our net worth shot up 17% in what seemed like the worst year of our lifetimes. Just four years ago…
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The stock market is in a sugar high so expect another sell off
Retirement leaves me with a lot of surplus time, time I manage to fill reasonably well with consulting and other activities. But there is still plenty of time for leisure. Instead of watching Netflix, I tend to watch YouTube. Since the pandemic, recession and the election are in, I watch a lot of videos with…
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Cash back cards are no longer offering spare change
The number one rule of credit card management is to always pay your balance in full when you get your statement. When I had to watch our cash flow more closely, every time I made a purchase with a credit card I wrote it into the checkbook. That way I didn’t worry if I had…
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Monetary policy and the danger of revolution
My recent post on quantum computing and its impact on cyber currencies like BitCoin have taken me exploring the world of money some more. This exploration took me to this video, which discusses who controls money and how it is created. I think this video is meant to be shocking. Most of us are painfully…
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Quantum computers will kill cryptocurrencies, but that’s just the start of it
About five years ago I took my first gander at the BitCoin phenomenon. In that post I wrote: In short, to trust a Bitcoin you must buy into its assumption that it can’t be hacked. Since the dawn of the computer age, hackers have demonstrated their ability to hack anything. They love the challenge. It’s…
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The devil in American Christianity
A confluence of events is proving just how dead and unchristian most of American Christianity is today. There are exceptions, most notably the Catholic Church. If you can overlook its rampant misogyny and long history of pedophilia, it still thinks it’s important to feed the hungry and shelter the poor regardless of race, color or…
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Greed is a terrible sickness
In the 1987 movie Wall Street, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) informed us that greed is good. His character fit in well with the Reagan years, because this was essentially the mantra of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. If anything since then the Republican Party has become even more extreme…
Occam's Razor 