Category Archives: Technology

Quote of the day—Ammal Hassan

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Because it was fun? Because it was for sale? Because he just had to have it? The truth is, no one really knows.

Ammal Hassan
April 26, 2022
What The Hell Does Elon Want With Twitter Anyway?
[Really? Musk has repeatedly said it’s because Twitter has been hostile to free speech. He has literally said:

Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate

April 26, 2022

By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.

I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.

Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.

April 26, 2022

image
April 25, 2022

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

April 21, 2022

And authenticate all real humans

April 21, 2022

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.

What should be done?

March 26, 2022

Despite all that, this bozo Hassan can’t imagine free speech being the real reason.

From reading some the comments to various threads about the buyout it is very clear that many people are vehemently opposed to free speech. They come close to predicting the end of the world if people are allowed to spread “disinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech.”

This is incredibly willful ignorance or, more likely in many cases, deliberate evil.

The “end of the world” is much more likely to occur if we don’t have free speech. The suppression of free speech is the mark of authoritarianism. It enables corruption, gulags, and genocide. This is why we have the 2nd Amendment. It protects the 1st Amendment.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

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I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Tweeted on April 25, 2022
[There are other things closely related that I thought I should point out at the same time.

Elon Musk’s buying Twitter is good for free speech. And a ‘nightmare’ for progressives:

despite warnings that censorship is necessary “for democracy to survive,” neither the Tesla CEO and billionaire nor ordinary citizens appear to be sufficiently terrified of free speech. Twitter confirmed Monday that Musk will acquire the company in a deal worth $44 billion. Once the deal is complete, Twitter will become a privately held company.

Progressives, in the meantime, have adopted a dangerous shift in their strategy of calling for corporations to censor speech.

…

Obama favors free speech only if it does not include disinformation, including what he considers to be “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.”

…

He is talking about imposing “standards” on companies to force them to censor “lies” and “disinformation.”

…

As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”

Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical. President Obama was briefed by his CIA Director John Brennan on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The intelligence suggested it was “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

I have to wonder how Obama, Clinton, and/or Biden would respond to being censored for trying to spread disinformation by talking about “the gun show loophole”, “gun manufactures cannot be sued”, or “private citizens could not own cannons during the revolutionary war era”.

Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

Twitter, Disney, Netflix, CNN+ and more stuff every day.
I told you guys a few months ago that we’d hit Peak Woke. They pushed too hard. Regular people are sick of this shit.
The tides are changing in the culture war.

On Sunday I had this very conversation with Brother Doug. My perception is that many people have been thinking this crap was near the breaking point for years and finally some people started openly talking about it and the dam has now burst. And people who were afraid to say something are now openly saying they aren’t going to take it anymore and are going to do something about it.

Brother Doug said that he has noticed that friends and relatives on Facebook on the political left have been keeping quiet about political stuff for several months.

Andy Ngô ️‍ (@MrAndyNgo) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

From my sources: Vocal Twitter employees on internal chats indicate their biggest fear is Donald Trump being unbanned. Many express strong hatred toward @elonmusk & say they’re sick of hearing about “free speech.” They’re concerned about their mental health. #ElonMuskBuyTwitter

Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.

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Just Asking (@WasJustAsking) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

Just seems odd…haven’t they spent years saying they don’t limit speech based on a partisan bent? If that is the key thing he states that will change, and they claim they haven’t been doing it, what is the freak out about? 😉

And my favorite, David Burge (@iowahawkblog) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:

If you think you’re having a bad day, spare a thought for the Twitter person who decided it was a good idea to ban the Babylon Bee

In case you don’t know, I think I have this correct, let me know if I misstated something and am spreading disinformation, The Babylon Bee had their Twitter account blocked pending their deletion of a tweet linking to their article The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine. The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet. Elon Musk took the side of The Babylon Bee and used $44 Billion of his pocket change to buy Twitter. He then informed them, “This is now a free speech platform. Enable The Babylon Bee account and, while your at it, there are a bunch of other accounts you need to enable before you go home for your free range tofu, gluten free, certified organic dinner and curl up with your copy of The Communist Manifesto. And tomorrow you are going to make your ‘unbiased’ algorithms open source. Sleep well.”

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey got the hint and not only his nose but his entire head down to his shoulders came out brown just before he said:

Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also [current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s] goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart

I hope Correia is right. But always remember, the political left believes violence is a legitimate tool for them to use. And they believed they were on the edge of extinguishing Republican influence at all levels of government. If they think they were that close and see it slipping away their response may be… impolite. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dr. Diljeet Gill

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Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming. We have proved that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells. The fact that we also saw a reverse of aging indicators in genes associated with diseases is particularly promising for the future of this work.

Dr. Diljeet Gill
April 7, 2022
“Time Jump” by 30 Years: Old Skins Cells Reprogrammed To Regain Youthful Function
[I like living in the future.—Joe]

Solid state heat “engine”

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This is interesting:

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m annoyed they call this an “engine”. An engine outputs mechanical energy. This produces electrical energy. In reality it is “just” a photovoltaic cell that converts low energy photons into electricity at a remarkably good efficiency.

Still, it could be utilized to convert stored heat into electricity far cheaper than batteries:

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid.

There are multiple interesting energy sources coming up that have the potential to reduce costs and pollution.

I like living in the future.

Rejuvenation

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I like living in the future:

Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman’s skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old’s.

The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body.

The eventual aim is to develop treatments for age-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and neurological disorders.

Reality is tough

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You hear the phrase “two movies, one screen”, right? People perceive what they expect/want to perceive. This makes it really tough to be in touch with reality. You may think, “Not for me!” I’m not so sure. Watch and listen to this:

These sort of things demonstrate the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and falsity. It takes a great deal of effort to change minds, even when the facts are overwhelming, because people’s brains get hardwired into thinking about something in a particular way.

My mom learned to do subtraction in a different way that what was taught in my elementary school. She could not help me learn how to subtract like Mrs. Cole was teaching it. She asked Dad to help me. After I learned to subtract I asked Mom to show me her way. It was incomprehensible to me. Dad could not understand it either. She got the right answers, but she could not understand our method either.

I came up with a different way of viewing exterior ballistics problems. Someone who was taught the traditional way is completely confused by my method. I understand how they do it but my way is simpler and has broader application. I can teach either way to newbies just fine. But teaching it to someone who has done it conventionally will result in their total confusion.

It’s obvious to some people that banning guns will save lives. The facts don’t matter because elimination of “gun deaths” mean fewer people are dying, right? Their brains have become hardwired down a particular path. Once they start down that path it is a slippery slope to the same conclusion regardless of the factual obstacles presented.

Spooky action at a distance is a very difficult concept. It just “can’t be true”. But it is.

Socialism/communism must be the most tested and failed political system ever. Yet people believe the false reality.

Reality is really, really tough. For everyone. I’m sure there are countless examples all around us that no one has yet properly deciphered and we all believe one or more flavors of falsehood about it. It may even take a generation or two after the truth is discovered before people are comfortable thinking in terms of the “new reality” and people laugh at “the things people used to believe”.

Quote of the day—University of Cambridge

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Like some people, AI systems often have a degree of confidence that far exceeds their actual abilities. And like an overconfident person, many AI systems don’t know when they’re making mistakes. Sometimes it’s even more difficult for an AI system to realize when it’s making a mistake than to produce a correct result.

University of Cambridge
March 17, 2022
Mathematical paradoxes demonstrate the limits of AI
[I’ve read a few AI/machine-learning papers, talked to people who design machine learning systems.and tried it a little bit myself. I’m being overly harsh to make the point but, AI/machine-learning designers are more tinkerers than engineers. We are a long way from having AI machines realize we are not particularly useful to them and they stuff us in The Matrix.—Joe]

Amazing conclusion to an amazing story

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I read a book (or maybe one story in a collection of survival stories) about the Shackleton expedition. A short version is here. In the long version you have difficultly believing there is an escape path for anyone at nearly every step in their journey. Yet, everyone survived.

And now people have found the ship Shackleton and his crew abandoned. It is four miles south and nearly two miles below where Shackleton reported it abandoned:

The wreckage of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship “Endurance” has been found, a team searching for it said on Wednesday, March 9.

The ship was crushed by Antarctic ice and sank some 10,000 feet to the ocean floor more than a century ago.

The three-masted sailing ship was lost in November 1915 during Shackleton’s failed attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

The pictures and video of the ship are incredible:

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Endurance is right.

EPA approved releasing two billion mosquitos

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Interesting:

Scientists have been playing god with mosquitos for a couple of years now. Back in 2021, British company Oxitech released 750 million lab-modified mosquitos in Florida. Now, the company is gearing up to release another 2 billion genetically modified mosquitos across more of Florida and in California as well.

The new species, codenames OX5034, is made up entirely of male mosquitos. The new species is derived from the Aeses aegypti family of mosquitos. Just like others the company has released, this new 2 billion should produce female larvae that die off before they reach adulthood.

…

Despite its size, the mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. That’s because this insect can carry multiple deadly and disabling diseases. Oxitech’s derived its new species from one notorious for carrying Zika, yellow fever, and even dengue. Other species can spread Malaria, lymphatic filariasis, and West Nile Virus.

The male larvae do not die off and will continue to produce dead female offspring.

Expect some fragment of this to be incorporated into COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy claims.

See also: What caliber for the most dangerous animal in the world?

Quote of the day—ALLAHPUNDIT

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The clearer the “memory” the immune system has, the more sophisticated the antibodies it can produce. According to new research, someone who’s had three exposures to the spike protein on the Wuhan virus via three doses of vaccine is capable of developing antibodies that can neutralize variants that didn’t exist when they were vaccinated, like Omicron. Just as the virus evolves in the wild as it passes from host to host, the T cells and B cells of someone who’s been boosted will generate more “evolved” antibodies.

And those T cells and B cells don’t fade in a matter of months like antibodies do. The latest data points to them lasting years, which means a person who’s had three doses might be equipped to avoid severe illness from the next serious variant to come down the pike even if that variant doesn’t arrive until 2025 or whatever.

ALLAHPUNDIT
February 21, 2022
New data: Protection from COVID boosters may last for years, avoiding need for fourth shot near term
[It seems to me the pandemic has focused a lot of attention on the immune system which resulted a rather rapid advance in the understanding of how it works and how to enhance it.

Two popular phrases come to mind:

  1. Every dark cloud has a sliver lining.
  2. Never let a crisis go to waste.

This mindset is applicable to many other situations.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Isobel Asher Hamilton

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The chip Neuralink is developing is about the size of a coin, and would be embedded in a person’s skull. From the chip, an array of tiny wires, each roughly 20 times thinner than a human hair, fan out into the patient’s brain.

The wires are equipped with 1,024 electrodes which are able to monitor brain activity  and, theoretically, electrically stimulate the brain. This data is transmitted wirelessly via the chip to computers, where it can be studied by researchers.

The second is a robot that could automatically implant the chip.

The robot would work by using a stiff needle to punch the flexible wires emanating from a Neuralink chip into a person’s brain, a bit like a sewing machine.

Isobel Asher Hamilton
February 17, 2022
Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to embed microchips in people’s skulls and get robots to perform brain surgery
[This sounds like such a great idea it should be mandatory… for politicians. The data should be posted on the Internet in real time.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader on the feedback to be applied when the dislikes exceed the likes by a factor of two to one.

On a more serious note, I expect there will be people eager to do this. It will depend upon what sort of “apps” are available. Being able to give yourself almost instant orgasm will probably be a best seller with some people. Direct Internet access will be sufficient for others. And the math coprocessor will be the “killer app” for many of the nerds. But I don’t expect the concept will get full market penetration until virtual reality is nearly indistinguishable from the real world.

Just as with recreational drugs Darwin will provide the negative feedback and limit the adoption of this technology.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chet

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Antifragile is another name for adaptive response, and it is one reason why models fail to be reliable very far into the future. The other reason is that many processes have probabilistic distribution that are not finite which Talib describes as fat tailed. Fat tailed processes have distributions which have no mean, no variance, or higher moments. Yes, you can compute these values, but they are not meaningful, and the resulting models are GIGO.

Failure to recognize adaptive response and fat tailed processes are major reasons why so much stupidity is going on in our world.

Chet
February 12, 2022
Comment to Quote of the day—Forrest Cooper
[This quote probably isn’t fully understood by more than 10%, at best, of the general population. But it really resonates with me and I wanted to give it more visibility so others who understand it can bask in the awesomeness.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Vox Day@voxday

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You can cling to all the Big Tech platforms as long as you like. It’s foolish, because they WILL deplatform you. And you can jump to all the “new” gatekeeping platforms run by the same people who run the Big Tech platforms all you like, but you’re not going to find what you’re looking for there either.

Consider this: there is a reason the media, the ADL, and all the other organizations that hate you have been deplatforming and discrediting people like me, Torba, Milo, Owen, Stefan, and Razor for the last 7 years.

And maybe it’s not because we are pure and unmitigated evil haters who hate. Maybe it’s because we actually stand for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Vox Day@voxday
Gabbed on February 4, 2022
[Read that carefully. He didn’t say they were the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. He said maybe they actually stood for that.

I think that is the more likely hypothesis than they are all “pure and unmitigated evil haters who hate”.

There may be some other hypothesis that fits the available evidence better than either but doesn’t matter much. What matters is those Big Tech companies deplatforming people are clearly evil haters who hate.—Joe]

Labradar update

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As I mentioned a month ago I and many others have have problems with the Labradar smart phone app connecting to their chronograph.

My old phone worked with the app. That phone died and my new phone, a Galaxy S21 5G, would not make the Bluetooth connection. I purchased a few relatively cheap ($30->$90.00) phones for testing. The Nokia 2.1 – Android 9.0 Pie (Go Edition) actually worked most of the time. I have no plans to put a SIM card in it and use it as a real phone. It’s just an remote control accessory for the chronograph.

Last Thursday I received an email from Labradar:announcing (highlighting added):

The new Labradar App for iPhones/iPads and Androids is now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store*. New features include.

  • Improved Bluetooth connectivity
  • Create notes for each shot and series
  • Add weather conditions
  • Create custom names for each series
  • Ke can be displayed in Joules and Ft.lb
  • Export files via email in CSV format
  • Create a custom name for your LabRadar
  • Quick entry of bullet weight for Power Factor calculations

Great. I’ll bet I wasted my money on the phone as a remote control, right?

Wrong. My Galaxy S21 still won’t connect. To be fair, they did say, “improved”, not “fully functional”. The Nokia 2.1 now works all the time instead of just most of the time. It is an improvement.

No thank you

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Via email from Gerald F.:

‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist

It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

And what is the morality of forcing others to adhere to a version of morality different than their firmly held belief?

And of course some (most?) would refuse which the author suggests isn’t that big of an obstacle (apparently oblivious to the practical problems of dosage, secrecy, and costs with this sort of scale):

administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply

And if you follow the link you will discover the “moral reasoning” of the author is somewhat twisted (highlighting added):

My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.

I find it very telling the author values “utility” and “equality”. And dares to suggest a covert program of forced “bioenhancement” is consistent with “liberty” and “autonomy”.

No thank you.

I want an underground bunker in Idaho.

Boomershoot country in the winter

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Last weekend I visited the Boomershoot site to get the weather station (see also here, it seems I always have to work on it in January) and webcam working again. The webcam had been down since November 8th and the weather station went down on December 31st.

I figured there was a good chance the power went down. The power supply is two deep cycle batteries charged by two solar panels and in the winter there is a risk of not enough solar to keep the batteries charged. The math says it should be enough as along as the batteries are not at end of life. But the batteries are getting old.

I took my 2 KW generator and a battery charger and arrived at my new gun range a little before 4:00 PM. It looks a lot different with 20+ inches of snow over it:

20220115_155958

After taking a few pictures there I drove to the driveway at the Boomershoot site. As I expected the driveway was impassable. I loaded up the toboggan I borrowed from Brother Doug and went out to the shooting line where the weather station is:

20220115_162943

I opened up the underground “vault” where the batteries, charge controller, ethernet switch, and power supplies are:

image

I measured the battery voltage. The 12 Volt batteries only had 3.7 Volts. That’s not good. That’s a real problem.

I hooked up the charger and generator and the smart charger quickly brought the voltage up to six volts and went into “maintenance” mode. Crap! It thinks these are six Volt batteries rather than 12 Volt. There was no manual switch to convince it to charge to 12 V.

I went back to my car and found the direct battery charging cable for the generator. I almost left this home because I didn’t think I would need it as I had brought the smart charger. I’m so glad I brought it.

Back at the shooting line I hooked up the direct cable and in a few minutes got the voltage up to about 10 Volts where the smart charge, with a power cycle, became convinced these were 12 Volt batteries.

It was getting dark but there was a nice sunset fading away:

image

The next morning I came back to refill the gas tank and check the charge on the batteries. Things were a bit frosty:

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The charger said the batteries were fully charged. That’s not good. These two batteries should have a combined 400 Amp Hours of storage. The charger puts out a maximum of 12 Amps. After being on the charger for about 16.5 hours that is a maximum of about 200 Amp Hours of charge (including the consumption from the electronics and contribution from the solar panels that morning).

For all I know they could have stopped accepting charge after eight hours. There was nothing I could do about it. The only solution is new batteries. And I do not want to do that in the winter. The batteries are just too heavy to make the trip on the toboggan and be lowered into the “vault” with all the snow making access difficult. I’ll go back in a month or two and recharge them.

I couldn’t get the webcam to come back online. It is dead. I confirmed that after bringing it home. It doesn’t even turn on the ethernet switch lights. It seems to be a frequent occurrence at this site. I suspect low voltage to be a contributor. I have a new webcam but I forgot to take it with me. I’m thinking I will make another trip to Idaho in late February and put up the new web cam and charge the batteries then.

I will be spending some time on site a week or two before Boomershoot 2022 (April 29th –> May 1st, sign up here!). I’ll install new batteries, get the local Wi-Fi working, etc. then.

Quote of the day—Chris Knox @ChrisKnox_AZ

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The minimum wage is a subsidy to the robotics industry.

Chris Knox @ChrisKnox_AZ
Tweeted on January 16, 2022
[That a great way to put it. And that subsidy is getting larger every day as the price/performance tradeoff keeps dropping.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Crider

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Minecraft builder “Sammyuri” spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM.

Michael Crider
December 15, 2022
This 8-bit processor built in Minecraft can run its own games
[Computer simulations will someday have simulated characters building simulations in their simulated world. It may have already happened—a few decades ago.—Joe]

This will encounter resistance

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In some ways this is a very cool idea. But you would have thought these people would have thought this through a little better:

Grow and Eat Your Own Vaccines? Using Plants As mRNA Factories

The future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC Riverside scientists are studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.

Messenger RNA or mRNA technology, used in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching our cells to recognize and protect us against infectious diseases.

One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines — which can be eaten — could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature.

The project’s goals, made possible by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are threefold: showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding. Does the mRNA only affect the DNA of the plants? Or do the plants deliver something that affects human DNA? If the latter then there is going to be some push back.

If the technology exists to deliver virus gene fragments into humans from food then what prevents food, modified by the evil genus in his basement, from creating an infectious (to plants) disease which delivers a “time bomb” infectious disease to human? For the “time bomb” think of HIV. It shows symptoms easily mistaken for something minor then is quiet, but infectious, for a few months before killing the host. If the lettuce infects other lettuce via insects or is airborne a simple infection of a few fields in scattered locations could infect an entire nation before the first person began to show deadly symptoms.

I don’t know how you practically prepare for that scenario.

Brett may have it right.

Quote of the day—Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff

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The real problem with #Bitcoin isn’t volatility. Volatility means Bitcoin can’t function as a currency, but it makes it very appealing to traders and speculators. The real problem is that Bitcoin has no underlying value to support its price, making a terminal collapse inevitable.

Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff
Tweeted on January 10, 2022
[That is what I believe too. I mentioned the volatility, appeal to traders, and no underlying value in a discussion with a coworker last month after he told me about setting up the server rack in his garage to mine Bitcoins. My coworker wasn’t accepting my arguments. I tried comparisons to other mined products such as gold and silver. He seemed to understand what I was saying but could not be convinced Bitcoin is a high risk investment.

Schiff claims the following credentials:

Chief Economist & Global Strategist: http://Europac.com, Chairman: http://SchiffGold.com, Founder: http://EpacFunds.com , Host: http://SchiffRadio.com

That Schiff sells gold probably gives him a blinding bias but he, and I, may still be correct. I just don’t know. And that I, and apparently Schiff, cannot make an accurate prediction as to when the demise of Bitcoin occurs gives me concern that we are mistaken in our belief.

I’m more confident in prediction about the financial collapse of the U.S. government than I am of predicting about the demise of Bitcoin. Yet, I still believe.—Joe]