Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, May 14, 2022
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34 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Surprise, surprise, surprise!
That’s actually a drop in the share price of all but a third. Somebody at the Guardian doesn’t know how to use a calculator.
And what has happened to cryptocurrencies of late? Oh yeah…
And what funding he had has been disappearing fast and furiously.
Awwww, Pobrecitos….
Ooopps.
Vlad really screwed the pooch this time.
@OzarkHillbilly: Back in 2014 I found the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which started out as a joke but gained a substantial following. Back then it was very easy to “mine,” as in it didn’t require a lot of processor resources like Bitcoin does. At the time, Microsoft was offering a free month on its then-new Azure cloud computing platform, so I signed up, spun up a bunch of Linux virtual machines, installed the Dogecoin miner, and let them run for a month. I ended up with about 20K Dogecoins. Until recently they were worth minor fractions of a penny, but last year they hit 70 cents each. Unfortunately I missed that window but I did sell a sizable chunk of mine shortly after. Made about $3K which is pretty good for something I got essentially for free.
But I’d never have been so stupid as to put my life savings into cryptocurrency, or even consider it an “investment.” It’s basically gambling. I just got lucky.
@Mikey: They always sounded to tech bro for me. By that I mean, “the latest technological gimmick that will be the hottest thing since…” I am one who, when he sees the bandwagon coming gets the hell out of the way lest it run me over. Sure, I’ve passed up several easy fortunes, but I also was never caught holding the bag whenever the scheme inevitably collapsed.
It’s all in the timing and my timing has always sucked.
For a long time my understanding of economics was stuck at the econ 101 stage where prices are set in open markets. Open markets mean a large number of sellers interacting with a large number of buyers, and the transaction of buyer A and seller B are immediately transparent to all. But that is not the way the world acts. A Warhol image of Marilyn Monroe recently sold for $195 million. The number of potential buyers and sellers of such commodities are very small. Similarly, Bitcoin ownership is actually very concentrated with 0.5% of bitcoin wallets holding 87% of Bitcoins. Musk holds 17% of Tesla stock. Rather than the open market of beginning econ class these concentrations lead to high prices and high volatility. Now the price of Warhols has little impact on you and me, but the price of other commodities does. We have been told that prices are the impersonal workings of scientific laws of the market. I’m starting to think that that’s not a truth. Maybe great wealth leads to great concentration of ownership that leads to further great wealth in a positive feedback loop.
@Slugger:
And manipulation of the political system. Picketty points out that the last cycle of capital accumulation furthering greater capital accumulation, the Gilded Age, was broken by two World Wars and the Great Depression. I hate to contemplate what might break this cycle.
@Slugger:
And manipulation of the political system to further greater concentration.
The Gilded Age was the result of such a wave of capital accumulation breeding even greater accumulation. Piketty shows it ended with two World Wars and the Great Depression. I shudder to think how this wave will end.
Jimmy Kimmel did a “man in the streets” thing where they stopped people and quizzed them to see if they knew more about Star Wars than about US history. One guy, seemingly perfectly normal, couldn’t name the current President.
Any theory of why one party or the other is up or down and involves words like “policy” or requires outrage over something a Speaker or Minority Leader said is just based on faulty assumptions about the electorate. Most people would have no clue about the things we regularly discuss here.
@MarkedMan:
I get as many laughs as does anyone else from those man-in-the-street interviews, but you know they only choose the most moronic responses to broadcast.
I do agree that most people aren’t as knowledgeable as the typical OTB commenter.
@OzarkHillbilly: (SHHHHH!!! Keep your voice down! Vlad’s undergoing cancer treatment right now. He’s very sick and if you don’t keep your voice low, he only going to get worse and recover more slowly.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
According to the NYPost, body doubles will replace Putin while he’s undergoing surgery.
Summer time is definitely here!
First evening I’ve sat outside and seen the swallows and martins swooping aroun.
(Do you have swallows/swifts/martins in the States? I’d never thought about that before; are they just a European thing?)
Also, my bearded iris are looking really good this year.
Yay me!
Just googled; yep you get swallows. 🙂
Love watching them fly.
Such amazing aerobatics.
@JohnSF:
Martins and swifts as well.
@CSK:
But the scary thing is not that they are less informed than the typical OTB reader, but they are less informed than Drew, JKB and the other trumpists that will hit an run here.
@JohnSF:
Iris are a few weeks away at my place. the daffodils have faded and the tulips are just budding, one open. The Azalea is in bloom, and the rhododendron will next week. Though the deer stripped the leaves off one and it won’t comeback.
Lovely day here today and Thursday was nice as well. Burgers on the grill this evening.
@CSK: If I were Putin’s body double, I would simply seize power while he is in surgery.
@Sleeping Dog:
Do you remember Sarah Palin’s Flying Monkeys, who’d swoop in here to avenge their goddess every time they felt we were maligning her?
@Gustopher:
That depends on who’s running the body double, I suppose.
@Sleeping Dog:
Tulips are over here; rhododenderonderonrons 🙂 about at best now.
Grilled lamb koftes, pita bread, salad and a bottle of Rasteau for me!
@Gustopher:
And get stuck with the shitty end of the stick?
Nope, loot the treasury of diamonds, gold coins and bearer bonds, and have it away on your toes to Paraguay.
@CSK:
The Flying Monkees were before my time here at OTB. Palin had moved on to being an embarrassment to even her most devoted supporters.
@Sleeping Dog:
I think once Trump appeared on the scene, they gave their hearts to him. Although a few of them seem to have revived their interest in her now that she’s allegedly running to replace Don Young in the House.
@CSK: One thing about running for the House is that the term is short enough that she won’t be likely to get beaten down by her political opponents so soon that she has to quit mid-term. They might beat her down enough so that she’ll be unable to take the strain of running for reelection, though.
People kill people with guns in this country because they can.
Rep. Elise Stefanik tweeted about Democrats being “pedo grifters.”
I think we need to have hearings on the globalist pedophile ring, subpoena her, and then when she refuses to show up start running ads in her district that she is protecting pedophiles.
(Alternately, can we take up a collection and get her a house two doors down from Rand Paul?)
@JohnSF: ….shall I talk to you about the dive-bombing by swallows of anyone who stepped into the front yard…?
For those who haven’t seen the news, today in Buffalo a white supremacist whose online-published manifesto reads like the script of a Tucker Carlson episode wrote the N-word on his rifle and took it to a grocery store to kill black Americans, of whom he killed eight.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism
Live Updates: Gunman Kills 10 at Buffalo Supermarket in Racially Motivated Attack
And he gets arrested with a gun in his hand. By the same cops who assaulted BLM protestors.
@Mikey: He’s from Conklin, so he likely drove for four hours just to kill Black people.
(Early reports are that he picked a location with the most Blacks in the state, and I’m left wondering why Harlem was spared. We’re probably going to discover some stupid reason, like visiting Niagara Falls, or not wanting to deal with NYC traffic…)
I hope he lives a long and empty life behind bars.
McConnell and some other GOP Senators visited Ukraine. Maybe this will open their eyes a bit to the carnage they helped Russia undertake by letting Trump straight up kiss Putin’s rear end for years with no pushback from the GOP.
@inhumans99: That would require empathy and some level of self-awareness, both of which are in short supply for way too many people in this country, and particularly on the part of our GOP Congress-Critters.