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Yearly Archives: 2016

Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson, written in 1946 by Henry Hazlitt, is an excellent book. From Chapter 1:

Doesn’t everyone know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? … do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are headed for a future of debt and poverty.

Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. These are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as a way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.

Sound familiar to anyone?

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Here’s the One Lesson Hazlitt shares in Chapter One and then illustrates through the rest of the book:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

The gist of the book is that economic policies are enacted to fix or change something. That is the visible side of the policy eg., the public works project to provide jobs visibly shows jobs and a bridge as a result. Why almost all policies fail is that there is an invisible side of every policy, a side that takes critical thinking to discover as the impact is higher taxes and lost opportunity for all industries not in the bridge building business.

 

 

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$DDD $BIDU $AMZN $NOW $TWLO

$DDD possible reversal after GE buys competitors. Caveat emptor.

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$TWLO on the move.

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$NOW getting interesting here.

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In response to White House Press Corp upset about a red carpet for Obama Chinese official responds with “Theses are our $CHINESEBURITTOS.” $BIDU

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$AMZN continues to decapitate your corner store, $WMT and soon favorite shipper.

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Harvard professor on Curse of Cash

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000548776

Couple of interesting statements:

There are 4,000 $100 bills in circulation for every man, woman and child in the US. In many foreign countries up to 90% of US bills are $100 denominations.

Regarding Bitcoin he states “They allow it for now and they’ll prevent it in the future”. Other than outlawing Bitcoin, like FDR outlawed gold, that shows massive ignorance on the ability to control Bitcoin.

“We’re not even a big cash printing country compared to Japan.” Go USA!

“The government makes a fortune off printing cash.” No kidding!

This guy is an asshat of the first order.

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Monero on a roll

Monero, the privacy focused cryptocurrency, punched the mustache off all bearshitters this past month going from $2.5 to ~$13.5 and it’s still running.

Unlike Bitcoin, which keeps all transactions on a public ledger, Monero transactions are not traceable. Monero provides a layer of anonymity not available with other cryptocurrencies.

The bump in Bitcoin from $575 to $600 may have been the result of Monero holders moving profits to Bitcoin.

The Monero top is not in yet but once it is there will be a fall to earth. Nothing goes straight up forever.

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$HUBS vs $CRM

In  the cagematch of the 800lb gorilla $CRM vs the upstart $HUBS I am keeping my eye on $HUBS.

Hubspot released a CRM to complement their industry leading inbound marketing software. And then they made that CRM free. Smart, very smart.

This move by HUBS is a 1+1 = 3 scenario.

HUBS and CRM are not direct competitors in most cases, however they have tracked each other until recently. HUBS is near it’s all time high. I believe the street is starting to wake up to Hubspot’s potential to move up market.

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Bitcoin ready to pop, but which direction?

Bitcoin has been in a relatively stable range with a midpoint of $570.

Within past few hours we’ve printed $597. A move of ~5% is not a big deal on the Bitcoin volatility scale but is this the start of an upside move, a bull trap or just a blip? Bitcoiners are watching closely.

Overall Bitcoin has been in an uptrend in 2016. Bitcoin just printed a 3 box reversal on the 6H PNF chart. Levels to watch are $615 and $650. On the downside $560 and $530.

Sundays are sometimes big trading days for Bitcoin (driven by Chinese?).

I am grabbing some popcorn and hoping for a good show.

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Brave Browser is tits

I downloaded the Brave Browser and I am impressed. Sites are loading faster than Chrome and all the annoying ads are gone. Brave also has a built in Bitcoin wallet to reward sites I visit most via micropayments.

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As an example, CNN is a pig of a site that takes 5-10 seconds to fully load in Chrome. That extra time between when the first images appear and the site is fully displayed is the loading of the different ads, site trackers, Facebook plug ins and complete crap snooping your personal information. In Brave CNN loads almost instantly. A peek at the Brave settings shows the following for CNN:

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From Cointelegraph:

On the desktop, Brave provides a 40% to 60% speed increase and a 2-4x speed increase on mobile devices. Mobile users see a direct reduction in both battery and data plan consumption. Brave also protects users with leading privacy and security features such as HTTPS Everywhere (encrypted data traffic), fingerprinting shields, phishing protection, malware filtering, and script blocking.

 

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We’ve reached peak Facebook, YouTube etc.

Le Fly posted about YouTube blocking certain content creators. Reminds me of Twitter and Facebook “curating” their users’ newsfeeds.

Should we be surprised? No. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This type of subjective censorship won’t last on the Internet. There are now decentralized competitors popping up in many areas: Arcade City vs Uber, Steemit vs Reddit, YouTube vs ????.

An example of a shift against monopolistic control driven by ad revenue is a new browser on the market called Brave. Their Mission:

….to save the web by increasing browsing speed and safety for users, while growing ad revenue share for content creators.

The Brave Browser team are removing the middle man and enabling payments to content creators directly in the browser. Sounds like YouTube/Facebook’s worst nightmare.

Introducing Brave Payments

As part of our 0.11.6 release of Brave for desktop today, we are pleased to announce the beta version of Brave Payments, our Bitcoin-based micropayments system that can automatically and privately pay your favorite websites.

For the first time in the history of web browsers, people can now seamlessly reward the sites whose content they value and wish to support, while remaining untracked by anyone, including us at Brave Software, Inc. This removes the need for intermediaries who may overwhelm web pages with invasive trackers and ads (and sometimes even malware). It also avoids centrally managed “feed” algorithms that may or may not value your idea of content quality.

Decentralized mircopayments to content creators cut out the middle man. Add in privacy and an open system…what’s not to like?

This concept is in pre early adopter phase but it’s happening in many industries. Most projects will fail, but new projects will take their place.

So while YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pick and choose what is good for their users the Internet is striving to be free (from censorship) again.

The question is, does Joe Public care about monopolistic entities censoring the Internet for them or have we given up those rights for the easiest possible access to cat videos?

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$WDAY double top breakout?

52 week high achieved at $87.94.

Can $WDAY set new ATH above $110 based on a double top PNF chart PLUS a $100 roll?

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Bitcoin: not just for Neckbeards anymore

Bitcoin is easy to mock. With Kim Dotcom, Mike Tyson, Mike Karpeles, Winklevii and Roger Ver as public faces of Bitcoin it’s tempting to write Bitcoin off as a nerd money fad.

However, things change quickly. Remember, only nerds used computers less than 20 years ago. Now everyone owns smartphones, tablets and 1-2 computers.

The video below does a good job showing the legitimate side of Bitcoin while also putting the adoption curve of any new tech in perspective with regards to cryptocurrency.

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