Category Archives: Technology

Craig Murray: FTX & the Joke of US Democracy

Posted on November 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

The FTX scandal is rapidly shaping up as one of those many government stories where the regular people will end up knowing about 20 percent of what actually went on. From Craig Murray at consortiumnews.com:

From its founding in 2017, the one-man company rose to a “partner organisation” of the WEF and second largest donor to Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election. It has now gone bust.

Sam Bankman-Fried during the Bitcoin 2021 conference. (Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The State Belongs to its Citizens,
Not the Citizens to the State

NOTE: This is is what I think of as a signpost article — it points you to something the mainstream media is deliberately not giving the prominence it needs, but I have no personal expertise or inside knowledge to give you. I am just giving you a start to get going. Several readers will have a much better understanding than I, and I encourage you to give your thoughts in comments below.

The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors’ money with it.

That is some trajectory.

The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it:

I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Collapse, Crime, Governments, Politics, Technology

Tagged ,

FTX: The Dominoes of Financial Fraud Have Yet to Fall, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 16, 2022 | 2 comments

FTX has probably set a record for the most of amount of money vanished in the shortest span of time. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com;

Once assets are revealed as worth far less than claimed, insolvency is the inevitable result.

If you haven’t plowed through dozens of post-collapse commentaries on FTX, I’m saving you the trouble: here’s a distillation of what matters going forward. If you’re seeking a forensic accounting of FTX, others have done this work already. If you’re seeking an ideological diatribe, you won’t find that here, either.

What you will find is insight into the real innovation of FTX: FTX compressed the entire playbook and history of financial fraud into one brief cycle of the credulous bamboozled, Charles Ponzi bested and creative accounting being revealed for what it really is, fraud.

All financial frauds share the same set of tools. The toolbox of financial fraud, whether it is traditional or crypto-based, contains variations of these basic mechanisms:

1. Using clients’ capital (without full disclosure) to increase the private gain of the Owners of the Con (OOTC).

2. Using the clients’ capital to arbitrage yield differentials in duration, risk and other asymmetries to the benefit not of the clients but to the Owners of the Con (OOTC)..

3. Overstate assets by listing illiquid, insider-controlled, non-marked-to-market assets at valuations completely disconnected from reality, i.e. what they would fetch on the open market in size. Rely on assets issued by the firm or its subsidiaries for the bulk of the firm’s assets, i.e. its claim of solvency.

Continue reading→

2 Comments

Posted in Banking, Business, Crime, Government, Politics, Technology

Tagged ,

Here Come “Programmable Dollars”: New York Fed And 12 Banking Giants Launch Digital Dollar Test, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is called the camel’s nose under the tent. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Never let a crisis go to waste. Or a market crash for that matter.

With equity and bond markets stuck in brutal bear markets and providing a sufficient distraction to what is happening behind the scenes, the Fed and a group of banks have been quietly preparing for the next stage in the “organized crash” pipeline: the rollout of CBSC.

According to a statement by the New York Fed, global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the participants announced on Tuesday.

Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Mastercard and Wells Fargo are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed, which will provide a “public contribution to the body of knowledge on the application of new technology to the regulated financial system.”

Bank of New York Mellon, the money-laundering bank of the world, HSBC Holdings, PNC Financial Services, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Truist Financial and U.S. Bancorp are also participating in the test, along with payments network Mastercard.

The project, which is called the “regulated liability network”, will allow banks to simulate issuing digital money representing their customers’ own funds before settling through central bank reserves on a distributed ledger, the New York Fed said.

The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Currencies, Government, Technology

Tagged

First VW . . . Now Toyota, by Eric Peters

Posted on November 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Toyota becomes the next victim of the jihad against diesel (strong competitor to electric). From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

There is a war going on – against the diesel engine. It is being waged, not because the diesel engine is a “threat” to the “climate.” It is being waged because the diesel engine is a threat – to the electric car. The forces pushing the latter use the manufactured “threat” of a “climate crisis” to attack the diesel engine (and also diesel fuel) precisely because it is a threat  . . . to them and their agenda.

It is why VW was attacked with unprecedented viciousness six years ago. It was not because VW “cheated” on government emissions certification tests. In italics to distinguish between those tests and the tailpipe emissions tests most people are familiar with. The “affected” VWs – as they were styled – passed the latter tests with no problem. Hundreds of thousands of them. How unclean could they have been to have been to have been able to pass those tests?

The answer, of course, is that they were – as VW advertised – very “clean.”

No unclean car could “get away” with “cheating” in any meaningful way and not be detected by those tests. It took a very fine-toothed comb  to “catch” VW’s “cheating” – on the certification tests. Which test the engine under a wider range of operating conditions, such as wide-open throttle/under load. VW’s sin – revealed to the public with you-don’t-care-whether-granny-dies hysterics (note the common thread here) was that it had programmed the engine management system of its TDI diesel engines in such a way as to pass those portions of the test – wide-open throttle/load conditions – where the engines’ emissions would otherwise have been momentarily and just slightly higher.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Energy, Government, Technology

Tagged ,

Are Robots and AI Really Going to Displace All Workers? Probably Not, by Robert Blumen

Posted on November 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Replacement by robots sounds plausible, until you give it a couple of minutes of thought. From Robert Blumen at mises.org:

Among the components of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are a drastically reduced population and the replacement of human labor with robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The question immediately comes to mind: can robots and AI really make all the stuff for the elites after they have gotten rid of the people?

Because a plan has been formulated and described does not mean that it is possible to realize. The plan may contradict laws of logic or reality, or assume the existence of resources that do not exist.

Podcaster and journalist James Delingpole, speaking to investigative journalist Whitney Webb on October 23, 2021, discussed this topic with his guest. I have transcribed several minutes from their conversation, edited for concision:

Webb: The fourth industrial revolution. One of the main pillars of that is automation and artificial intelligence. We’ve already seen that with corporate behemoths, like Amazon’s efforts to replace human workers with robots. Starbucks is piloting their AI barista with plans to have at least one in most if not all locations…. How long until humans are gone entirely? That’s in a retail setting.

In the UK Tesco recently joined the cashier less checkout. It’s all done on your phone. You scan when you enter the store. Everything is tied to you, your unique digital identifier with the corporation. You can just walk out of the store. How convenient that you didn’t have to walk by a cashier at all.

We’re going to see this happen in big ways in manufacturing. Chile is one of the biggest producers of copper in the world. In the northern part of Chile, the economy is driven by mining…. They are automating the mining here [in Chile]. Most of Chile’s middle class in the north work in the mining industry. They are about to all be cut out….

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Economics, Economy, Governments, Labor, Technology

Tagged ,

One Veteran’s story: An Orange-Pilled Green Beret

Posted on November 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

He thought he was fighting for freedom as a Green Beret. Now’s he fighting for freedom with Bitcoin. From Adam R. Gebner at bitcoinmagazine.com:

This is an opinion editorial by Adam R. Gebner, a Green Beret and West Point graduate.

The opinions expressed throughout this piece are mine alone, and in no way reflect official policy or opinions of the U.S. Army or the U.S. Department of Defense. Though I am by no means a writer, I hope that by publishing this, more service members consider working in the Bitcoin industry and Bitcoin companies consider expanding their efforts to hire Veterans. Additionally, I am always learning more about Bitcoin, how it works, and the potential value it may bring to our world. Please let me know where I am off base, thanks!

Early in my life, I knew I wanted to be a Green Beret officer. Fighting to liberate oppressed people by working by, with, and through local populations was at the core of my motivations to choose this path. I saw the Special Forces’ mission as a cost and risk-efficient way to prevent large-scale conflict while enabling people to defend themselves and secure their own freedom. After graduating from West Point in 2014 and serving with the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) for three years, I ultimately earned my Green Beret and an opportunity to lead a detachment of America’s Chosen Soldiers. Now that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do with my military career by commanding an “A-team” for two years, I am looking forward to the next mission in my professional life: contributing to the adoption and integration of the best freedom-protecting innovation in modern history — Bitcoin.

Like so many others, I had a few touch points with Bitcoin before seriously considering the validity of the technology. In 2010, during my first year at West Point, I overheard a few Computer Science majors discussing this “internet money” and I foolishly dismissed it without trying to learn anything else. Then in 2013, when I started learning about investing and economics, I stumbled across bitcoin again. I read a little bit more into it, but not enough to understand how it could replace gold as a sound money system (thanks Peter Schiff…).

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Economy, Government, Liberty, Money, Technology

Tagged ,

The EeeeeVeee “Mandate” From Within . . . by Eric Peters

Posted on November 6, 2022 | 1 comment

Mandates are not the hallmark of a profitable business or investment; they are a sign that someone is being forced to do something. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

 
 

It’s not just the government that’s “mandating” (don’t you hate that word?) electric vehicles. So are the car companies.

They are “mandating” that their dealers “invest” in EeeeeeeVeeees they don’t want to sell – because they know they are a hard sell – and also the “infrastructure” (meaning, adding – and paying for – high-capacity “fast” charging capability at the dealership) the car companies know dealers must have in order to create the illusion that EeeeeeVeeeees are useful as vehicles rather than vehicles to signal virtue.

The latter amounts to a minimum of several hundreds of thousands of dollars in “investments” – with little prospect of return. Hence the . . . what’s the right word? . . . hesitancy to make these “investments.”

Dealers know – though most won’t say – that few, if any customers are interested in spending any more time at a dealership than they have to. And they don’t have to – or have to, a lot less – if they don’t buy an EeeeeeeVeeee because they don’t have to go to a dealership for a not-so-“fast” charge. And wait there for it. They can stop for less than five minutes for gas – on their way home – and be home much faster.

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Government, Investing, Politics, Technology

Tagged , ,

No Alaskan King or Snow Crabs Will Be Harvested This Year, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on November 5, 2022 | 2 comments

Is global warming or weather tampering causing the shortfall in Alaskan crabs? From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • The snow crab population dropped from 8 billion to 1 billion between 2018 and 2021 and the mature female population of king crab is also down. This has triggered great concern as Alaska produces 60% of the nation’s seafood and has supported a lucrative industry, which is now in danger of collapse
  • Crabs are cold-adapted species that require cold water to survive. However, Alaska is warming faster than any other area on Earth, losing billions of tons of ice each year and causing degradation of the permafrost on which Fairbanks, Alaska, is built
  • Scientists are using large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s climate, known as geoengineering, to alter the effects of global warming and the United Nations is considering a controversial form that comes with potentially disastrous effects
  • The risks of geoengineering on a large scale are immense, including being used as a weapon to advance wealthy societies at the expense of poor countries by artificially cooling some areas and triggering dangerous droughts, severe weather and heat in others so food can no longer be grown

Continue reading→

2 Comments

Posted in Business, Collapse, Environment, Science, Technology

Tagged , ,

Inconvenient Facts, by John Stossel

Posted on November 3, 2022 | 1 comment

Electric cars aren’t going to much farther down the road before they run into a bunch of inconvenient facts. From John Stossel at townhall.com:

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.

President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified” and, “There’s no turning back.”

To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.

Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.

But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.

In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.

“Electric cars are amazing,” says physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute. “But they won’t change the future in any significant way (as far as) oil use or carbon dioxide emissions.”

Inconvenient fact 1: Selling more electric cars won’t reduce oil use very much.

“The world has 15, 18 million electric vehicles now,” says Mills. “If we (somehow) get to 500 million, that would reduce world oil consumption by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t end the use of oil.”

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Energy, Government, Politics, Propaganda, Technology

Tagged

A Surprising Threat To The US Power Grid Could Plunge The Country Into Darkness, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

Electric cars may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you do have to be able to plug them in somewhere and get the juice. From John Mac Ghlionn at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

The importance of a strong power grid cannot be emphasized enough. Often, when a grid fails, the results are terrifying. Of all the major power grids in the world, the United States’ is one of the more vulnerable to attack.

State-sponsored hackers from the likes of Iran, Russia, and, unsurprisingly, China pose a real threat to the United States’ electrical transmission lines. However, there’s another (far less obvious) threat to the grid: electric vehicles (EVs).

Yes, you read that right.

The Biden administration is desperate to consign the internal combustion engine to the dustbin of history. In this radical shift to embrace a new, zero-emission world, Americans are being told to embrace EVs. Such an embrace, however, requires a stellar power grid, the very thing the United States lacks.

Just to be clear, the U.S. power grid (or electric grid) involves a huge network of transmission lines, power plants, and distribution centers. The United States has three major grids: the Eastern Grid, the Western Grid, and the ERCOT Grid, otherwise known as the Texas Grid. Of the three, the Eastern Grid is the largest.

Although the three grids can operate independently, they’re also connected. A failed grid means no power for tens of millions of citizens and prolonged periods of darkness. Imagine a power grid failure in the likes of Los Angeles or New York. The two cities are already riddled with crime; grid failures would make things many times worse.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Energy, Governments, Politics, Science, Technology

Tagged ,