Month: November 2022

Krypto Currency

Until last week I hadn’t heard of FTX. Or, if I had, it never registered. That’s because high-flying Crypto currency is no more real to me than Superboy’s high-flying pet, Krypto.

My interest in Crypto has been limited to reading articles about block-chain technology and the massive amounts of power and cooling required to run the server farms that are mining the virtual currencies.

I’ve made a point of not reading about the people involved with the business of Crypto, or the exchanges they run. So, in the same way I’d never heard of Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried was unknown to me until his financial empire likewise collapsed.

Why did so many people trust their money to a kid with no track record, operating in an unregulated market? For the same reason they trusted their money to a respected Wall Street veteran running a well-established firm in a regulated market. For the same reason they voted for someone who was not only clearly unqualified to be President, but unfit to hold public office.

They fell for a sales pitch from a con man. Although it has yet to be determined if Bankman-Fried has actually committed fraud, or if he’s just a bright kid who got in over his head and was desperately looking for a way out.

Mapping the Information Superhighway

It has been 50 years since I first read about the thing that evolved into being the Internet: https://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

One popular new feature on the Net is [the] Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that’s coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form).
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Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized [sic] and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with “essentially perfect fidelity.” So much for record stores (in present form).

Stewart Brand
Rolling Stone
December 7, 1972

Swimming in India Ink

The new Black Panther movie brings Sub-Mariner to the MCU screen. He apparently now has some sort of an Aztec connection. Or maybe it’s Mayan. Whatever it is, he’s nothing like the character created by Bill Everett in 1939.

Sub-Mariner #57, on sale 50 years ago, October 1972, with art by Bill Everett

By 1972 Everett had stopped drinking, and he was helping other alcoholics through his work with AA. His art was better than ever, but then tragically he died only a few months after issue #57 was published. There is some more information at this link:

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-namor-bill-everett-final-days/

A glaring oversight is there’s no mention that Everett illustrated Daredevil #1. Although he had trouble meeting the deadline, Everett’s art is as fine as anything he ever drew. He was a master of inking with a brush, as was my dear old friend Joe Sinnott.

Insider Incomes

Parade has stopped publishing as a Sunday supplement and gone 100% online. A feature I have always looked forward to seeing in Parade is “What People Earn.”

https://parade.com/living/what-people-earn-salaries-2022

There is a big ongoing push for pay transparency beyond the categories where it’s always existed — jobs that pay minimum wage to start, pay grades within unions, and what public employees are paid, unionized or not.

This comes after the Great Resignation, which was followed by Quiet-Quitting, and now there’s the inevitable Big Layoff. At a personal level, the guy who took over my job when I retired didn’t quiet-quit, he just plain quit. He submitted his resignation and declined an unprecedented counter-offer. His area of expertise — cloud computing — is in high demand.

I was never the quiet-quitting type, and neither is my replacement who has moved on to another opportunity. I would suggest that those who have been doing the quiet quitting, especially while working from home, are among those who are now caught up in the layoffs sweeping through the tech sector.