Category: Politics, Religion & Money

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.

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.

The week before last I dropped my ballot into the box in front of town hall. There were no self-appointed “ballot watchers” who have swallowed the con man-in-chief’s lies.

The guy in this video who says, “Go back to same day voting and paper ballots” should be reminded of Florida’s “hanging chads” in the 2000 election. Even where voting is done the way he wants I’m sure he would convince himself there was “something wrong” with the process.

One of the big Republican talking points this year is crime. Yes, let’s talk about crime. In particular the school shootings resulting from the “all guns all the time” mentality that holds the country hostage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/