They never actually had a ceasefire to call off.

It's pretty amazing. The Ruskies cancelled all exports of diesel, sanctions are back on Iranian Oil but the Black Gold still selling at the bargain price of $78.  No mentions of fertilizer shortages now either.  I guess they've solved all the problems somehow without reopening Hormuz.  Magic!

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 08, 2026, 09:39 PMCrypto is only good for laundering money.  It has no other purpose.

No, it's good for any type of transaction you want to make which isn't traceable back to you.  Say you want to contribute money to an organization which will bribe CONgress Critters to Impeach Trumpolini or Assassinate NetanYahoo.  Or more commonly, you want to buy a New Zealand Passport, Birth Certificate and Drivers License so you can GTFO of the FSoA.  Or you want to buy some powerful computer hardware from a Chinese manufacturer the FSoA Goobermint has put restrictions on.  Anything you want to avoid paying taxes or tariffs on of course.  Etc, etc, etc.

Obviously, it's main application is for doing "illegal" transactions.  However, just because Da Goobermint makes something illegal doesn't mean you don't have a good reason for wanting to do such a transaction and not get caught.  It's actually the only reason I like Crypto currency.  Neither the established banking system nor Da Goobermint has control over it.  It's the digital equivalent of what people used Gold or Diamonds for when they wanted to make untraceable physical transactions.  Since many if not most transactions are now done electronically, anyone wanting to do such a transaction anonymously needs to use Crypto.  Of course those  transactions are mostly illegal, but that doesn't mean they are always a bad thing.

RE

Crypto is only good for laundering money.  It has no other purpose.

I posted prior articles about the perceived threat of Quantum Computing to encryption and crypto currency systems under another thread, but I think it needs a home of its own moving forward.  It remains to be seen how real the perceived threat will turn out to be, but if even one of the major crypto currency systems is compromised or ultra-secure military systems are hacked it would be a game changer in the flow of information and money transfers.  It will be a while before anything major happens, but it's worth keeping track of.

RE

Big surprise!  So what's next?

RE

Quote from: TDoS on Jul 06, 2026, 05:25 PMWell, once this site had all sorts of folks stopping in, discussing most anything, it was great entertainment. RE's early sites had even more followers. That might have been guru level leader status I suppose..

The reason I had a following was because I Blogged.  I no longer do that, so the people who liked reading my take on history, economics, anthropology, politics, energy, futurism and my autobiographical material have drifted away.  I no longer have sufficient energy to sit at the keyboard to write at the length I used to.  I also no longer can keyboard anywhere near my old speed.  I'm down to one hand hunt and peck typing.   My old blogs would usually range from 5-10K words and I could crank them out in a day.  Today, one of those blogs would take a month.

I wish I still could blog.  There are some ideas and topics I either never thought had relevance to collapse or are so controversial I didn't think it wise to publish while still alive so I didn't write about them.   I have no desire to be martyred for having wildly unpopular opinions and end up in prison. lol.  At this point though, prison would not be that much different than my current accommodations, though I don't think they let prisoners have unrestricted access to the internet, which thank god I still have.

Anyhow, now all we do is chronicle the newz stories which are relevant to the topics I used to write on at great length.  It's not enough to develop or retain a following.  I'd like to do video again, but I've been waiting for Kdog to set up a better platform than what I used to do with Skype and YouTube.  Hopefully he'll eventually get around to that.  I can still talk well enough unscripted to do an entertaining show.  Maybe I can still be a Guru. lol. 😀

RE