I get that anything is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. That's besides the point. My point is, beyond speculation, what do crypto coins represent?

I also understand that the value of the US dollar is being questioned almost as much without the backing of gold.

But what I really want to know is what is at the foundation level of Bitcoin that people are buying into?

I have a basic understanding of the blockchain, etc. I sold 1BTC in 2017 for $1200 when I thought that was as high as it would go. At this point, at over $100kUSD and rising steadily, what is the $ limit and what is that limit based upon? I thought it was based on the value of mining to check transactions but this seems... not worth $100k to me.

I've been thinking, the only tangible value I personally see in Bitcoin, because it's not really being used as legitimate currency, is for criminals. By now, there must be trillions of dollars in BTC acquired by criminals holding corporations hostage. When you've got people like Trump involved (either explicitly or by way of manipulation) with an executive order to establish a crypto czar, this suggests to me that he's creating pathways for bad actors to more effectively gain more wealth. These are the people who are most excited in Bitcoin, beyond speculation.

I mean, there's little to nothing on the up and up with crypto, right? It's a scam. Right?

Please, factual answers only. I'm looking for someone to dispel my speculation with genuine economics of the matter.

I'm looking to get a card for general spending that's not tied to any account. Is a gift card the way to go? Are these reloadable?

Don't say cash - lots of places don't take cash any more.

Excerpts:

When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.

Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”

I've just been archiving about 75 of my deceased uncle's CD-Rs which, I'm assuming, he had archived from his EMusic account. The labeling of the CDs (ex., 13/08/23) and the order of tracks is completely wacked but I really appreciate that I have "hard copies".

Last year, I gave my 16 year old nephew a classic (refurbed) iPod full of about 10,000 songs. Don't think he really appreciated it (and the months it took me to curate it). Kid was touching the screen and had no idea what a click wheel was.

I'm an avid record (500) and CD (100) collector but I have close to 100,000 tracks in my digital library. This music was acquired in a number of ways but only about a quarter of it was ever paid for by me. I know how to get music for free. I'm sure most of this sub knows too.

I've mostly resorted to buying physical media for the albums I really like and sourcing digital music with abandon for background music, playlists, and iPod playback.

For a wide variety of reasons, I do not use streaming music services. For one, with such a large music collection of my own, I was never listening to it. Two, and more importantly for this post, you can't pass down a subscription service.

I'm just curious, is anyone buying digital music anymore?

Bandcamp is an easy place to pay for music but it's not really mainstream. If you wanted to buy the new Teddy Swims album, where would you buy that? I just pulled this album out as an example because it's in the iTunes Store. Apple has it for $8 but the artist has a 24/44 MP3 for $5.

Where are you buying digital music from and why?

Ooh - and is anyone either buying digital and burning to CD for backup or buying CDs and ripping them for playback? Or are you all too young for CDs over here?

Importantly, scientists have determined that the genetic changes in the bird flu’s genome, that have accelerated the development of the panzootic, have been driven by climate change. A comment by wildlife ecologist Diann Prosser at the Eastern Ecological Science Center located in Maryland Laurel US and her team, published in Nature Microbiology in November 2023, titled, “Climate change impacts on bird migration and highly pathogenic avian influenza,” stated that “Climate change patterns appear to parallel an unprecedented global spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).”

The current outbreak in US dairy cows poses an enormous threat to human populations. This threat is being expanded by the US ruling elites’ program of trashing basic public health measures in the interests of big business with the continuing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. “Forever COVID” is being expanded to avian influenza, but with even more lethal consequences if it becomes a pandemic.

President elect Donald Trump’s recent selection of anti-vaccine zealot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as his appointment of Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and television doctor Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), alongside other vicious opponents of public health to fill out the health agencies, clearly demonstrates that public health will be further eviscerated for the interests of big business, neutering the potential of science to solve these crucial questions for the future of humanity.

Edit:
Since 2003, 51% of the 903 people infected have died.

Currently, without a vaccine, there is the potential for this being a very grave threat.

Please take a moment to read this article and continue to pay attention to this issue. The CDC has a page here https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html Given the situation with the US presidency, I would suggest finding other trustworthy sources.

I've pulled quotes from the article to express my personal opinion on the issue. That being that our increasing consumption of animals raised on factory farms, our reliance on fossil fuels, and general culture of over-consumption is contributing to both climate change and a measurable increase in livestock disease.

From my perspective, we are quite literally on the path of a death spiral. Everyone should be taking their consumption of animal products very seriously and finding ways to reduce by any amount. I'm not vegan nor do I intend to be but I do go out of my way to source animal products from smaller local farms. Please, take time to learn to cook for yourself using fresh foods. I believe quality nutritional intake should be the single highest priority for everyone.

I can understand people looking at the cast and the budget and the trailers and going into the film expecting one thing and getting something entirely different. I, however, thought this movie was incredible. And terrifying.

I'm not really one to watch movie trailers anymore. They're too long and tell too much of the story while too often setting up misguided expectations. But they're also difficult to avoid.

I went into this movie knowing little more than some visuals from the trailer, it's Coppola with Driver, and it's been poorly reviewed.

After watching the film on the comfort of my couch, I was gassed. This movie is a warning. It's warning us about greed and capitalism and nationalism and rejecting our humanity. There have been countless works of fiction warning us about the consequences of merely being human. It's evident that too few of us have been heeding these warnings.

Having little knowledge of the stories this is based on (see: Catilinarian conspiracy), I searched for some interviews with Coppola. Now, you can say a movie should be complete all on its own without additional knowledge; and that's fine. I disagree. I enjoy movies that pull from other works and history. This film retches with metaphor and I love it. I like stories that breathe outside the theater, that ask me to make connections, that keep me thinking about them long after the credits are over.

The premise of the film is that the United States was intentionally based on the Roman Republic and, like Rome, is on a course towards collapsing. It's a great argument that Coppola has illustrated and it should be a moment for us all to reflect upon. He's been working on this film since the 1980s it could not be more pertinent right now. We should dissect this film as we should dissect the rise and fall of Rome.

The film claims, Utopia isn't a place - it's the commonness of genuine debate, empathy, equity, and not being a pawn in a corporatocracy.

It ends in a way today's youth should resent. It says, look at all this shit your elders and governments have done - now it's up to you to fix it. Because if you don't, sorry, but you're on the path towards the Empire of America. Still, it says so in a hopeful way.

I don't think it's a perfect movie. I wish some things were done differently - perhaps a little more specifically or apparently - a tiny bit more cohesion. My politics and my rage-buttons might prefer more direct lines to modern day personalities. But I really enjoy the opportunity it gives us to debate and compare and to, maybe, step outside our echo chambers.

Compared to the vast majority of cinema that's been put out in recent years, Megalopolis "leaps into the unknown". Preexisting Hollywood franchises are continually regurgitated for people who fear the unknown. Discomfort is divisive. Populism is comforting. Populism rejects freedom. What's gained from repetitiveness but disconnection from our imagination? Imagination created the gods. We need to reject populism to create great things.

The film itself may have some flaws but Coppola's story is monumental. I'm looking forward to watching this movie again and studying up on the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the Catilinarian Conspiracy.

Edit: I just saw a tv ad for crypto and their tag line is “fortune favors the brave”. Hilariously, it’s a very pertinent statement.

Why are grocery prices so high?

Several factors affect food prices, such as:

• Supply chain challenges, including those related to COVID-19 and global relations such as the war in Ukraine.
• Inflation.
• Higher labor and transportation costs.
• Animal disease, such as the avian flu in 2022 which impacted egg and chicken prices.
• Extreme weather events which damage crops and affect animals.

The USDA expects grocery store prices to increase 1.2% in 2024 compared to 2023. Although the federal government can take indirect action to help manage grocery prices, it does not have a direct say in controlling price increases.

“The need is infrastructure,” he said. “You may produce all this light sweet crude oil in Texas. But if you don’t have pipelines to the nation’s refineries to deliver it, how are you going to be able to utilize it?”

So importing foreign crude oil is cheaper. Meanwhile, De Haan said, increasing renewable energy demand is making investments in fossil fuels riskier.

So we buy and refine the cheaper stuff, and we sell our more expensive stuff to places that can’t do that. There’s one more discount: The majority of our oil comes from our closest neighbor.

I've posted this in response to Trump's promise to "drill, baby, drill" as well as for all the people who have fuel prices as one of their primary concerns.

The reason gas prices are high is because it doesn't make fiscal sense for corporations to invest in the infrastructure to refine locally sourced crude oil. And, as it seems, refining local crude may actually increase prices at the pumps.

From everything I've read (please share anything that's contradictory), it seems like Trump's agenda is going to increase the cost of everything. For the number of people who voted based on 'the economy', I wish we had had more transparent discussions about the impact of his plans. I'm already scared for whomever has to inherit this pending catastrophe.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested would have a “big role” in his second administration, wasted no time laying out potential public health measures he would oversee if given the chance.

Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has no medical or public health degrees and has promoted anti-vaccine conspiracies for years, told NBC News on Wednesday that he would not “take away anybody’s vaccines,” but that he wanted Americans to be informed with the “best information” available so they “can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”

“People ought to have choice,” he said, adding that he has “never been anti-vaccine.”

Mr. Kennedy has been a prominent critic of the childhood vaccination schedule and has frequently linked some vaccines to autism and other health issues. Studies have long shown no such connection.

On the topic of adding fluoride to drinking water, which helps to protect teeth, Mr. Kennedy said the mineral was “lowering I.Q. in our children,” despite decades’ worth of studies that show its efficacy and safety. “I think fluoride is on its way out,” he said. “I think the faster that it goes out, the better. I’m not going to compel anybody to take it out, but I’m going to advise the water districts about their legal liability.”

The treatment of public water with small amounts of fluoride has been widely hailed as one of the most important public health interventions of the past century; the American Dental Association has said that it reduces dental decay by at least 25 percent.

Mr. Kennedy also said that if he were given a position in Mr. Trump’s administration, he would focus on eliminating corruption at public health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some departments, including those focused on nutrition, “have to go,” he told NBC. “They’re not protecting our kids.”

“Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they’re going to get a lot healthier,” he added. As president, Mr. Trump would have only limited authority to make some of these changes, and some would need congressional approval. But on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump said he would let Mr. Kennedy “go wild on health.”

“I want to be in the White House, and he has assured me that I’m going to have that,” Mr. Kennedy said this week.

Tariffs are at the center of former President Donald Trump’s economic plan. He wants to put across-the-board 60% tariffs on everything from China and 10%-20% on everything else from the rest of the world. It’s an extreme trade policy that he wants to use to generate revenue to cut taxes. But how would they work?