Finance Update: Bitcoin, the War on the Poor, AstroTurf by the Rich, and More
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-01 13:35:30 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-01 13:35:30 UTC
Bitcoin
-
Bitcoin, the emerging if still somewhat mysterious digital currency, may be coming soon to a high-tech ATM near you.
Kiosks that allow people to buy the virtual coins, or exchange them for cash, will be installed within the next month or so in Seattle and Austin, Texas, according to Robocoin, the Las Vegas-based company that makes the machines.
-
Bitcoin is big news again. The digital cryptocurrency is on the frontpage of every major newspaper. This week its price collapsed because the largest exchange on the network did not handle a known design flaw in bitcoin properly, which caused widespread disruption and possibly some loss of bitcoin. As a precaution, several exchanges had to close their virtual doors till further notice.
-
Feb 28 11:27 - A class action lawsuit has been filed that sues Mark Karpeles, MtGox Inc (US), MtGox KK (JP), and Tibanne KK (JP) for pretty much all of the above.
US
-
What's worth keeping an eye on is whether the Sam's Club layoffs are a symptom of much larger problems at Wal-Mart. The company has been a giant of retail for decades, but there are signs that its reign is coming to an end.
-
Wal-Mart (WMT) reported today and by now, most people who follow the stock are aware of the highlights: EPS before special items, at $1.60, beat estimates by a penny; revenues fell short of estimates; same-store sales and traffic fell.
-
A plan to clear homeless people from New York City subway trains in a pre-dawn Monday operation by police and transportation officials was abandoned amid pressure from campaigners.
Dozens of homeless men and women sleeping on the seats of E line trains as they rolled into the World Trade Center terminal in the early hours were left alone, despite warnings that they would be asked to leave so cars could be cleaned.
“It was postponed,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told the Guardian. “We decided not to go ahead. I can’t give you a specific reason why it was postponed. But it may well take place in the future”.
-
A group of fired-up activists in Portland, Ore., who were tired of seeing homeless people being mistreated staged the kind of protest that will be difficult for the mayor to ignore.
-
The instant messaging service connects millions, but its record-breaking sale won't generate new jobs
-
America’s wealthy increasingly inhabit a different country from the one “they” inhabit, and America’s less fortunate seem as foreign as do the needy inhabitants of another country.
The first step in widening the sphere of “we” is to break down the barriers — not just of race, but also, increasingly, of class, and of geographical segregation by income — that are pushing “we Americans” further and further apart.
UK
-
The formerly homeless are increasingly trapped in homes riddled with damp and infested with rodents after ministers gave councils powers to force those without a roof over their heads into rented accommodation rather than wait for a council house, a report by Britain's biggest housing charities has found.
-
Quietly and without notice, Britain has surrendered control over its trade with Iran
Central Europe
-
One of the favourite parts of my job is meeting young ICT and web entrepreneurs - who are creating new apps and services that benefit us all. Our Startup Europe programme was designed to support this group - as you can see in my earlier blog post – but it's also a way of encouraging more young people to get involved and see digital entrepreneurship as a viable career path.
AstroTurf
-
Records obtained in 2011 from the office of Ohio Rep. John Adams, the ALEC public sector chair for the state, show how he worked closely with ALEC's Ohio private sector chair, Time Warner Cable lobbyist Ed Kozelek, to raise funds for the national ALEC meeting held in Cincinnati in April 2011.
-
The gig is up for the everyone's favorite deficit fetishists, Simpson and Bowles. It starts great with the headline: Anti-debt group finds itself in red.
-
A year and a half after launching with much fanfare, a group affiliated with fiscal watchdogs Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson is nearly broke.
Misc.
-
The first part of this clip is about why a lot of the good jobs are gone (hint: it rhymes with whoa-balization), and the second part gets to the point about where things are made and what countries benefit. Economist Robert Reich shows us, and it's a little ... scary.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Techrights Should be Even Faster Now
- We're now better off
- Richard Stallman (RMS) Gave 3 Talks in India in Less Than a Week
- In India this month we've not seen a single negative comment about RMS
- Microsoft Mass Layoffs Without Severance Pay Reported Hours After Microsoft Reported Weak Numbers and Microsoft Stock Fell
- Microsoft has a bloodbath this month
- Another Slew of Fake Articles About 'Linux' and 'Security' From Brittany Day at linuxsecurity.com (Spamfarm/Slopfarm)
- linuxsecurity.com is basically a pariah and parasite. It lessens the incentive to write real articles about "Linux" by generating fake ones to outrank the originals.
- IBM: Many Thousands of Layoffs in 2025
- If 2025 is expected to be the same, then perhaps about 20,000 IBM workers will no longer be there
-
- Gemini Links 31/01/2025: "Bulletin Buble" and "Why Blog?"
- Links for the day
- Static Site Generators (SSGs) Pay Off: Vastly Faster Sites, Much Smaller Hosting Bills
- success story for SSGs
- Of Note: Linux Foundation Has Already Let Linux.com Rot for About 4 Months (No Activity)
- there's no campaign aside from marketing spam there
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, January 30, 2025
- Indian Data Biases statCounter For or Against "Linux"
- In statCounter, the GNU/Linux increases and decreases are deeply tied to what it does with data collected in India
- The Corporate Media Pretends That Facebook ("Meta") Has Performed Well, But Its Debt Doubles Every 2 Years Despite Mass Layoffs
- That same media also helps parrot misleading financial claims
- Microsoft's Debt Surged by More Than 6,000,000,000 Dollars in Just 3 Months
- numbers released hours ago
- The Sheer Irony of Microsoft Proxy Accusing Others of 'Stealing'
- Wherever DeepSick's data came from, Microsoft (or its proxy) is in no position to issue criticism.
- The Difference a Decade (and GAFAM Money) Makes
- Credibility cannot be purchased
- [Meme] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Critics Because Its Message is Effective
- Applying to others the same standards one is willing to violate?
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised $422,000 (Another $22k in the Two Weeks After Campaign Ended), Proving That Truth and Justice Tend to Find a Way
- 10,000+ dollars a week even without campaigning for more funds
- Faking Revenue Increase by Buying Your Own Products and Services (Through Scams and Scammers Like Scam Altman)
- Is this what society deserves? Media that instead of exposing corruption has chosen to participate in it and profit from it?
- Links 30/01/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) Causes Deaths, FBI Seizes Domains
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Action vs Inaction, Gopherholes, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 30/01/2025: Microsoft Wants Convicted Felon to Give Fentanylware (TikTok) to It (After Making a Phonecall Asking for That in 2019), "Moving Away From Google's Ecosystem"
- Links for the day
- Jack M. Germain (LinuxInsider) Seems to Have Turned to LLM Slop, Graphics Slop, and B2B SPAM
- LinuxInsider is barely active anymore
- Links 30/01/2025: Amazon Layoffs and DeepSeek Panic
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Chaos Reigns, E-mail, Searching
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- Google: Your Only Option is Google YouTube (Coming Soon: Mandatory DRM and Attestation?)
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) to follow? Only for "approved" (attestation) browsers?
- Mastodon Was Always Biased (Just Like Twitter After Abandoning Chronological and Neutral Timelines in Order to Become More Like Facebook)
- So bury-brigading and click-farming control what people see
- Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt Falls to Only 0.4% of the Total in Geminispace
- Geminispace does not need to outsource trust
- The Munich-Based EPO is Still Using a Platform That Promotes the Far Right and Rehabilitates Nazism
- Active Twitter account
- Links 29/01/2025: Dismantling Public Health in the US, Air Busan Plane Up in Flames (South Korea's Air Disasters Streak)
- Links for the day
- Announcements and Administrivia
- This week we're going out for two days in a row to celebrate an achievement that's very respectable
- Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Japan, GTD, and More
- Links for the day
- Sir, Yes, Sir. The Life of EPO Patent Examiners.
- If working for the EPO makes it harder to sleep at night, take action
- How the EPO Pressures Staff Into Minting More Monopolies (Patents), Even Illegal Ones That Harm Europe and Ultimately Dismantle the Rule of Law
- insights into the pressure examiners are under
- LLM Slop Machines Are Not a Win for "Open Source" and If They Get Cheaper, It's Even Worse
- If some program that claims to be "Open Source" pollutes the Web with fake articles (Microsoft SPAM and fake "Linux" articles), whose win is it?
- Links 29/01/2025: Data Privacy Day and Growing Tensions in Europe
- Links for the day
- Nazi Twitter (aka "X") Became a Troll Site That Lets People Buy a Blue Tick While Its Boss Actively Promotes Neonazi Politicians
- the intellectual level of people who infest the Web through "Twitter" or "X"
- This is Why They're So Afraid of Richard Stallman (He Tells People the Correct History)
- Then they post about it to Microsoft's LinkedIn
- Richard Stallman Speech in Bengaluru, "Silicon Valley of India"
- 62 years have passed since his "young nerd" days and he's still at it
- Claim: Facebook Deletes Posts of IBM Red Hat Critics
- As always, follow the money (advertisers)
- Links 29/01/2025: Climate Crisis and "It’s time for the Xbox to fade away" (Microsoft Lose)
- Links for the day
- Links 29/01/2025: Buying Groceries During a Trade War, Political 'Retro'
- Links for the day
- More Illegal Patents at the EPO, Legality of Granted European Patents No Longer Matters to the Office
- breaking the law for profit
- Network Improvements Tomorrow
- "Network maintenance" down in London
- Sharing is Caring (But Advocating Copyleft Makes You a "Target")
- GPLv3 does not close all the loopholes which the "Affero" helps close
- Articles About Free Speech at Facebook
- 'Facebook vs Linux' story is now receiving a lot more media coverage
- We Were Right About stallmansupport.org Making an Error by Joining Social Control Media. mastodon.social Suspends stallmansupport.org.
- From what we can guess, accounts can be banned by some oversensitive admin or a mob of users ("bury brigades")
- "Latest Technology News" in BetaNews Still LLM Slop and SPAM Composed by LLMs (It's Basically a Spamfarm Disguised as a News Site)
- Only a fool would visit BetaNews in search of actual news
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, January 28, 2025
- The EPO's Corruption, If It Remains Untackled, Helps the Far Right and Enemies of European Unity/Solidarity
- Do not negotiate with evil
- The Web, Including Wikipedia, Gets Filled With Lies About Bill Gates, Added by Bill Gates and His PR Team
- Of course Wikipedia is funded by Gates
- Facebook Banning Linux Sites (or People Who Link to Linux Sites) is Another Symptom of the Web's Demise
- The state of media on the Web is really bad; Social Control Media amplifies the badness, as Facebook serves to show
- Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Neovim Telescope and Writing Less
- Links for the day