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
- Digital Sovereignty Discussed in the United Kingdom (UK)
- Digital Sovereignty would be nice, but let's remember what contributes to it
- IBM Adds Only More IBM Staff to the Fedora Council, They Like LLM Slop for Posting 'Articles'
- It's like Canonical with Ubuntu, only worse
-
- Internet Relay Chat (Shorthand IRC) is Still Growing
- Contrariwise, social control media is waning
- The Register MS Published a New Page With "AI" 21 Times in It. It Was Paid SPAM.
- The former editor of the The Register MS admitted to me (directly) that he knew all this "AI" stuff was stupid hype
- Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Associates Dependence on a Ponzi Scheme With "the Future"
- Those ludicrous ads (disguised as rankings) from WSJ deserve scorn and ridicule
- The XBox Story is Still Fast-Developing, the Layoffs Are Confirmed to be Happening Already (Mid-June), Just Not "Officially"
- Workers have Microsoft have long braced for what is happening this summer and will accelerate further in two weeks' time
- Fake News From Rupert Murdoch's WSJ Could Not Keep IBM From Sinking
- "2026 Best Companies for the Future"?
- To GNU, AV2 Adoption May be a Year If Not Years Away
- The leap between versions means that there is fertile ground for incompatibilities
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 18, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 18, 2026
- Gemini Links 19/06/2026: "Born and Raised by the Internet", Fifteen Years in Gopher
- Links for the day
- Links 18/06/2026: Clown Computing Has Harmful Sound, Facebook "Must Face the Music (Infringement Litigation)"
- Links for the day
- IBM Common Stock Down to About $250, It Was at $330 Just 17 Days Ago
- Happy birthday IBM!
- Microsoft's CEO Openly Admits XBox is Not Sustainable and Microsoft is Beginning to Admit Slop Isn't Working and Is Not Not Sustainable Either
- Expect Microsoft cancellations next month (or later this month) to impact far more than XBox and some studios
- EPO and Disabilities: Payments Allegedly Disabled
- But people who do cocaine can claim paid "sick leave" (over 100,000 euros for no work at all) if the President sleeps with them
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 110 Out of 200: Anti-SLAPP Reform Formally Advanced in the United Kingdom (UK) the Same Week the Serial Strangler From Microsoft (US) Does Forum-Shopping in the UK
- The only language they understand is money. They don't understand privacy.
- Links 18/06/2026: UK Social Media Ban for Minors, Finland Lifts a Nuclear Weapons Ban
- Links for the day
- 'Article' With "AI" 27 Times in the Page, It's "Partner Content" (Paid Spam) as Usual at The Register MS
- We deem this a timely reminder that a lot of the hype around slop is paid-for lies
- Microsoft Layoffs Have Reportedly Already Started at ZeniMax
- The overall scale is unknown
- Cyber Show: "Our independence remains intact and we're set to continue relentlessly probing the world of digital technology with hard questions"
- As one should
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Leveraging the Lusitanian Connection
- Mendonça no longer functions as an independent agent but rather as a fig-leaf for a mafia-like entity that prizes obedience over integrity and self-preservation over truth
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 17, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, June 17, 2026
- The "Official" Numbers That Say "Microsoft Layoffs" Will be Misleading
- The scale of the layoffs in gaming will be unprecedented
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 109 Out of 200: When You Drag Family Members Into a Case Unrelated to Them Because Their Relative Published Something
- This did not exactly surprise us given what we had already encountered
- SUEPO Munich Informs/Contacts the German Government About the Situation at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- Salary Erosion Procedure: Two letters to Germany
- Gemini Links 17/06/2026: Feeling "Useful"; PISA Pen-and-Paper Cipher
- Links for the day
- Trajectory of O'Reilly: From Publisher of Books to Microsoft Advertiser
- The state of the media is not good and when prolific book publishers start running ads as 'articles' or videos (never mind the disclosure) it is rather tasteless
- Links 17/06/2026: Slop's “Crack Cocaine” Approach to Pricing, Microsoft's Rapid Shrinking of Gaming Business
- Links for the day
- Links 17/06/2026: "How Developers React to Slop-Scented Blog Posts", Police Caught Fabricating Evidence Using Slop
- Links for the day
- More Than 90% in European Patent Office (EPO) Ballot Vote for Continuation of Industrial Actions/Strikes, About Half Wish to Further Intensify These
- Ballot results on intensification of actions
- If Not Now, Then When?
- If you are not part of the solution/s, then you're merely a vessel or passive participant
- Microsoft Offers People 'Retirements' (Again) to Fake (Artificially Lower) Number of Layoffs, Those People Are Nowhere Near Retirement Age
- Microsoft implicitly affirms huge cuts are coming
- Gemini Links 17/06/2026: 10 Years in Canada, Wild Flower Explorations, and Microslop
- Links for the day
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The Portuguese Prodigy
- In this part we will present some additional background information about Mendonça's activities before he joined the EPO
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 16, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, June 16, 2026