Bitcoin's still anonymous inventor, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, figured out a completely new way for a decentralized network to reach a consensus about a shared transaction ledger. This innovation made possible the kind of fully decentralized electronic payment systems that cypherpunks had dreamed about for decades. //

One challenge is how to introduce new coins into the system. Obviously a viable payment network needs some way to create new coins, but if you let anyone create new coins whenever they want, the currency will quickly become worthless. //

The second challenge is known as the double-spending problem. The rules of bitcoin say that each transaction output can only be spent once. If someone tries to spend the same output twice, the bitcoin community needs some way to detect this double-spending attempt and reject the later transaction. //

bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to build a network that wasn't controlled up by any single organization.

So Nakamoto invented a shared ledger called the blockchain that is maintained by computers, called nodes, operating on a peer-to-peer network. Thousands of computers around the world keep separate copies of the entire blockchain, storing every transaction that has happened since the network was launched in 2009. The network rewards nodes who help to create the blockchain by allowing them to create new bitcoins—solving the coin-distribution problem while simultaneously creating an incentive to help solve the ledger-updating problem.

I’ve been an Amazon user for about 15 years, and an addict since we became Prime members about three years ago. It’s been surprisingly easy to kick the habit.

It’s attractive for politicians to keep taxes low and spending high. Each of our last four presidential administrations has benefited from this dynamic.

Wall Street and global business, which dominates Washington policymaking, have also benefited greatly. These corporate actors care about their next financial quarter a lot more than our country’s state of affairs 10 or more years down the road.

This period will be looked upon by historians as the saddest time in our history: a once great country behaving so selfishly and with such short-term interests that they sold their children’s futures away with barely any debate.

When journalists defend the removal of art you know we are plunging down the cultural waterslide… //

Some, like Philip Bump, go so far as to say if you defend these ‘’racist’’ books it is because you want to defend racism. Defending a person’s right to speak is not defending their actual speech. He knows this, or at the very least he should. But for him, and the others, preserving their right to expression is less important than virtue signaling, and then using the call for free expression as a tool to injure political opposition.

It is a shallow and craven mindset. This is echoed in the belief that every person has a right to vote, but if a racist votes for a certain candidate then everyone who voted for said candidate is a racist. It is the thinking that justifies targeted silencing and approves of making an entire movement a pariah. That our members of the press are pushing this is beyond disturbing.

The lesson learned is that we must never be sucked into complacency as preached by ANYONE, as that path is exactly what the Uniparty/Deep State/globalists wish us to trod. These people want us all to be complacent and unconcerned while they work diligently behind the scenes to achieve their evil ends. Ben Franklin charged us as American citizens to take continual corrective actions in our government if we wanted to keep our constitutional Republic, not sit on our hands and “trust the plan.” Time to take out the trash bigly and get to work.

The end.

Solar and wind power provide carbon-free electricity. But their generation is tied to the vagaries of nature. That is why, to achieve a zero-carbon electric grid, technologies that can store that energy for when it’s needed will have to play a big role.

While lithium-ion batteries have started to meet some of the need for storage, the metals needed to make them are not plentiful enough for large-scale energy hoarding. So entrepreneurs around the world have been looking for alternatives.

At Quartz, we’ve written about companies working on reversible sulfur power-plants, injecting water underground, running “refrigerators on steroids,” and using stacked concrete blocks—all with the purpose of storing excess renewable energy. Add to that list Hydrostor, a Canadian startup that’s storing energy by injecting compressed air into deep underground caverns.

The Trump Campaign laid down a huge marker for the final 50 days leading up to Election Day — voters can embrace the patriotic history that focuses on 1776 and what came after, or 1619 and what the New York Times says should be important. //

Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.

American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools, cancel culture at work or the repression of traditional faith, culture, and values in the public square,” Trump said.

Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse, the truest sense. For many years now, the radicals have mistaken Americans’ silence for weakness. They’re wrong. There is no more powerful force than a parent’s love for their children.

The left-wing Cultural Revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution … The Left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.

tonysc

I was reading Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, and he makes the distinction between 'legislation' and what was called 'law' or, putting it into the bigger framework, the 'Rule of Law.'

When you really read what he's saying, the problem we have today and what the quote above talks about, is that what the Rule of Law refers to is not the regime of arbitrary and capricious 'legislation', legislation that some group of people pass to do or force you to do something but that has little to do with the concept of the concept called 'Law'.

In fact, he makes the point that what we have today is nothing like the old meanings of what the Rule of Law is. In other words, it looks like we may need to go back to first principles and get some better understand and agreement around what Law and the Rule of Law is or... we're just talking past each other.

aramandai

A simple example would be whether speed limits are being used for our protection or as a voluntary tax to finance the state. Since my vehicle does not have a limiter preventing it from going over 100 mph then I would present that speed limits are to generate taxes. The way the law is enforced also makes it obvious.

tonysc

IIRC, he and the original discussions around the Rule of Law, viewed Law as the limiting of freedom and, according to what the Rule of Law meant. His argument would have been more around the general principles around even setting the speed limit and limiting our freedoms in the first place, what the car could or couldn't do was irrelevant.

The Rule of Law was about the balancing of the inherent freedom man has with the needs of society. The making of arbitrary rules of law that ignore the need to maintain freedoms he considers legislation and it has no relation to the Rule of Law.

A few years ago the State of Michigan's legislature got tired of municipalities using the setting of arbitrary speed limits so they could not just raise revenue but generally control people. So, they passed a state law that mandated that all of the rules making around WHAT the speed limit should be MUST be preceded by a traffic study. A lot of municipalities didn't like that and, as a result, when a citizen decided to fight the tickets, the courts were throwing out the speeding tickets because the cities didn't follow state law.

Hayek would have argued that a speed limit based on a general rule like "We must somehow slow the upper 2% of the speeds that we see" was real Law but the setting of the speed limit to 25, in violation of the general rule, in open desert on a straight-away with 4 lanes because someone wanted to raise revenue... this does not conform to the Rule of Law but to the Rule of Legislative Acts.

We conservatives really need to not let the left convince us that the latter is the former and then enlist the tendency of the right to be law abiding, especially when it's being used as a tool to restrict our freedoms.

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Video editor Joaquim Campa has remastered, colorized and “deOldified” the iconic 1897 black and white silent film Louis Lumière entitled “Bataille de Nege” (“Snowball Fight”). With these enhancements, the humorous scene in which a man is knocked off his bicycle can be witnessed with greater clarity.

Editor's note: Twelve Civil War historians and political scientists who research the Civil War composed a letter to The New York Times Magazine concerning 'The 1619 Project.' The NYTM editor, Jake Silverstein, responded but the NYTM declined to publish the letter and his response. The scholars created a reply and Silverstein had no objection to publishing the exchange in another venue. It is published below.

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We’re building on hard lessons learned. Some of us previously argued for free trade agreements because we believed Americans would broadly share in the economic gains and that those deals would shape the global economy in ways that we wanted. We had good reasons to think those things, but we didn’t do enough to understand who would be negatively affected and what would be needed to adequately offset their pain or to enforce agreements that were already on the books and help more workers and small businesses fully benefit from them. Our approach now will be different. We will fight for every American job and for the rights, protections and interests of all American workers. We will use every tool to stop countries from stealing our intellectual property or manipulating their currencies to get an unfair advantage. We will fight corruption which stacks the deck against us and our trade policies will need to answer very clearly how they will grow the American middle class, create new and better jobs and benefit all Americans, not only those for whom the economy is already working. //

If Blinkin’s comments are a public recognition of this reality, and the need to treat China as a force of evil in the world that it truly is, then the Biden Administration will have gone a long way in gaining some level of respect from me on foreign policy. I will disagree with pretty much everything else they do, but I can hold my nose for much of it without too much complaint if they get things right on countering China.