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Thursday, January 11, 2018

Buffett: Will central banks burst bitcoin bubble?


The latest round of jawboning from central banks suggests their tolerance for cryptocurrencies is wearing thin.

Will central banks burst bitcoin bubble? 


You know when you’re watching a fan or a wheel or something else quickly spinning and it seems to stop spinning and even looks like it’s spinning backwards? And you blink your eyes and remind yourself you’re not on drugs and haven’t been drinking heavily but it’s still somehow simultaneously spinning and not? This optical illusion occurs most commonly with video cameras (but can also occur looking through your normal eyeballs) when the frame rate of the camera matches some multiple of the rate of the thing being filmed, as with this magically levitating helicopter.
Since each frame has to ensure the blade is in the same position as the last it therefore needs to be in sync with the rpm of the rotar blades. Shutter speed then needs to be fast enough to freeze the blade without too much motion blur within each frame.
Here the rotor has five blades, now lets say the rpm of the rotor is 300. That means, per rotation, a blade is in a specific spot on five counts. That gives us an effective rpm of 1500. 1500rpm / 60secs = 25.
Therefore shooting at 25fps will ensure the rotor blades are shot in the same position every frame. Each frame then has to be shot at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the blade for minimal motion blur.

The Year in Money





A review of money issues…and mainly not bitcoin 

Warren Buffett says cryptocurrencies will 'almost certainly come to a bad ending'



That’s a clip from the HBO documentary, Becoming Warren Buffett. The full documentary is here.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are two of the richest men in the world.
One time Warren was at Bill’s house for dinner and Bills dad asked them to write down on a piece of paper what was one word to describe their success.
Focus.
They both wrote down the exact same word.
(via gruber)

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has weighed in on the bitcoin frenzy, saying he will never invest in it or any other cryptocurrencies - while predicting a "bad ending" for those who do.




Two US companies have shelved proposals to launch bitcoin exchange-traded funds, citing concerns by the SEC.

Bitcoin ETFs pulled over US regulators' concerns

The AEC says it needs funding to revamp technology and protect against cyber threats, warning foreign interference represents a "potential catastrophic risk".

Foreign interference a 'catastrophic' risk 

  


















AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information


Motherboard: “…In a recent paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, computer scientists Ani Nenkova and Yinfei Yang, of Google and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, describe a new machine learning approach to classifying written journalism according to a formalized idea of “content density.” With an average accuracy of around 80 percent, their… Continue Reading



















The ACCC is seeking millions in fines and up to 10 years jail for executives of a series of high-profile companies in first criminal cartel cases.

ACCC seeks jail time, fines for cartels

 

Fair Work has rejected a TAFE manager's claims he was "scapegoated" for a training fraud after finding he developed a false cover story.

Sacked manager 'no scapegoat' in TAFE fraud


Tech: “The Great Attention Heist” [Los Angeles Review of Books]. “The consequences of this vast gambit for our attention is that we have been drawn into a kind of mental slavery. Masters of profits and propaganda are farming our minds, doing cumulative damage that may go to the very core of our humanity. As a result, our attention is becoming locked into a low level of living and functioning…. As we would not throw a precious jewel into the trash, so we should not surrender our priceless and finite capacity for attention to the merchants for resale.”
Tech: “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance” [Quartz]. Google’s origin story revised for historical accuracy….. 
Tech: “Yes, Your Amazon Echo Is an Ad Machine” [Slashdot]. “Proctor & Gamble as well as Clorox are reportedly in talks for major advertising deals that would allow Alexa to suggest products for you to buy. CNBC uses the example of asking Alexa how to remove a stain, with Alexa in turn recommending a Clorox product. So far it’s unclear how Amazon would identify promoted responses from Alexa, if at all. Here’s the really wacky thing: Amazon has already been doing this sort of thing to some degree. Currently, paid promotions are built into Alexa responses, but maybe you just haven’t noticed it. CNBC uses this example: ‘There are already some sponsorships on Alexa that aren’t tied to a user’s history. If a shopper asks Alexa to buy toothpaste, one response is, ‘Okay, I can look for a brand, like Colgate. What would you like?'”
Tech: “[Amazon has] created a new division called Alexa Voice Services, which builds hardware and software with the aim of making it stupendously easy to add Alexa into whatever ceiling fan, lightbulb, refrigerator, or car someone might be working on. ‘You should be able to talk to Alexa no matter where you’re located or what device you’re talking to,’ says Priya Abani, Amazon’s director of AVS enablement. ‘We basically envision a [
dystopian corporate hellscape] world where Alexa is everywhere'” [Wired]. And listening precedes talking, right?
Tech: “You Will No Longer Lease a Car. You Will Subscribe to It” [Slate]. “The biggest difference [between a lease and a subscription] is the time frame: Rather than being tied to a years’ long lease, subscriptions give you the ability to “own” a car on a month-to-month basis. You could theoretically not have a car for 10 months of the year when you’re working and using public transit and then get a car subscription for two months when you’ll be traveling more often…. Car subscriptions” appear to be a clear bid to garner favor with tech-savvy millennials in busy metropolitan areas….”

   

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